Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [88]
Paternal car; Chevrolet/Cadillac
Slaughter Self/Butcher
Kennedy/Nixon
Married uniform/tie
Husband married uniform/tie
Saw moon landing/word-of-mouth
Union/non-union
Polio in family/No polio
Pink Cadillac/Blue Cadillac
Purple Chevrolet/Orange Chevrolet
One sibling/no sibling
Two sibling/three sibling
Procrastinator/punctual
Audited/Meticulous with books
If cursive, then “saw moon landing”
If union, then Yankees
If Procrastinator, then Polio
As I look at the list, the first thing that comes to mind is that I’ve heard Grandma Lane talk about some of these things, both in her conversations with me and in her conversations with the Human Memory Crusade. For instance, on more than one occasion, she’s mentioned to me that her father drove a Cadillac. I recall that she told the Crusade that she heard about Pearl Harbor on a radio. One of the items on the list reads: “12/7; Radio/Word-of-Mouth.”
12/7—December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor.
I study the whole list again. On its face, this looks like a list of possible memory options. Some people supported Kennedy, others Nixon. Some drove a standard car, others an automatic. But the list also seems so discrete, narrow, and confining. After all, some people probably supported neither the Yankees nor the Dodgers.
Grandma wasn’t a big baseball fan.
The word equations at the end of the list are another curiosity—“If union, then Yankees.” “If Procrastinator, then Polio.”
I do recognize the syntax as basic computing language, The “if . . . then” statement. Bullseye can make more sense of it.
It is almost midnight. I fold up the piece of paper and start the car.
I start driving across town to what I imagine will be a bizarre confrontation, one that has been a lifetime in the making.
The funniest teacher I had in med school was Dr. Eleanor Fitzgerald. She taught anatomy. We called her El Fitz.
One day, she brought in a picnic lunch for everyone that included beer. After lunch, she announced we would finally start dissecting the brain.
“No need to be totally sober for this,” she said. “We have no real idea what’s going on in there, or how it works. Come back in seven thousand years and we’ll have something to teach you.”
It is truly a wonder how we think, process information, store memories, and recall them.
Computers are a mystery too, at least to me. But, in general, I know that we know how to build them, and we know how information moves. We know that data gets held in a certain piece of hardware that is controlled by a certain piece of software. We know that tiny transistors attached to only slightly less tiny pieces of silicon transmit and calculate information when we ask our device to calculate a math problem or place a phone call. We write software that performs certain tasks, all dictated and understood by a computer’s creators.
Similarly, we know that various regions in the human mind have a lot to say about certain activities. The visual cortex and sight are linked. Injure the frontal lobe and emotional retardation follows, and so on. But most activities don’t just rely on a discrete region of the brain. Even a relatively simple task—picking up a pencil—might involve dozens of nooks and crannies; neurons firing in just the right amounts, cascading and cooperating in an organic alchemy that is truly one of life’s great mysteries.
But unlike a computer, we can’t well measure or dictate what’s happening. Our mind often has a mind of its own. Witness depression, joy, hand-eye coordination, ability to make music, or love. Or the sudden emergence of a memory, the synthesis of a complex idea, a brainstorm, or revelation.
Say, for instance, a revelation about the life of your grandmother.
Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, a theory bubbles to the surface. I have a feeling I know what triggered it: When I found Pete lying on the floor in a pool of blood, he confessed to me that he was living a “double life.”
Double life.
Why did that phrase trigger a theory about my grandmother? Who knows. But it did.
It made me think about her distant relationship with my