A week passed before Adina and I met again. For me, it was a hectic week because I spent quite a bit of time closing down all my commitments at Testit. I wanted to exit nicely and not leave them with unfinished business. At the same time, I started writing my research proposal. Both tasks were not easy and required a lot of energy. Every day I sat writing from early in the morning until the wee hours of the night. Yael tried not to disturb me, but I noticed signs of distress on her face. She had gotten used to our former routine.
"Don't worry," I told her one day, "this is a transitional period that will pass. I'm just busy with both worlds now, closing one and opening another, and it's taking energy out of me."
"I hope so," she said, doubt in her voice. She knew that when I immerse myself in something, I tend to lose my limits.
"You have to take care of yourself, Jonathan. It's not long since the accident and you're completely immersed in work. Sitting for hours is also an effort."
"I promise. It's a transition period of just a few weeks, and then we'll get back to a sane pace."
"Do what's right for you. I just worry and want us to keep our lives together. I'm good with our normal pace and I don't want to see it spoiled." She looked at me pleadingly and when she saw my distress she added, "I'll help, don't worry. I will mark the boundaries for you, and you, on your part, will try to keep them."
"Promise."
At the appointed hour, I knocked on the door of Adina's room with the research proposal.
"Come on, sit down," she called out invitingly, so different from her initial reaction, "did you make a proposal?"
I took the document out of my bag and gave it to her.
Adina skimmed the pages and lingered here and there on certain sections, especially the financial part. In the proposal, I asked for a budget of about two million dollars for the first year, and I assumed that within a year we would be able to show preliminary results and build on them in building the budget for the next year.
When she finished reading, Adina looked up and stared at me. "I thought a little about your proposal and even consulted with friends from the physics department," she said.
I blinked. She was running ahead faster than I had imagined. On the other hand, why am I surprised? It's her way.
"It won't be easy," she told me, looking me straight in the eye.
I was silent.
"There were a lot of question marks, even before I raised the subject of research. Simply because you've been out of academia for so long."
"Question marks?" I wondered.
"How much do you remember physics? What have you been doing since you did your doctorate? Do you need refresher courses? Are you also able to teach physics or will you only enter as a researcher? Those are just some of the questions."
"And they didn't ask what the research was about?" I wondered.
"They asked, but I didn't elaborate. I just said it had to do with neuroscience. I thought we would feed them in small spoons. Neuroscience is a hot field, and engaging in it can pave the way. Besides, I'm not sure I can correctly represent your direction. You've been researching the subject for quite some time, and I've only been exposed to it recently."
"What's the bottom line?" I wondered.
"We agreed that you would start working as a postdoc and I would take joint responsibility for the research together with Alon, Head of Neuroscience. That is, if we can convince him."
"Wonderful!" I exclaimed, "Looks great, doesn't it?"
Her eyes filled with relief. "Honestly, I was afraid you'd refuse. I thought you would feel disrespected in a temporary job funded by a scholarship and by being subordinate to me in one degree or another."
"I don't have a problem with that," I said. "I believe we'll manage."
I looked for the confirmation in her eyes and she nodded immediately.
"Sure," she replied, "but now we have two more challenges. One is to get Alon's support, and the other is the budget. I'm afraid I won't be able to give more than half a million dollars of my research budgets for the first year. We'll probably have to do several things. One is to see how much money we can get from Alon, and two, to reduce the investment. I'm guessing you'll have to find a way to reduce it to half the amount you asked for, that is, to a million dollars."
My heart fell inside me. "Do you know what effort I made to reduce investments for the first year? It's really little money."
"You come from a very rich world of high-tech. Things are more complicated here," she replied. "We're not like the prestigious universities abroad. The budgets are tight, and we still don't know if Alon will also support with his own budget."
We agreed that Adina would contact Alon, and we would meet with him. "You'll have to be at your best," she told me. "It's important that he fully understands what you want to investigate. That's the only way there's a chance for his support."
Three days later, I received a call from Adina. "Come tomorrow, meet Alon."
How good was it that I kept in touch with Adina, how would I have moved things forward so quickly without her connections?
Alon's office was also in Givat Ram, but in a different building. Back then, when I was still in college, neuroscience was an integral part of the Life Sciences. Since then, the field has evolved and has been joined by researchers from disciplines such as biology, psychology, physics, computer science, and medical sciences. In recent years, it has become one of the hottest fields in academia, and the understanding of the brain has made unprecedented progress. Scientists studied brain activities using medical instruments and tools such as MRI and EEG, physicists and biologists built multi-neural interaction models, mathematicians and computer scientists brought network science insights onto their research, and psychologists became interested in laboratory measurement tools for understanding mental processes. The field was really boiling.
I liked Alon at first sight. When we entered, he stood up towards us and offered us to sit across from him, across the table. He was in his forties, average in stature and had piercing, intelligent eyes that examined me as he shook my hand with a confident hand. He wore a knitted kippah. A religious guy, but not an extremist, I said to myself. Dressed slightly carelessly, the tassels stick out from under his shirt, and at his feet wore sandals and socks. Later I will learn that this is his outfit regardless of the seasons. In winter he adds a coat.
Alon's office was a bit reminiscent of Adina's office, simple and basic furniture, bookcases, a table, and a few chairs, but that was the extent of the furnishing. While Adina's desk was full of articles and professional journals, all in one big jumble, Alon's desk was neat and clean. One stack, not high, of articles in the corner of the desk, a laptop in the other corner, a mouse, a keyboard, and a picture frame that I saw only from the back. Along the walls of his office were many shelves on which I saw articles arranged in piles, probably by topic, and quite a few books. To my surprise, I also recognized books of poetry and thought, alongside others in physics, biology, and neuroscience.
Adina introduced me and suggested that I take it from there and elaborate. In preparation for this conversation, we agreed that I would leave my entire history of thoughts and conversations for later, and for now I would concentrate only on the research topic. We thought it would be more productive and reduce the chance of being rejected as an eccentric.
"The human soul is a very complex thing," I began, "as a physicist I can think of two approaches to characterizing the mind at the most basic level. One way is to look at the bottom-up system, as they say in the industry. That is, the brain is built up from below, at an ever-increasing hierarchical level. At the basic level there are neurons, above it are neural systems that are built for a specific function, such as vision, and so on up the hierarchical ladder until you reach the full brain. How exactly do we explain the complexity of the mind, emotions and abstract thinking using such a model? It's a riddle."
Alon nodded. Of course, he understands.
"The second approach," I continued, "is the top-down model. In this approach, I begin at the highest level of the soul as a whole and ask what it is and where it came from, while I treat the brain as a medium, as material on which the mind relies."
I noticed that Alon was cocked and straightened up. Here's the decisive moment, I thought.
"Even such a model is not exempt from challenges, of course," I continued, "in my approach, I am looking for another presence. Some external entity whose very interaction with matter, the brain, generates the processes that happen in the soul. I, as a physicist, would likely call this entity a 'field.' Just as the electromagnetic field reacts with physical matter, so the field I propose to study reacts with the brain."
Alon sat in his chair, his hands resting on the table, his gaze wandering gently away from me. I saw that he needed some digestion time and I kept silent to give him space. But Adina, like Adina, couldn't help herself, "What do you think, Alon?" she asked.
"I'm still trying to understand," he replied, slightly moving the kippah on his head.
After another pause, he turned to me, "Do you understand, Jonathan, that you are going against the current? Science today is quite aligned on the bottom-up approach, and everyone is trying to deal with the gap between the basic level and this vague essence that we call the soul. Suddenly you come and try to characterize some external field, the interaction with which is the essence of the mind. And I ask, what does it mean if that's true? That there is a God?"
"Honestly, I don't know, Alon. I'm just speculating. If I do prove the existence of this field, the interpretations will be many and varied, including the one you mentioned."
Alon leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "Look, there's something very seductive about your approach, imaginative as it may be. It bypasses a whole world of questions and problems. I just anticipate wall-to-wall opposition in the academic world. You are potentially pulling the rug out from under the feet of thousands of scientists all over the world."
"I'm not sure," Adina interjected. "The question may be of Cause and Effect. One possibility is that the mind is built from below and is the result of complex neural activity. A second possibility is that the field excites something, and the brain responds to it with neural activity. The two approaches may complement each other."
"A bit like Einstein's coefficients for light emission," I suggested. At this point, I didn't know Alon's background yet. "Einstein characterized two phenomena for the emission of light by excited atoms, that is, those that contain high-energy electrons. One is spontaneous emission, when at random time the electron drops back to its basic energy level and the atom emits a photon. The second phenomenon is emission that occurs because of the presence of a photon with the appropriate energy, which 'stimulates' the electron to decrease the energy level and leads to the emission of another photon. Stimulated emission is, by the way, the basic model that explains how lasers work."
"That's familiar to me," Alon said, "but how is it related?"
"Maybe," I continued, "maybe that's how the field-brain interaction behaves. There is spontaneous brain activity and there is activity that is 'forced'—or stimulated—by the field. The two are in constant interaction, and there is no question of Cause or Effect."
"Very nice, Jonathan," Adina complimented me. "Really a beautiful analogy. And from such a point of view, there really is much room left for characterizing the hierarchical model, because even if there is an external field, its influence is also ultimately expressed at the basic level of the neurons. The field activates areas of the brain that activate functions, that activate clusters of neurons, that activate individual neurons. Or vice versa."
I followed Alon's reactions with my eyes. It was clear to me that the concepts I used—field, energy states and Einstein coefficients—were not foreign to him. "Do you have a background in physics?" I asked.
Alon smiled and Adina answered instead. "Alon graduated with honors with a Ph.D. in astrophysics. His research focused on black holes and the breaking of symmetry."
"I'm sorry. I should have done my homework better," I apologized. "I really disconnected from this world many years ago. What made you make such a dramatic move and move from astrophysics to neuroscience?" I added.
"A long story that I might tell you one day," Alon replied, "but in order not to leave you completely wondering, my decision stemmed from a deep place connected to my very belief. How far does the meaning of 'we were created in His image' come from? Is man really endowed with the divine spark and to what extent? Add to that our contemporary knowledge, because neuroscience today combines almost every field of science and technology, and so I find this integration charming and fascinating."
I found a soul mate, I thought, and said out loud, "Fascinating. We'll have a lot to talk about if you just decide it's right for you to work with me."
Alon got up, circled the table, and held out his hand to shake. I stood up embarrassed, not knowing how to interpret this gesture.
"I don't know where this leads," he said, shaking my hand warmly, "and it will go somewhere, but I'm a little scared to think about it. However, I don't find a good reason to refuse you. I'm in."
Adina smiled broadly and I just stared at Alon. Although I had a good feeling from the moment we entered, I expected a much longer process. I'll get along well with him.
"Thank you," I said as I regained my senses, "I'm very happy with your decision, and I'd love to work with you."
Alon nodded with a smile. "I'd love to work with you too. Your attitude is thought-provoking."
"How exactly will this work?" I asked them both. "Will I get a budget from each of you? How big is the budget? What level of involvement of yours should I expect?"
"My budget has already been set," Adina said. "It's going to be half a million dollars for the first year and then we'll re-evaluate the results."
She looked at Alon questioningly, and he squinted, as if he didn't like talking about money, but then came to his senses. "I will support a similar amount. You'll have a million-dollar budget for the first year," he said curtly.
"Wait, we're now in June, not exactly a good time in terms of the fiscal year, right?" I wondered. "I mean, we won't be able to start spending until October, at the start of the academic year?"
Adina and Alon exchanged glances that they understood each other, and finally she answered. "No, no. Don't bother yourself with details. Everyone has a budget and we also have quite a bit of freedom in managing money and choosing investment directions. In academic research, it is very difficult to anchor budgets for specific actions, and some freedom is required in the individual management of money. On the other hand, freedom is not infinite and therefore the budgets that is given is also limited."
"Great," I replied. "I thank you very much. I don't know how I would have managed to hold back until October."
"Regarding the level of involvement, I suggest that we conduct ourselves as with any postdoc. We will meet from time to time to check on progress, and if there are any special results, we will be happy to catch up in real time." Accommodating, but as practical as ever.
Alon nodded. "Adina's working assumptions about tracking progress are acceptable to me. But, before I finally agree, I'd like us to get to know each other better. Maybe we should arrange a meeting, just you and me?"
I looked at Adina hesitantly and she nodded positively and signaled to me that as far as she was concerned, there was no problem. "Gladly," I replied, "whenever it's convenient for you."
I thanked them both from the bottom of my heart. While we had taken a big step forward, I also knew how much work I had to do to justify the trust placed in me. Maybe Yael was right, I wondered to myself with some trepidation. I will probably continue to be very busy and will have to find the right balance somehow.
To cope with the load, I realized that it was best to enlist help as quickly as possible. The research proposal included a two-person team, a lab technician, and a Ph.D. student, and despite the budget reduction, it was clear to me that I still wanted both. But I didn't know, of course, who the two would be.
After we said goodbye to Alon, I waited for us to leave the building before turning to Adina with a question that bothered me.
"How did it go so easily?" I wondered. "Didn't ask about me? Didn't interrogate me?"
Adina burst out laughing. "What do you think?! Would I let you come to the meeting without preparing Alon? I told him all about you, how brilliant you were in your studies, and how successful you were at Testit. We even checked you out on social media. There's nothing else to say: your resume is impressive."