A technician called Sue-Ellen is measuring my skull. She stretches a wetsuit-like cap with little holes in it over my head, and marks two points with a red Sharpie pen. Removing the cap, she gives me two electrical nodes, each inside a salt-soaked sponge. I hold the sponge-nodes to my head: one on the left of my upper forehead, just behind the hairline, and the other lower down on the right-hand side, just above my ear. She then straps a kind of brace onto my head and I withdraw my hands from the sponges. She adjusts it, a little more to the left, a little nudge downwards, and when she’s sure the nodes are in the right spot, she plugs them into a little box behind me, the Neuroconn Edilth Stimulator—where transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) originates.

Unfortunately there’s a body-length mirror in this little treatment room at Sydney’s Black Dog Institute, and if I turn my head right just far enough I can see myself. The whole effect is pretty Minority Report. I’m Samantha Morton’s pre-cog. I’m a mental patient. When I pull my hair back in the bathroom afterwards, I see red patches where the nodes were. I then go back to my office and write for the rest of the day. Hardly anybody knows what I’m up to. I do this every day for two months, and then intermittently for the rest of 2013.