SCENE FIVE

SCENE FIVE

On a screen, Elaine, a young woman, is visibly and audibly reacting to receiving a series of electric shocks. A young Chinese-American woman, Bo, is on hand and speaks to camera.

Bo (on screen) How is it, Dr Matthews?

She is talking to Hilary, who is in her small office, watching the screen.

Hilary is changed: in charge.

Hilary Good.

Cathy walks into the office. Hilary doesn’t notice her. Cathy pauses, watching.

Elaine... the shocks are coming at regular eight-second intervals, keep an eye on the red light, keep the reactions fairly even, it’s your distress which increases, not over-dramatic...

Elaine continues to ‘perform’. Hilary notices Cathy, who is watching the screen. She doesn’t know Cathy.

(Relaxed and friendly.) Hello.

(To the screen.) That’s good, Elaine. Take a break.

Hilary turns off the screen.

Who...?

Cathy Is that lady being hurt?

Hilary No. We’re playing a trick. It’s... . kind of game.

Cathy (puzzled) Did she know it was a game?

Hilary Yes. She’s my friend Elaine. She was pretending.

Cathy Why?

Hilary It’s all right. It’s what we do here. Sometimes. We... it’s difficult to explain.

My name is Hilary. Hilary Matthews. I don’t know your name.

Cathy It’s Cathy.

Pause. Hilary reaches to lift Cathy’s ‘laminate’ on the cord round her neck, looks at it, lets it fall.

Leo enters.

Leo Your dad’s looking for you.

Cathy runs out.

Hilary Jerry’s here...?

Leo He’s giving his daughter the tour. She wants all the animals let out, so he thought he’d better show her we’re nicer to people.

Hilary Oh dear.

Leo (slightly bitter) He’s come to hand out medals. The Krohl is going to have the cover of Nature, did you know?

Hilary (nods) It’s Ursula’s team, working with Stanford – infecting neurons with a photoreceptor. I understood it when she explained it, but not so I could explain it to anybody else. She can get a single brain cell to spike by flashing a blue laser on it.

Leo Mouse brain.

Hilary Yes, a mouse brain.

She detects a put-down in him.

What?

Leo I didn’t say anything.

Hilary I won’t tell anybody.

Leo I think it’s a big step forward in the study of mouse brains.

Hilary (laughs) That’s mean.

Leo (shrugs) They’re doing optics with mice and calling it consciousness. A mouse is a bundle of behavioural responses to physical stimuli. Poking it with a stick is the same thing bigger. Light photons hit the retina, smell molecules get the whiskers twitching, and improved technology will show the mechanism all the way to cheese response. It’s only amazing, it’s not counter-intuitive. But cognition – reasoning, imagining, believing... that’s hard. How does the brain do self-consciousness? – reference? – metaphor? ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’ As a what? ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.’ Like two what which what? That’s hard. Where is it happening? How? If you had a choice, would you choose a mouse? Would you choose optics? Would you spend your time looking at a brain while you poke it with a laser?

Hilary Not me, boss. It’s a no-brainer. The psyche in psychology is Greek for soul.

Leo lets that go by.

Leo You need something with a mind which can talk you through.

He sighs.

Still, the cover of Nature is pretty sexy. Do you have anything that sexy? It would do wonders for the department’s fitness in the struggle for survival at the Krohl.

Hilary Seriously?

Leo Seriously. The ground is moving under us.

Hilary What would be that sexy?

Leo A predictive theory of human behaviour, for instance. If there were a Nobel Prize for psychology, that would do it. Why are predictions wrong half the time?

Hilary (roused) Being wrong about human behaviour half the time is our guiding star, Leo! It’s what’s telling us the study of the mind is not a science. We’re dealing in mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan – accountability, duty, freewill, language, all the stuff that makes behaviour unpredictable.

Leo You’re not listening. It’s the Jerry Institute for Brain Science, and I’d like to have something that gets his attention before there’s a genetic algorithm that will do our job in a computer.

Hilary It won’t.

Leo They’re working on it.

Hilary It won’t compute. At Loughborough we used to do a child custody test. You describe two parents. Parent A is across-the-board average – health, wealth, social life, everything. Parent B is positives and negatives – richer, but travels a lot, great rapport but minor health problems, etcetera. When you ask which parent should be awarded custody, you get a fat majority for Parent B. When you ask which parent should be denied custody, you get a fat majority for Parent B. It doesn’t compute. We did it over and over, and it didn’t compute.

Leo You never brought that up at your interview.

Hilary (laughs) Leo, do you remember my interview?

Leo What do you think of Bo?

Hilary Who? Oh, Bo. I haven’t had time to...

Leo She’s unqualified in psychology, and over-qualified in maths but I’ve a good feeling about her.

Bo enters, carrying a paper cup of coffee and a sheaf of paper, thirty hand-filled questionnaires.

(To Bo.) And here you are.

(To Hilary.) Come by later... something you might like.

Hilary Oh, yes? What?

Leo (to Bo) I’ll see you later, too, Bo.

He leaves.

Bo I’ve got the questionnaires, Dr Matthews.

Hilary Hilary is fine. All done?

Bo Yes. The guinea pigs are doing coffee break.

Hilary (correcting) Test subjects. The guinea pigs get lettuce.

Bo Sorry. I brought you one.

She puts the cup down.

Is Elaine a research assistant?

Hilary No. That would work if we used real electricity. She’s an actor. We’re doing a variation of a well-known experiment. The test subjects don’t know they’re the subject of the experiment. They think Elaine is. I’ll fill you in as we go. How did you get on with Leo?

Bo Dr Reinhart? He seemed very nice. I really enjoyed the interview.

Hilary Well, so you know what this day is about.

Bo Well... to see if I’m smart, I guess...

Hilary No, that’s a given. It’s to see if you’ll be happy here. For you to see, for us to see. (Taking the questionnaires.) Thank you.

Hilary dumps the questionnaires into a bin.

Bo Oh... !

Hilary We don’t look at them. The questionnaires have to be convincing but they’re a charade for the benefit of the test subjects. We divide the subjects into two groups randomly. We tell group one they scored high for empathy, we tell group two they scored low for empathy. So, when we get to the experiment we can allow for suggestibility. But we’re not testing for empathy.

Bo What, then?

Hilary Motivation. Egoist motives and altruistic motives. Selfish and unselfish. There’s a commonsense view that we’re selfish by nature, and unselfish when we override our nature, basically by culture. What do you think?

Bo I think it’s good to be good, I don’t see that it matters what makes you good.

Hilary It might matter if people who are out for themselves think they’re justified by biology.

Pause. Hilary sips her coffee.

Bo Yes.

Hilary We’re trying to understand other minds, and we don’t really understand our own. Why did you bring me this coffee? Perhaps you thought I looked as if I needed some coffee; so that would be an altruistic motive. Or perhaps your ultimate motivation was that you wanted to make some sort of good impression; which would be an egoistic motive for bringing me a cup of coffee. I could ask you. But how do I know the answer is honest? And if it’s honest, how do I know it’s reliable?

Bo has been discomfited. She takes one of the questionnaires from the bin and glances at it.

Bo What do you do with these?

Hilary Shred them... confidentiality issues. The data we collect from an experiment is kept anonymous.

Bo ...A lot of detail here... personal detail... not to be using it...

Hilary The reason we don’t look at the questionnaires is, once you look you find the special cases who will skew your precious results. Outliers. But the point is the subjects are a random sample. If you’re tempted to weed out the outliers, you’re rigging the experiment, and that’s a sin. If there’s a hidden bias in the design of the experiment the results are not information, they’re misinformation, and understanding the human mind is difficult without that, it’s like trying to catch a sunbeam in your cupped hands.

Bo You’re testing for motivation, one-on-one with Elaine, and you’re – what? – adjusting for empathy?

Hilary Yes.

Bo But they don’t really feel empathy with Elaine –

Hilary They don’t know Elaine.

What?

Bo It just seems kind of approximate.

Hilary Really?

Bo Empathy-wise, you’ve made two groups of clones.

Hilary Well... how else...?

Bo You can match every subject with their own Elaines, with very high or medium high empathy, or low, whatever.

Hilary (exasperated) We haven’t got a lot of Elaines... !

Bo No, you describe Elaine each time different, to fit their questionnaire. There’s this one here who’s a middle child, so Elaine can be a middle child...

Hilary thinks about this. She takes all the questionnaires out of the bin, takes the questionnaire from Bo, and puts them into an empty box-file, which she adds to a row of box-files.

Out of nowhere, Bo bursts into angry tears.

I wasn’t doing egoist or altruist anything! The man said to bring you this cup of coffee so I brought you the fucking coffee!

Hilary stays quiet while Bo recovers.

I’m sorry. I don’t swear a lot.

Hilary Do you swear in Chinese?

Bo No, never. My grandmother would have killed me.

Hilary Where did you graduate, Bo?

Bo Shanghai and Caltech.

Hilary Shanghai and Caltech.

Bo Then my Master’s at Cambridge.

Hilary You...? Really.

Bo Then I got a job offer from Krohl Capital Management... I was a quant for a year at Krohl, but... well, the money was good, I’ll say that, but it wasn’t good money, you know?

Hilary Good money?

Bo Gaming the market to make more money for people with money.

Hilary This is Jerry’s money, so that’s good money, isn’t it?

Bo He did something good with it. But I’d like to do something good with math without turning math into money first. A friend at KCM said I should try for a psychology doctorate here...uant, Amal. He knows you.

Hilary Who? Oh. Yes. Amal. Yes, he would do that. Do you see Amal?

Bo Yes. He’s... who I’m seeing.

Hilary Coincidence.

Did he tell you about us?

Bo Really?

Hilary No – we were both up for this slot.

Bo Oh. And... you got it.

Hilary Yes. It was a miracle.

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