David Adam - The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brains Potential

THE
GENIUS
WITHIN

Unlocking Your Brains Potential

DAVID ADAM

There are two things you might not know about the electric chair. First, it was developed by the same man who invented the light bulb, Thomas Edison. And second, he did so not to showcase his own expertise but to attack the technology of his rival, the businessman George Westinghouse, with whom Edison was engaged in a bitter feud over the future of power.

Edison was no fan of capital punishment, but he was willing to put his personal morals to one side for money. In the late 1880s, the United States was searching for a new way to execute condemned prisoners, with hanging judged too barbaric for the emerging superpower. Thoughts turned to the new power of electricity, and its new-found ability to kill. And a decision had to be made about which of the two competing types of electric current to use.

Edisons fortune rested on direct current (the DC in AC/ DC). Westinghouse was a threat because his rival alternating current (AC in the above) was easier to transmit down power lines. But there was a catch to transmit alternating current it was geared up to high voltages, and this made it lethal. For the first time in history, people were regularly electrocuted usually workers who were installing and maintaining the high-voltage cables.

Edison saw the opportunity to label his rivals work as dangerous. He told all who would listen how Westing-houses system was too risky, and if people didnt get the message then he showed them what alternating current could do. In a series of gruesome demonstrations, he used Westinghouses invention to electrify a tin tray, and led stray dogs onto the metal surface to take a drink from a bowl at the other end. As the dogs yelped and dropped dead, Edison told people it could be them next. But not, he smiled sweetly, if the power used to supply their homes and businesses was the lower voltage, and inherently safer, Edison Corporations direct current.

It was a dentist from Buffalo who suggested to Edison that electricity might serve as a capital punishment. Having watched a drunken man electrocute himself when he touched a live generator, Alfred Southwick wrote to the inventor in 1887 to ask which of the two forms of current might produce death with certainty in all cases. Edison wrote back that the best execution option would be alternating machines, manufactured principally in this country by Mr. Geo. Westinghouse, Pittsburgh.

Westinghouse was furious and when officials in charge of executions came calling, he refused to sell them his AC generators. His protests failed. Somehow (almost certainly with Edisons help) the officials got the equipment they wanted and in 1890, an axe murderer called William Kemmler was sentenced to be put to death in the new AC electric chair. Edison, naturally, was delighted. Kemmler, he crowed, was going to be Westinghoused.

Kemmlers execution was an oddly informal affair. He was led into a crowded prison basement and introduced to twenty-five people invited as witnesses, at least a dozen of whom were curious doctors. Then he took off his coat and sat himself in the chair. Straps were tightened, electrodes plugged in and a black cloth pulled over his face. When the warden gave the order to pull the switch, Kemmler went rigid.

After seventeen seconds of current, a witness declared him dead. Nodding, the warden started to remove the electrode from his prisoners head when another cry went up: Great God! He is alive.

Though Kemmler was unconscious, the electricity had not done its job. See, he breathes, one witness cried. For Gods sake kill him and have it over, urged one of the journalists present, who promptly fainted. As other witnesses retched, the current was turned back on, and left on.

After Kemmler was finally dead, scientists, doctors and death penalty advocates were eager to examine his brain. Among other things, they wanted to identify the cause of death, which was important to know for the electric chair to be accepted as the latest, most humane, method of execution. But, and here is something else you might not know about the electric chair, no one has been able to work out exactly how the current killed Kemmler, or any of the 4,500 prisoners who have followed him into the chair since.

Kemmlers brain looked like it had been cooked. Its blood had solidified and seemed like charcoal. The post mortem reported: It was not burned to ashes but all of the fluid had been evaporated.

In contrast, other electrocuted brains showed signs of massive internal trauma, with tissues ragged like they had been shredded by disruptive force. The massive current, scientists concluded, could make the brain literally explode from the inside; perhaps because it forced bubbles of gas to form in blood.

Electricity has unpredictable effects on the human body and on the brain in particular. Exactly what the current does in there is a mystery. This is partly why the United States (and the Philippines, its former colony) remains the only nation to have used the electric chair as a form of execution. Its why several US states have banned it and why most death row prisoners, when offered the choice, opt for the relative certainty of a lethal cocktail of drugs. And its why, in a small flat near Londons Wembley Stadium in the days before Halloween 2015, when a Ukrainian man called Andrew, with a cat and a penchant for mediaeval weaponry, straps electrodes to my head and asks me if I am ready for him to turn on the power, I swallow hard before I say yes. I dont want anything to go wrong. I really dont want to be Westinghoused.

The human brain packs a tangle of 86 billion different cells and, if they could be counted, the number of different ways they can combine and connect would be the highest number of anything that could be counted anywhere not just more than the grains of sand on a beach, but greater than the grains of sand that could exist on all of the beaches anywhere. As we mentioned in the introduction, you have probably heard you use only 10 per cent of your brain. Thats not true. All of your brain cells and tissues are overloaded with function. Every bit of your brain does something, and most bits do several things at once. If anything, rather than having 90 per cent spare, there is not enough of your brain to go around. But it is true you probably dont use all of your brains potential.

This is where Andrew and his electrodes come in. Andrew is part of a growing movement that interferes with the workings of the brain to try to improve it. In basements and garages, but also in universities, military bases and hospitals, scientists and enthusiasts are using techniques to hack, boost and improve the human mind, to dig into that unused potential, make the brain work better and be all it can be. They call it neuroenhancement. We can call it increasing intelligence.

I was surprised when Andrew suggested he could neuroenhance my brain with his electricity. When I had asked to visit him at his flat, I thought we were going to talk about something called DIY electrical brain stimulation. I guessed that I hadnt made the do it yourself bit clear enough. But it felt like it would have been rude for me to refuse his offer. Still, as he dampened the electrodes and placed them onto the top of my head, I wasnt sure that I wanted him to turn the machine on.

Ready? he asked.

Yes, I said, thinking, no.

You might feel a small burning sensation.

The furniture in Andrews place bears the mark of someone who spends a lot of time at his keyboard. Only the chair looks truly valued the comfortable, adjustable, expensive-looking black leather chair pulled up next to his computer.