Richard Powers is one of America's most acclaimed novelists and a faculty member in the Beckman Institute's Cognitive Neuroscience group. Powers, a professor in the Department of English, has earned numerous literary and academic awards and honors, including Time magazine Book of the Year Award, four National Book Critic Award finalist nominations, an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. On November 15 his latest novel, The Echo Maker, won what many consider the highest honor for works of fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction.

Powers had been at Beckman in the 1990s, then returned to the Institute last year to continue researching and writing The Echo Maker, a book that weaves family tragedy and the annual migration of the Sandhill cranes to Nebraska's Platte River into a story that probes basic questions about the self.

Powers read the neuroscience literature, attended seminars, and talked with neuroscientists at Beckman and elsewhere in researching the book. The Echo Maker tells the story of Mark Schluter, a 27-year-old Nebraska slaughterhouse worker whose truck accident leaves him with a rare case of Capgras syndrome. Unable to recognize his sister or even his dog, Schluter is trapped inside a mind that is connected to his old self in many ways but strangely disconnected to those people and things that were most familiar to him before the accident. A famous neurologist, Dr. Gerald Weber, is brought in and a story unfolds that reveals how fragile our connections to the world can be and how amazing the workings of the mind really are. The Echo Maker is Powers' ninth novel and was composed with a tablet PC using speech recognition software.

Steve McGaughey: You've been at Beckman since March of 2005. How did you end up here?

Richard Powers: This is my second time through. When I first came back to the States after living in the Netherlands for many years and was invited by Illinois to stay as an artist-in-residence, Dick Wheeler and Ted Brown - who was head of the Beckman then - came up with this plan to give me an office and an affiliation here; this was in 1992. And by spending that year here, I came up with the idea for Galatea 2.2. There's a fictionalized Center in that book that's sort of a thinly disguised Beckman. So after finishing that book I gave up the office and went back south of Green to the English Department and stayed there, wrote some more books and taught some classes and helped start the graduate program, the Masters in Fine Arts degree that the English Department now issues. I'd been teaching with them for some years when I started working on this book with neuroscientific themes.

I realized that I needed to come back and test my story against the stories that were unfolding here and the research that was being done. I came back a year ago last spring and have been enjoying being a fly on the wall once again.

SM: What do your interactions with neuroscientists at Beckman consist of and did they influence The Echo Maker?

RP: Very much so. I was working on the book and had done a lot of research in print and also in interviews prior to coming here. But once I was here I had several new avenues of connection and new resources available. One was access to informal conversations with scientists here, and that's been invaluable. The number of times that somebody has pointed me to other bibliographies, to an error in my preconceptions, or just to new and exciting research, I can't count. Just in casual conversations. Beyond that, I've had several chances to sit down with some incredibly exciting researchers like William Greenough and Neal Cohen, people who were working in areas that were important to my own narrative. The ability to sit and be in seminars with them and pick their brains one on one was really invaluable to me. Then I also started to attend the regular research seminars here, for instance the Advances in Sensory and Developmental Neuroscience events. That's where folks are bringing stuff fresh out of the lab and putting it up for public discussion, even stuff that is still in formulation. The benefits of that were really two-fold: learning about research before it actually hit publication, just as a sense of where things are going right now. But also a chance to see as an observer - but someone sitting in the same room - the whole culture of science. The way that scientists interact with each other as people was very interesting and eye-opening and part of the story that I ended up creating.

SM: There are numerous references to real world neuroscience cases in the book, such as HM, the man Neal Cohen discussed in his Director's Seminar talk Oct. 20 of 2006. How much research did you do before sitting down to write and why was Capgras syndrome the choice for Mark, the character the story revolves around?

RP: I did hear the Director's Seminar and Dr. Cohen's work is just stunning. I was knocked out by that. But I have had a couple of chances to talk to Neal privately and I also heard a similar talk that he had given in the past. I was participating in a memory seminar that he also participated in and, of course, I read him. So being at the Beckman was an exciting way to connect the formal presentation of these insights and discoveries as you come across them in published form with the actual guy doing the work. To see what he's like and what his fears and his hopes and his dreams are. That was very thrilling to me. I had read him on HM and read a lot about other people's research with HM, but to actually hear him stand up and talk personally about the narrative of his experience with this guy, the kind of stuff that you can't put into scholarly publications, was really useful to me.

SM: In The Echo Maker, the neurologist Weber, when assessing his career, wonders about consciousness - what are its neurological correlates, do we have free will, etc. After researching and writing this book, what are your thoughts on what neuroscience tells us about the "basic riddle of conscious existence"?

RP: What's really interesting about writing this book and publishing it in the year 2006 is I think we're right in the middle of a complete transformation of attitude, even toward asking that question. In other words, when I started writing 20 years ago or more, scientists would not touch that question. To do so would be an embarrassment, overreaching, philosophy. Now everybody's asking that question. It's tremendously exciting, but we're still in our infancy in our ability to formulate an answer. So in a way the question is still philosophy but it's undergirded now by these new kinds of data, imaging data for example, ways into the locked room that didn't exist before. So we're right in between having the question being respectable and having the question being answerable.

SM: You write that "imaging and drugs are opening the locked-room mystery of the mind." But there are issues with all advances, including as Weber worries about, the deterministic view that technology will eventually provide a neurological basis for consciousness. He wants to find more explanation, higher processes, than just interdependent modules making up consciousness. What does his search tell us about the field and about him?

RP: I think it tells us that the field is exploding and it also tells us that the field is incredibly optimistic in a way that it wasn't until recently but, finally, that the field is incredibly messy and a work in progress. Anyone who enters this investigation thinking that we will finally have a complete, simple, reduced, elegant sense of who's driving who around inside the human skull is going to be disappointed. The field continues to point to models that are interdirectional, complicated, richer than we thought. So as always the most interesting research shows us that we have to up the ante with the questions, make the questions more sophisticated, make the questions more open to complexity.

SM: An idea that comes out of the book is that one theory for explaining the basic riddle of conscious existence used to dominate in neuroscience, then another opposing theory took hold, but it seems to say that currently no one theory is dominant.