THE MEMORY HACKERS

I AM, AT THIS MOMENT, AN OVERGROWN lab rat. A blue plastic band secures a pair of electrodes to my head: a negatively charged cathode on my forehead above my right eye, and a positively charged anode on the left side of my scalp over a portion of my brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The DLPFC, as it’s known, is an area of the brain involved in episodic memory, the conscious recollection of the events of one’s past. The electrodes are connected by narrow wires to a gadget that, with its panel of dials and gauges, looks a bit like a ham radio. That device is steadily delivering a mild two-milliampere charge straight into my cranium.

As the electricity flows through my brain, David Gallo readies materials for a memory test. A tweedy, excitable cognitive scientist in his mid-40s, Gallo is the chair of the psychology department at the University of Chicago and heads its Memory Research Laboratory, a center dedicated entirely to the study of how and why we remember (or fail to).

“What do you feel?” Gallo asks. “Do you feel like your memory is charging up?”

“I feel a tickle over my right eye,” I say. “And there’s heat through my scalp and forehead.”

“Almost like a low-grade burning sensation,” he says cheerfully.

Apparently the burning means it’s working.

Gallo, three doctoral students, and I are in the lab’s main testing site, on the third floor of the ivy-covered building housing the psychology department. The narrow room is furnished with tables, chairs, and desktop computers loaded with memory tasks that study participants are asked to complete during experiments. The only decoration: an artistic rendering of the hippocampus, the part of the brain thought of as the seat of memory.

I overhear one of the doctoral students saying something to Gallo about shock therapy. The image of Jack Nicholson convulsing on a sanitarium table in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest bolts to mind. Sensing my concern, Gallo adopts a soothing bedside tone: “With electroconvulsive therapy, the idea is to deliver enough electricity to induce an epileptic seizure. We’re trying to do the opposite. We want just enough electricity so that we’re tickling the brain region that we want to be more active during a cognitive test. Seizure would not be a good outcome.”

As I finally begin to), that misremembered word is known as the “critical lure.”