Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
Dr. Gazzaley sat in a chair and called up a grainy black-and-white image. Reggie’s brain. Just like he’d once before pulled up Mickey Hart’s.
“Before we get to it, there’s one thing I want to point out,” he said. He drew my attention to the front of Reggie’s skull. There was a little bump, a slight protrusion just in front of the sinus cavity.
“He’s got a heavy brow.”
There’s nothing problematic about that—just an anatomical variability—though it might explain why Reggie sometimes looks as though he is leaning forward. Beside the image, Dr. Gazzaley pulled up the brain of another twenty-six-year-old—a random image taken from the lab—and there was no such protrusion.
Side by side, the two brains looked fairly similar. Dr. Gazzaley noted some very understated differences. Reggie appeared to have a slightly bigger ventricular system, for instance.
“Brains are like faces. There is lots of individual variability,” Dr. Gazzaley said. He concluded: “It’s a brain.”
So far, so good, just a regular guy.
A FEW WEEKS LATER
, after technicians and Dr. Watson in Utah had taken the time to process the rest of the fMRI results, I again visited Dr. Gazzaley’s office. This time, he got Dr. Watson on a sleek black speakerphone. It was afternoon, and Dr. Watson was in his office, talking on a cell phone, and cautioned he might get interrupted because he was also watching his seven-year-old son, Nathan, fresh off summer camp for the day.
“He’s sitting on the floor behind me, playing video games,” Dr. Watson said.
“That’s good for his brain,” Dr. Gazzaley said. They both laughed.
“They’re educational games, mostly.”
Dr. Gazzaley had two different images on his two monitors. On the larger screen were several images of a brain, with three key spots lit up in orange. On the smaller monitor was a graph that started high on the left and descended to the right at about a forty-five-degree angle.
The scientists explained that we were looking at measures of Reggie’s brain as he attempted to multitask in the MRI machine. The particular activity that Reggie had undergone while his brain was being imaged in the tube is called a dual n-back test. In it, he was trying to juggle two different demands: remembering and responding to audio cues in his headphones and, separately, remembering and responding to visual cues projected into a mirror he could see while lying in the tube. This is represented by the curve on the smaller of Dr. Gazzaley’s computer monitors. As the task load increases, performance falls. In that way, Reggie looked like lots of other people Dr. Watson and Dr. Strayer have studied.
So, too, the increased demand on Reggie’s brain showed up as a very familiar brain-imaging pattern to Dr. Watson. Three key areas that were lit up in orange were the anterior cingulate cortex (labeled ACC); the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DL-PFC), and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). These areas, the scientists explained, are part of the attention network, and the fact that they are lit up reflected an increase in blood flow to those locations. More blood flow means they are taking on a greater load.
That should come as little surprise. Greater demand on attention puts more demand on the attention networks. But one of the things Dr. Watson and others have begun to understand is that people whose performance suffers less—who are, in effect, better “multitaskers”—see a lower load on their attentional networks. The reason is not yet clear, but it might have something to do with how efficiently the brain uses its resources.
Regardless, Reggie’s brain, and his performance, was right on par with most test subjects. His attention network took on a predictable load as his performance imploded. As Dr. Gazzaley had put it, Reggie was “just a regular guy.”
“There is one thing that surprised me,” Dr. Watson said.
It wasn’t the imaging, or Reggie’s performance on the dual n-back test. It was what happened before—before he got into the imaging machine. Just prior to the test, he’d been asked to take a performance test aimed at establishing his general ability to sustain attention. It’s a “baseline” test. How good is Reggie at focusing and dealing with complex problems? Better than most: His score was in the top 25 percent, Dr. Watson said.
“I’d classify Reggie as high in terms of attention,” he said. “It really illustrates that even those of us with a lot of attention still have a breaking point.”
In other words, Reggie was far from being someone likely to get distracted—behind the wheel or elsewhere. He has a pretty good ability to focus. Nothing superhuman, just solid. And certainly not more of a liability than the typical person. Nevertheless, when his brain was asked to do too much, to multitask, it became overloaded.
“Everybody has a limit. That’s the bottom line,” Dr. Watson said.
R
EGGIE IS A REGULAR
guy who rebounded from tragedy.
Terryl rebounded, too. She and her family were happy, the Warner children thriving, the product of a profound generational change in her bloodline.
Jayme and Taylor teamed up and won the state history day contest in 2009, and took ninth place in nationals for a project on Joe Hill, a labor activist.
In 2010 came more remarkable accomplishments. That year, Jayme won first place in the DuPont Challenge, a huge, international science essay competition. She won for her essay titled “Salt: Enhancing Lives One Breath at a Time,” which focused on using salt water to help the breathing of young cystic fibrosis patients. Jayme based her research in part on her sister Katie, who is suffering from the disease.
She was the first winner to come from Utah.
But not the last.
The next year, Taylor won first place, and they became the first sibling pair to ever win, let alone back-to-back. His project focused on solving environment problems, notably waste, by using a natural resource: earthworms. The idea had come after Terryl had suggested putting earthworms in the kitchen in a big box to help compost in a natural and effective way.
In 2012, Jayme placed third in the state for National History Day with her paper “Come, Come Ye Saints: Reactions of Early Mormon Pioneers to the Persecutions They Faced.”
In 2013, Taylor placed fourth in an international science competition, comparing texting while driving to driving under the influence. “He is now considered a published scientist,” Terryl coos.
Taylor graduated early from high school, in 2013, at the age of sixteen, and was the valedictorian at InTech Collegiate High School. It is a small charter school, public, just 140 students, but
U.S. News & World Report
ranked it as the top high school in Utah, and one of the top seven hundred in the United States. In his valedictory speech, Taylor thanked his teachers. He thanked his parents. He thanked Steve Jobs, or, at least, quoted the Apple cofounder:
In the first sixteen to eighteen years of our lives, we have lived between 140,160 hours to 157,680 hours. However, between now and the average life expectancy of seventy-five, we will live about five hundred thousand more hours. In mathematical terms, we are barely scratching the surface of our lives at this point. After today, when the caps have been thrown and the parties have ended, we will all begin our journey into the next half million hours of our lives. Whatever we choose to do, we will be well on our way, due to many who influenced us. Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
Before his conclusion, Taylor said:
In our future hours of our lives, let us not forget the power of education; the education we have received and the education we face for our future. While millions across the world struggle with illiteracy, poverty, violence and war, let us remember that we have the power, determination and creative minds to help fight and eliminate those social problems. I hope that in our future hours, we will find time to remember our responsibilities to others and resolve to give something back to our society.
For his part, his heart was set on becoming a neurosurgeon. As for Jayme, she was headed to her mission in the Philippines, and then she, too, also wanted to go to medical school.
The younger girls, Allyssa and Katie, were spending the summer of 2013 doing opera and musicals, Allyssa performing in
Fiddler on the Roof
and Katie appearing in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
. Terryl did the driving to and fro, and waited by the stage as her girls practiced. And they performed with the Utah Festival Opera.
Allyssa, twelve, a huge fan of music, composed an original piece about Joe Hill, the same labor activist who Taylor and Jayme had done their project on a few years earlier. Allyssa and her partner came in first in the state’s history day in the performance category.
OF COURSE, THERE WERE
ghosts from the past. Terryl struggled with her mother, Kathie, who now lived in Logan. They would occasionally clash. Taylor didn’t think his grandma liked him much. Terryl would get frustrated that her mother didn’t seem to want anything to do with the past, wouldn’t so much as brook a conversation about it. Terryl told her mother she was talking about her childhood for a book. Terryl says Kathie thought it was a bad idea, and she herself has declined to be interviewed.
“She does not understand why we have to tell anybody. For her, nobody has the right to know,” Terryl says, in the rare raised voice.
“Here we are, years later,
years later
, and the idea is, let’s not let anybody know—let’s pretend we did not have secrets destroy parts of our life. Yes, yes, I did. My mother’s idea is we don’t talk about things because we don’t want anybody to know. I get really angry.”
Terryl says: “I’m sick and tired of shoving things under the carpet. People have a duty to stand up,” and not just within their families. “In society, people don’t want to stand up.”
She and her brother Michael corresponded some by email. He has professed to be happy. He also has mentioned to Terryl in email that he had a heart attack in 2005 and that it caused his spirit to leave his body, and travel and get wisdom. He writes of conspiracies and satanic plots. He once wrote and told her that all the punishment and whippings doled out by Danny had, for all their horror, one positive side effect. “You have to give [him] some credit though . . . he made us both unusually strong. I do not think I know of any woman in this world that actually is as strong as you, and that has a lot to do with the treatment ol’ BLD gave us.”
Terryl’s younger brother Mitchell feels these accounts are unfair. His dad, he reiterates, is his hero. How to explain how his memories differ from those of his siblings? Family friend Donna Simpson says Mitchell, who came along much later than Terryl and Michael, got different treatment by virture of being Danny’s biological offspring. Mitchell thinks his father and Kathie were a volatile mix and that his dad might’ve been different with Michael and Terryl before the parents split. But Mitchell offers another theory, too, about how his experience differed from Terryl’s. It has to do with how people view the world differently. Two people can be in the same car crash, he says, and describe it very differently.
BUT, ON THE WHOLE
, life for the Warners was about activity, family, and it was about service—church every Sunday—and kindness, the things that Terryl had pleaded for in her diary as a little girl. Earlier in the year, one of Jayme’s childhood friends, a boy, came out to her as gay. He was being shunned and bullied, even turned away by his family, which was something that could happen in a small, highly religious community. Terryl told Jayme to be his friend, to listen and not judge, to help him be himself and feel comfortable with who he is. Jayme says “When Jesus said, ‘Love everybody,’ he didn’t make any exceptions to that rule.”
Not that Jayme needed to hear that; she says when her friend came out to her, it didn’t even dawn on her that it was an issue.
“I told Alan, ‘I think we’ve done something right for her to embrace this young man,’ ” Terryl says. “She doesn’t care if he’s gay or straight. That isn’t what life is about.”
Terryl says the boy later told her: “I just want to thank you, because your daughter saved me from doing some drastic things.” He also planned to go on a mission, and wants to start a family.
Terryl seemed to have developed, and passed on, a deep moral authority, despite her tragic childhood, or maybe because of it, that seemed to have more depth and breadth than the institutions and conventional leanings around her.
The Warners were raising joyful, happy, family-centric children. They kept at arm’s length the multimedia that Terryl feared would foil their engagement with one another, their studies, the real world. She saw this as crucial. Too much media would be numbing, dulling, cheat her children of an engaged life, the kind she’d always craved as a child. One thing was for certain: the life of the Warners, and Terryl’s adulthood, was a far cry from the path that might have been.
What could they teach us? What could Reggie teach us?
T
HERE ARE TWO RULES.
In the public-policy debate around distracted driving, safety officials have drawn on those two seemingly tried-and-true rules used to reform drunken-driving culture and seat belt adherence: strong laws and enforcement, coupled with public education about both.
That’s how society changes.
But how do individuals change?
How do they come to terms with something tragic, dissonant, dangerous, contrary to their long-term interests, their safety, the interests of their children? How do they heal, themselves and others?
Here, after talking with many experts, filtering many views, it seems there is one rule. It is simple, yet not nearly so easy to achieve.