My adventures began shortly after a 72-hour research marathon into cephalopod communication. As Mei likes to say, I’ve entered what I like to refer to as a “Knowledge spiral.” The point at which I research something so much that my very biology catches up with me and concepts like sleep and food are no longer requirements but suggestions at best.
My room looked like a natural disaster had occurred.
Research journals littered my floor, my whiteboard was filled with scribbles of squid chromatophore density distribution graphs, and I had slept maybe four hours. “So the cool thing about cephalopods, right,” I started the next morning at breakfast with Josh, “is that they basically have a whole different means of communication than us.
We’re all stuck with this primitive vocal chord vibration methodology when they’ve got pattern changing skin.” Josh had earned coffee trapeze artist status after fifteen years of friendship. He’s gotten exceptionally good at figuring out if my discoveries need to be filed under “interesting” or “report to the authorities.”
He waited patiently while I rubbed the crust from my eyes. “So what, exactly, does that have to do with me?” “I was thinking about how inefficient our verbal communication is!”
I said energetically while nearly dumping my coffee on my laptop. “I mean, we spend so much time and energy emoting through spoken word when maybe we could support that with visual signals! We could learn to change color to convey emotion just like cephalopods!”
“Jamie, did you somehow splice your DNA to grow chromatophores?” Josh asked. “No, that would be incredibly inefficient.
There are technological constraints that would make that a minimum five-year project,” I paused, bookmarking that idea in my head for later. “What I’m trying to say is, we could wear shirts that allowed us to change color like cephalopods!” And so, two days of prototyping later I was sitting in my quarterly department meeting at the university I guest lecture at wearing what can only be described as a lit lab experiment covering my torso.
Essentially, I took a thin undershirt and sewed on pieces of pressure sensitive conductive foam that hooked up to an Arduino microcontroller that drove addressable RGB LED strips underneath a thin diffusion fabric. When attached to my skin, the shirt allowed me to change colors through tensing different muscles and manipulating my posture in certain ways. I took careful note that each movement was subtle so as not to draw attention to myself with excessive flailing.
The experiment itself was simple. I would sit in a three-hour long budget meeting and attempt to communicate only through changing colors like cephalopods did while taking notes on both my surroundings’ reactions to me as well as my own experience. A basic legend flashed through my mind: red means disagreement, blue means agreement, purple means confused, yellow means excited, and green means neutral/passive listening.
There were patterns for more complex responses as well. I took a deep breath and logged the start time in the margin of my meeting agenda. Dr.
Henderson glared at me as I took my usual seat at the table. Apparently last quarter’s “Accidental Fermentation: When Your Office Lunch Turns Into An Ecosystem” experiment had come back to bite me in the form of a strongly worded email regarding appropriate break room refrigerator storage. “Maxwell, you are frighteningly silent today,” she said thirty minutes into the meeting as I had blinked my response to three consecutive lines of budget requests.
I grinned and brightened the green of my shirt. “Do you feel okay?” She continued, eyeing my shirt suspiciously.
Dr. Khatri leaned over me. She was my undergraduate advisor and has literally seen me at some of my worst.
“Jamie, why does your shirt have LEDs on it?” “I’m trying out nonverbal cephalopod-inspired communication!” I hissed at her, immediately guilty that I’d spoken.
“JESUS MAXWELL JUST SHOUT OUT LOUD WHY DID YOU SAY SOMETHING”
Fine. Eff off experiment, I thought while purposefully swirling my shirt into an angry shade of red. Breathing slowly, I relaxed my shirt back into a peaceful green.
Dr. Rivera from Analytical Chemistry jumped back several inches. “Was your shirt just like react to your emotions?”
YES YES IT DOES THANK YOU FOR NOTICEING!! I wanted to scream while quickly scrolling through my legend to find a subtle yet exciting yellow. What followed was forty-two minutes of increasingly derailed meeting as my coworkers slowly but surely stopped listening to budget allocations and instead tried to solve the mystery of what in the world my shirt was trying to communicate.
Luckily for me Dr. Khatri knew me too well. She whipped up a rough translation chart based on what she could see me silently mouthing as well as the colors my shirt displayed and held it up for all to see.
“When he blinks blue rapidly like that,” She said to our dumbfounded department, “He’s agreeability with what’s being said. The quicker the blinks, the more he agrees.” “This is entirely inappropriate for a budget meeting,” Dr.
Henderson scolded, though I noticed she too was watching my shirt rather than my face for my response. Green. Purple.
Green. Slow angry blinks of red. “Did he just sass me with his shirt?”
Henderson asked. It was all down hill from there, friends. I was supposed to be collecting data, but instead my fellow professors spent the better part of an hour asking me questions to see how my shirt would react.
Dr. Chen from Biophysics took it upon herself to quiz me on inflammatory grant topics just to see how my shirt would respond emotionally. Dr.
Williams kept creeping up behind me to startle me in order to watch what she termed my “chromatic startle response.” The unexpected results of my experiment were fascinating. To start, there was a severe delay.
By the time I processed what was happening in the meeting enough to change my shirt color to something appropriate, we were usually discussing something new. This made it incredibly difficult to communicate complex ideas through my shirt. Additionally, while my coworkers were easily able to translate basic emotional responses from my shirt, communicating anything beyond that was virtually impossible.
But the real discovery came when I noticed that other people were reacting to what my shirt was saying. About 107 minutes into the meeting, I realized that as my shirt changed colors, the people around me subconsciously began to mimic my behavior. When my shirt turned angry red because we were talking about cutting funding to staff conferences, the entire room shifted to a defensive posture.
When I blinked calming blue during a facilities update, people in the room visibly relaxed in their chairs. It wasn’t until we got into a debate about departmental parking, however, that I saw the true power of chromatophore communication. Dr.
Rivera and Henderson were locked in an epic battle of wills over who would get prime parking space come fall semester. I sat, cycling through every calming blue and green I could think of. Almost instantaneously, their volume began to decrease and their arguing softened (mentally as well as physically) without either of them realizing they were even doing it in response to my shirt.
It was happening. Social mirroring had begun simply because I was changing colors like a cephalopod! In my excitement, I pulsed so brightly yellow that Dr.
Henderson caught me saying out loud that I wholeheartedly supported her proposal. “Consider it supported, Dr. Maxwell,” She said without waiting for me to regain my neutral tone.
“We’ll have those changes implemented first thing next month.” I later found out that I had also volunteered to give up my faculty parking space for visiting scholars. I spent the next hour and a half frantically scribbling down everything I observed about my shirt meeting as my glowing torso ran out of battery and turned a solid ugly shade of blue.
My note-taking arm was cramped from writing so much and I had been volunteered to be on yet another committee all without speaking more than twenty words aloud. “Maxwell,” Henderson hollered as the last of our department trickled out. “Maybe leave the crazy science experiments for the laboratory.”
Leaving, I paused in the doorway to think about my findings. My brain was already ticking through improvements and corrections I could make. Maybe if I tapped into my muscle motor neurons I wouldn’t have to concentrate as hard on shifting colors?
It’d be much harder to build into a shirt, sure, but if I could hack an EEG bike helmet to—
“Jamie.” Dr. Khatri’s voice brought me back to reality.
“I swear to God I can see you running your next experiment in your head. Your normal speaking eyes have stopped blinking and I can literally hear your inner science cat powering up.” “I discovered social mirroring through controlled chromatic output!”
I yelled back over my shoulder. “I can control an entire room’s mood just by—”
“You have been banned from meetings by wearing ‘interactive garments,'” She said placing a department wide email in my face. “Effective immediately.”
As I walked to my car, dejected, I took one last mental note. While my hypothesis was incorrect and it turned out we couldn’t physically communicate like cephalopods, my shirt had provided enough social proof that we were capable of chromatically emulating these magnificent creatures. There was enough data here to spend months refining my technique before taking these findings mainstream.
Now all I had to do was convince people to wear LitLab Gear shirts and research if we subconsciously changed color like cephalopods do all day anyways…
It sucked that I was banned from meetings for the time being, but as they say, science waits for no man. Or woman.
You know where this story goes. Me sent me a text from her hospital bed. Blue lights, traumatic ambulance rides, and three days of intense chest pain suddenly made a lot of sense when I read her message.
“tell me about the shirt”
The End.
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