In the summer of 1991, Susannah Breslin, a 23-year-old college student, agreed to meet with Jack Block, a prominent psychologist who’d been spying on her for most of her life.
From the time she was three, Breslin had been part of a groundbreaking program at the University of California, Berkeley, called the Block and Block Longitudinal Study.
Along with a cohort of over a hundred other preschoolers, they were studied and observed for over thirty years, in an attempt to “predict who we would grow up to be,” writes Breslin in her new memoir, “Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment” by Susannah Breslin (Grand Central Publishing), out November 7th.
Breslin had long been aware she was a “human lab rat,” in her words, but it wasn’t until adulthood that she started to wonder what it was all about.
“I had been their research subject for years, but I didn’t know much about them or what they had learned about us over the three decades of the study,” she writes.
Had they seen what she would become someday—or what she was still becoming—and had they shaped it in some way?
During her sitdown with Block, he showed Breslin photo albums of herself and other kids from the study, like they were memories from a family vacation.
And he presented her with a folder of the published papers that he and other researchers had written about the experiment, including one landmark study from the ‘80s showing that divorce had no significant impact on a child’s development.
Breslin “skimmed their dense prose,” but “it wasn’t like reading a personal diary or watching a home movie,” she writes. “It was more like viewing a documentary of your life narrated in a different language.”
Breslin wanted more.
Like whatever was in the filing cabinets in Block’s office.
What secrets did they hold about herself?
Breslin’s parents didn’t have altruistic reasons for enrolling her in the Block Project back in 1968.
Her dad, a poetry professor at UC Berkeley, and mom, an English instructor, were mostly looking for a way to get their daughter out of their hair.
As the story was told to her, Breslin’s dad walked straight from her delivery to the Brock Project offices, submitting her application just hours after her birth.
“The university’s faculty and staff got convenient, affordable, quality childcare,” Breslin writes. “And its researchers and students got young human subjects.”
Breslin wouldn’t realize until years later that she was being constantly watched as a child by a team of researchers behind one-way mirrors.
Even when strange men and women showed up at her house, only to watch her play from afar and ask occasional questions, she managed to ignore it.
But as a teenager, it was impossible not to suspect something was different.
At 14, Breslin was given a beeper.
Every time it beeped, “I punched in a number that represented my mood,” Breslin writes.
When she was pulled randomly out of class for Block Project observation, she could see the jealousy in her peers’ eyes.
“Where did you go?” her best friend asked.
Breslin just shook her head and smiled conspiratorially.
“I was in a secret club for special kids, and she wasn’t,” Breslin writes.
At home, she felt invisible.
Her parents were preoccupied with work, and her mom especially wanted to be free of parental responsibilities.
But at the Block Project, “I felt seen,” Breslin writes.
The researchers “wanted to know everything about me: who I was, how I saw the world, what kind of person I wanted to be. When I spoke, they nodded encouragingly. It made me feel how I longed desperately to feel: special.”
Breslin went through difficult times in her teens.
She dabbled in drugs, became promiscuous, and started flunking classes she once excelled at.
“You might think that if you were a research subject, it would change your life,” Breslin writes. “Because you were being observed, you would be compelled to become a better version of yourself.”
But instead, she just felt the pressure to be exceptional. And that pressure could be crushing.
She zigzagged around the country during her 20s and 30s, looking for meaning.
She became a sex reporter in LA for Playboy, published a short story collection in Portland, moved to New Orleans just in time for Hurricane Katrina, eloped in Las Vegas with a man she just met and moved to Florida, then divorced him when he became abusive.
She reinvented herself countless times in countless cities. All the time wondering, Did Block predict how my life would unfold?
In her 40s, she finally decided to investigate the people that had studied her.
She tracked down files from the Block Project stored on internet archives, but there wasn’t much.
“There were scripts for interviews and instructions for tests I remembered having taken,” Breslin writes. “There were acronyms I didn’t understand. Charts I couldn’t decipher. Mathematical calculations I failed to comprehend.”
She learned that each child was given a three-digit number to disguise their identity, and managed to deduce her code name.
“I was 758,” Breslin writes.
Though Block died in 2010, Breslin tracked down one of his colleagues, a retired psychology professor named Per Gjerde who’d been with the Block Project since 1978 and had become Block’s right-hand man.
“Children like to be under study,” he told her. “It makes them feel special.”
As for whether any real insight was gleaned from the constant surveillance, Gjerde assured her there was.
“Your personalities were like a road map,” he told Breslin. “You did something important. You proved it is possible to see who we will be.”
Whatever that proof might’ve been, it didn’t last long.
Breslin learned that after the Block Project ended in 1999 and Block himself passed away ten years later, the majority of the files—hundreds upon hundreds of boxes, with detailed notes about Breslin and other Block Project subjects—had been unceremoniously disposed of.
“Waste management delivered garbage cans with locked lids,” Breslin writes. “A woman stuffed the Block Project files through the slots in the garbage can lids. Then waste management retrieved the filled garbage cans and dropped off more garbage cans to fill. This process repeated itself over the course of several weeks: delivering cans, filling them, taking them away.”
Whatever insights were recorded about Breslin and the hundreds of other kids involved in the decades-long project had been swept into the dustbin of history.
The Block Project may not have predicted Breslin’s future, but it did shape it.
Her experiences pushed her towards writing about the sex industry.
She had something in common with the porn stars, strippers, and escorts she wrote about.
“That need to be seen, that desire to be exceptional, to feel, above all else, special,” she writes. “I got it, I thought.”
When she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer at 36, and she was surrounded by a team of curious oncologists, it felt weirdly familiar to her.
“It was like I was being studied again,” she writes. “The hospital room was the experiment room. The doctors were the examiners. I was their subject.”
Breslin sometimes still wonders if the secret to what makes her tick was somewhere in those files.
Had it predicted what she would become?
Had she read any of it, could she have spared herself heartbreak?
Career missteps?
Even cancer?
“I had fantasized that by finding my data I would find the real me,” Breslin writes.
But probably not, she concludes.
The Block Project “had only known the part of me that I had shown it,” she writes.
In some ways, she was one of the lucky ones.
“These days,” Breslin writes, “we’re all data babies. Somewhere a little girl is being co-parented by a digital device.”
The difference is, today’s tech isn’t trying to predict that girl’s future, “but tell her who she is and what she wants, steer her behavior and decide for her.”
So who, Breslin wonders, will that girl grow up to be?