I am not cool. For starters, I don't listen to music. It disrupts my concentration and makes me cranky. I'm anxious at parties, always hoping that someone will turn down the stereo so that we can all break off into small groups and talk, preferably about science or books. My ideal evening ends early, around 10, freeing me to go home and read. At the party, everyone would wear something comfortable, possibly flannel.
If coolness is formed early on - as it often seems to be - I never stood a chance. In eighth grade, when most of my classmates spent lunch clustered in small, gossipy cliques, I distinguished myself by cantering around the school grounds like a horse, neighing and occasionally leaping over a bench. Although I dressed carefully, I could never pull off the stylish look of my peers. In fifth grade, I struggled to roll my jeans so that they hung slightly flooded, as was the fashion. I never quite succeeded, and it didn't help that the rest of my wardrobe reflected an unusual taste for velour (I had three favorite, otherwise identical, velour sweaters in yellowish dun, turquoise, and red), as well as a lingering love of appliquéd unicorns. Fifth grade was also the year that I discovered, to my shame, that the seventh grader I had privately idolized was actually the class dork, a turtleneck-and-glasses-wearing nerd incarnate.
So it was with a conflicted mind that I accepted an invitation from Steven Quartz, director of Caltech's Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, to take part in a study of cool. Unlike a mere written test, Quartz's experiment would use functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, to measure my subconscious response to 140 different products and celebrities, each of which had been assigned a coolness rating from 0 to 5.
Depending on how successfully my subconscious picked out the cool objects, Quartz explained, I would be classified as one of three types: High Cool (a "Trendsetter"), High Uncool (a "Critic"), or Low Cool. As far as I could make out, either of the first two categories would be an improvement on my current status. High Cools, I was told, had brains that lit up in response to cool objects. High Uncools reacted strongly to uncool objects; they're the snobby tastemakers. The last group, the Low Cools, was the one I feared. Low Cools had scans that came out almost entirely blank. It didn't matter whether they were looking at a picture of Michael Jackson or Mick Jagger. They were, in effect, cool-blind.
I had little doubt as to where I would fall in this spectrum. And yet there was something compelling about Quartz's cool test. Unlike the assessment of my grade school peers, it was scientific. Moreover, like every other former outcast, I still harbored a private hope that someday the rest of the world would discover how cool I really was. Perhaps that someday was now. Having failed the informal test of the school yard, I saw Quartz's study as a chance to have my social status objectively evaluated.
There was a time, way back in 1998, when neuroscientists didn't conduct coolhunts. Instead, they toiled away at lab benches, painstakingly measuring the electric current between two neurons, or lobotomizing cats to give them epilepsy. It was important work, everyone agreed - the way carbon dating all the rocks in Yellowstone would be important to geologists, or collecting the pinfeathers of terns might matter to ornithologists. Somebody needed to do it, but there was a certain lack of spark, a barely acknowledged feeling that the really interesting cognitive science problems (why some people are better at math than language, why only half of the guests at a dinner party appreciated your joke) lay out of reach, fumblingly fussed over by psychologists and sociologists.
Since those gray days, neuroscience has undergone a kind of ecstatic revolution. Technological advances in MRI cracked open the door to higher function, and the resulting stampede has just about ripped off the hinges. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is now the business accessory du jour. It is routine for neuroeconomists to "hyperscan" the brains of people negotiating a price, for neuropollsters to peep inside the minds of voters, and for neuromarketers to measure activity in the anterior cingulate while subjects contemplate pictures of a Ford Bronco. General Electric, the market leader in sales of MRI machines (of which fMRIs are a subset), reports that business has almost doubled over the past five years, driven in part by steadily dropping prices. MRI machines now outnumber hospitals.
The science behind these efforts is cruder than one might think. In 1990, Seiji Ogawa, a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs, discovered that blood low in oxygen caused a slight distortion as it flowed through a magnetic field, while fully oxygenated blood did not. Put a person's head in a big magnetic tube, scientists found, and the distortions created a blurry map of the brain's regional oxygen use. And so functional magnetic resonance imaging was born.
The resolution on these maps has since increased from a cubic centimeter to a cubic millimeter: a thousandfold improvement. This is still pretty lousy - a cubic millimeter contains up to 100,000 neurons) - though not bad enough to stop ambitious researchers.
Romantic love, deceit, racism: They've all gone under the scanner. A group at Dartmouth has used fMRI on people watching The Simpsons, to pinpoint the brain regions involved in getting a joke (the left anterior frontal and posterior temporal cortices) and finding it funny (the amygdala and the bilateral regions of the insular cortex). Another group, based at Caltech, aims to record the neural activity of old people as they make difficult decisions, in hopes of isolating nothing less than "wisdom." Infected by this feverish atmosphere, the American Psychological Association recently announced the Decade of Behavior, a hopeful follow-up to the recently expired Decade of the Brain. Even the field's narcoleptically dull journals have revived into something like beach reading, with exposés on jealousy, social rejection, and even porn - "the stuff of novels," as one researcher put it.
Quartz is aptly suited to this new world. Officially tenured in the philosophy department, he works mostly in the nascent field of neural economics and recently won a Packard Foundation grant to study the brain structures involved in moral decisionmaking. He is also, by any measure, very cool. As a teenager in Toronto, he attended an arty alternative high school and drove to New York to go clubbing on the weekends. Even now, he is more likely to be mistaken for an aging lead singer than a neuroscientist, due to his double-wide leather watchband that looks like a bondage strap and black steel-toed boots that match the roots of his dyed blond hair. "I would feel kind of uncomfortable being in science," he told me once - puzzlingly, since I thought he was in science. "You know, I was just, like, a regular guy growing up, and, like, you know, big into party scenes and things like that." While in Budapest for the annual Human Brain Mapping conference in June, Quartz went to clubs or parties almost every night, including one rave in a rented ancestral castle. (When I asked him about the gathering afterward, he described it as "pretty great," adding, "We had our pictures taken with the DJ!") When not partying with the Eastern European hipoisie, Quartz lives in Malibu, just down the street from Métley Crée drummer Tommy Lee. Their children go to school together.
None of this eases my mind about my likely score on the cool meter. Worse yet, it turns out that Quartz has appointed himself the test's gold standard. It is he who has determined - with the help of some art school students - where each of the 140 diagnostic items ranks on the cool scale: whether Beyoncé is a 4 or a 5, for instance, the Ford Escort a 1 or a 2. Since my score depends on how accurately I can identify what is and isn't cool, I had assumed that the coolness ratings would be much more objective - maybe generated from a random survey of the population, with the results averaged for consistency. It's troubling that my subconscious reactions will be judged against Quartz's conscious ones - particularly since I didn't actually know who Tommy Lee was until after the scan. (Back home, I Googled him.)
Set to be scanned with me are Quartz and Anette Asp, a former liaison at the Swedish consulate in LA who is now the coolhunt's project manager. Asp is even more intimidating than Quartz when it comes to personal style. Sleekly attired in a pin-striped suit with a plunging neckline and zippered sleeves, she seems to have stepped directly off the selling floor of a high-end boutique. Between her and Quartz, I feel as though I am back in some kind of high school group project, wondering, now that I've been paired with the two coolest kids in the class, why I ever decided that brown jeans and a black sweater would look good together. This time, however, I am not even running the intellectual show. As Asp hands me a bottle of Evian, Quartz waves his pen like a cigarette and notes that the virtue of the fMRI is it can't be faked. "If you secretly like Michael Bolton," Asp adds pleasantly, "we'll know."
An fMRI scan features all the excitement of an afternoon nap - except that it's noisy and you aren't allowed to move. First my head is packed into a spongy wedge, then further braced with earmuffs and a hockey mask. In the tube, amid a raucous buzzing, images begin flashing across the overhead display. Because the reactions Quartz is recording are subconscious, there's nothing to do but lie back and watch the parade. It's a rather boring one: a procession of loafers, office chairs, toasters, and washer-driers, interspersed with different kinds of bottled water and celebrities like Eminem, Madonna, and the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld. There are a few slow pitches - even the most cool-blind might suspect a powder-blue bottle of men's cologne from a label, Candies, normally found on products for teenage girls - but most of the images are more ambiguous, like the dozen pairs of nearly identical sunglasses, or the collection of unattractive handbags that might possibly be considered couture.
With the slide show complete, I am done. The analysis will take some time, Quartz explains, so I go home to wait. In the meantime, I fret over the fact that I didn't recognize Britney Spears (major anticool points) and puzzle over whether Perrier is chic or over.
Three weeks later, Asp writes to say that the results are in. I skim to the middle of the second page, where my diagnosis is buried. "Regarding your own brain, Jenn," she writes diffidently, "you are a High Cool. There was a huge amount of frontal activation in the cool condition and you are our most extreme case so far in this group!" Not only am I a High Cool, in other words, I am first in my class. Miraculously, after years of carrying a plastic bag instead of a purse and playing Boggle rather than going to clubs, my inner genius has been recognized. I am an idiot savant of popular culture.
Asp also confides the rest of the results. She has finished as a respectable High Uncool, while Quartz, rather shockingly, has turned out to be a Low Cool. (Or more precisely a "Cool Cool" which is a new subcategory of Low Cool.) It is an appalling reversal for Quartz, and I wonder how he is taking the diagnosis, which in his case seems mortal. Then I spend a happy afternoon looking over the miniature pictures of my brain and comparing them with those of Quartz and Asp. The differences are stark. In the composite slide, in which all non-cool-oriented activity has been subtracted out, Quartz's brain appears almost solid gray, the base color produced by the MRI. My brain, by contrast, has large red and yellow patches, which correspond to the successful identification of a cool object. Asp's brain also has colored patches, but hers appear only during the identification of something uncool: a cheap, upholstered desk chair; generic bottled water, Barbra Streisand. It looks like a mirror image of mine.
In the details, this is puzzling. Like others in our highly responsive cohort, both Asp and I show activity in the motor cortex, which is normally engaged when the brain is thinking about reaching for something it wants. While that is expected in High Cools, it is baffling in the High Uncools. Do they secretly like the uncool objects, or is it actually a sign of revulsion: a desire to hurl the offending objects far away? Likewise, what is the meaning of the activity in the section of prefrontal cortex known as Brodmann Area 10 - one of several regions that have been tentatively linked to our sense of personal identity? According to Quartz, High Cool trendsetters, who define themselves by the coolness of their accessories, are more likely to picture themselves with the cool object and to imagine how others will react. But if this is right, why are High Uncools defining themselves with respect to objects they dislike? Quartz thinks it might be a sign of social anxiety: Maybe the High Uncools are worried about being seen with such lame objects. "Or it might have something do with their sense of self," he muses. But there is no denying that the results are mysterious. And coupled with my improbable success, Quartz starts to second-guess himself.
Quartz, of course, is not in this solely to separate the cool wheat from the nerd chaff. He believes the discovery of High Cools and High Uncools might change the way companies market their products. Advertising would target people who think alike, rather than aim at the usual demographics of wealth, age, and gender. In particular, Quartz hopes to identify the unique pattern of brain activity that corresponds to the recognition of an object as "cool." The pattern would be holy among product developers and marketers - a visible, purely subconscious reaction freed from the biases of a focus group. Put a man in a can and tap his consumerist id.
Discovering the brain activity pattern associated with coolness would make Quartz a rich man, but his interest, at times, can seem strictly philosophical. "What is it that confers social desirability on a product?" he asks rhetorically. "Rewards like food and drugs follow a basic circuitry in the brain, but things that are socially constructed are more confusing. And it's not just about aesthetics. I mean, Mick Jagger is cool. So it seems to be something beyond beauty."
The elusiveness of this mystical attribute seems to fascinate Quartz, who dreams of getting a look at his neighbor Tommy Lee's brain - which presumably would contain all manner of information about what it means to be cool. Unfortunately, he explains, tattoo ink contains trace amounts of metal, which can act like tiny lightning rods in the strong magnetic field of an MRI machine. Lee is tattooed almost from head to foot, making the likelihood of the scan remote. "I'd hate if it barbecued him or something," Quartz says thoughtfully.
Just a few weeks after having my social status raised, I receive a phone call from Asp with a revised assessment. Although I am still a High Cool, I am not, she explains apologetically, a savant. Instead, the High Cool group has been demoted to what Quartz is calling "Cool Fools": compulsive shoppers whose tastes drive the popularity of stores like Pottery Barn and Old Navy. The most discriminating, it seems, are High Uncools like Asp - now deferentially referred to as "Uncool Connoisseurs." Quartz's Low Cool result, meanwhile, has been completely reinterpreted. Rather than implying cool-blindness, it is now evidence of a "risk-taking personality." (Quartz's worldliness, I am told, accounts for his blank brain scans.)
Needless to say, I feel a bit screwed. Not over the loss of my savant status, which was never plausible, but because of my forcible reassignment as an aesthetic drone. Yet something about it seems more than just unfair. Science, after all, isn't supposed to be run by the cool kids. It's the nerd's refuge: the place where awkward misfits avenge themselves by making millions in semiconductor electronics. It's the one arena where they rule. They decide what questions will be studied, design the experiments, and interpret the results. Quartz had turned the tables - or rather, turned them back to the original social order. It was junior high all over again, with caste assigned at the whim of the ruling cool class.
But Quartz's sudden reversal seems fishy, even after factoring out my ego. The only thing the fMRI results show, after all, is the presence of three different levels of brain activity. But what does that activity mean? Under the circumstances, Quartz can pick any interpretation he wants. Unsurprisingly, he picked the one that best matches his personal opinion: I am a geek, he is a risk-taker, and Asp is absolutely fabulous.
Experimentally speaking, this kind of ambiguous result is known as a problem of insufficient controls - or, more colloquially, bad science. It's the kind of error that plagues epidemiology, where researchers are burdened by an endless number of uncontrollable factors - diet, exercise, genes, past exposure to diseases - all of which can contribute to an incorrect conclusion. Quartz's coolhunt faces much the same problem. "It was totally unanticipated," he shrugs. "Going in, we thought, Oh, there'll be a signal for cool objects and a signal for uncool objects. We weren't even thinking about how it might differ across personality types." Instead, Quartz ended up with a pile of mystery data that could be interpreted - and reinterpreted - any number of ways.
The most likely explanation for Quartz's results, in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with cool. It has to do with personality. Psychologists have known for some time that personality affects perception - and in particular that extroverts react strongly to positive stimuli, while neurotics gravitate toward negative stimuli. Rather than isolating coolness, Quartz may simply have rediscovered the effects of personality on the brain's image processing. In that case, High Cools - aka extroverts - would react to positive, or cool images, while High Uncools - aka neurotics - would fixate on negative, or uncool ones. If so, the breakdown of results would be the same whether Quartz used cool objects or merely attractive or cheerful ones. We can't know this, of course, unless Quartz reruns his experiment, this time with pictures of cupcakes and cockroaches.
Quartz's coolhunt is not the only experiment to have gotten tangled up in the mind's multiple layers. Indeed, the problem is endemic to most ambitious fMRI studies, where confounding factors like personality are only beginning to be identified. Attempts to pin down anything interesting - wisdom, love, cool - will produce murky results at best. Narrower studies fare better but succeed mostly at confirming the obvious. For instance, when researchers scanned opera fanatics as they listened to their favorite arias, they saw a spurt of activity in the area of the brain that processes reward. While this may be important news for the cartographers trying to connect cognitive function to real estate in the brain, it doesn't exactly qualify as insight. One imagines the psychologists in the building next door rolling their eyes.
Even in carefully focused studies, however, there's still the problem of what is actually being seen. For example, no one really knows what it means when the amygdala - the brain's emotion processor and one of its most studied regions - lights up. Is it recognizing fear, anger, or happiness? Or deciding how to respond to it? Or is it merely deciding whether to respond? Despite the new fMRI technology, cognitive function remains a black box. At this point, researchers can't even say for certain whether the amygdala is activated primarily by aggression or equally by emotions like despair and joy.
As for my personal journey from geek to savant to Cool Fool, it's over, and I can't say that I'm sorry. After all, I never got treated any differently - and in any case, the transformation didn't really take. Mere rebranding won't erase all those years of cantering around like a horse or undo the effects of a lifetime of high-waisted jeans. With luck, though, some unfashionable fifth grader will idolize me.
Contributing editor Jennifer Kahn (jenn_kahn@wiredmag.com) wrote about hacker Adrian Lamo in Wired 12.04.
credit:Courtesy Roy and Arlene Kahn
I want to grow up to be an MRI pioneer: The author in fourth grade.
