Spacebreaker

The sound of silence has never been so devastating. Hush and watch. A space shuttle is dying. It disintegrates into silvery slivers, dismembers in disgrace, spewing its innards into the void. As debris strikes, stress propagates through the wing, buckling and shredding in its wake. The shuttle revolves in a graceless agonizing pirouette, its angular momentum ruthlessly dictates its course. Caught in a maelstrom of projectiles are astronauts in twilight. They are tiny. A wing detaches. A mute groan. Sandra detaches.

The center of mass is simple to define, ubiquitous in solids, entirely unremarkable. Until Sandra transforms this abstraction into poignancy, as she tumbles and wheels through a world without friction. She is making a beeline to nowhere in particular, but straight is straight, and inertia immutable. As hope diminishes with each revolution, numbing inevitability mounts.

Hope dies.

I got you.

Bursts forth.

This is my fantasy of momentum. I must have nursed this for years. I am in the middle of a frozen lake, whose surface is so slick as to make walking unfortunate. All I have are stones in my pockets. All I need are stones in my pockets. I watched my fantasy unfold on screen, as Sandra commandeers space with a fire extinguisher.

I’ve never felt closer to space, after Gravity. A movie that is ripe with tech, but is not weighed down by it, instead uses its tech humanistically, propels itself to space untrodden, it transcends belief and enters the realm of dreams. A spacebreaker.

Catch, release, float.

Zuker speaks of the silence of the cortical field. We rulers of mice, we cannot yet control their dreams, but we can make them confuse sweet for bitter.

These are the dimensions of taste: sour, salty, umami, sweet, bitter, carbonation. Carbonation?

To each dimension, a type of receptor. To each receptor type, a cell type, and then a distinct pathway to the brain. The telephone lines don’t mix. Imagine transplanting receptors for sour into cells for salty, and vice versa. Mice can experience sour while biting down on salty.

Each pathway leads to a distinct localized region in the brain. If the umami region is silenced, the mouse will lose its ability to taste umami. Mice hate bitter as much as we do. While the critter is tasting water, inject a laser with pinpoint accuracy into the brain region for bitter. Have you ever seen a mouse cringe?

Though his successes loom before him, Zuker speaks of humility. Of expanses in ignorance. His longstanding goal: to understand how the senses create an internal representation of the outside world. I am only beginning to understand what this statement even means, its Structure would otherwise have been lost.