The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [150]
37 Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line “The surest poison is time” in “Old Age,” Society and Solitude (1870). Memoryless and demented, Emerson died of Alzheimer’s disease twelve years later.
38 It is not always possible to control the ambitions of one’s subalterns, who clearly flirted with unprofessionalism in this regard. One of the experiments that NB refers to was conducted to see whether memory impairment occurred in synaesthetes after electrical stimulation, as it normally does with non-synaesthetes. Another was inspired by experiments conducted by the Montreal neurologist Dr. Wilder Penfield (who was once called “the greatest living Canadian,” even though he was born and educated in the US). Penfield found that by stimulating the temporal lobes he could evoke memories incorporating sound, movement and colour, which were much more vivid than usual memory, and often about things unremembered under ordinary circumstances. In short, he made his patients relive the past as if it were the present. As Cytowic (1989) memorably describes it, “This was Proust on the operating table, an electrical recherche du temps perdu.” Patients were shocked (pardon the pun) to re-experience long-forgotten conversations, a kindergarten classroom, a certain song, the view from a childhood window. They were convinced that what they experienced was real, even though they also knew they were on an operating table in Montreal. Now, the obvious next step is to open up the cranium of a synaesthete, stimulate the visual cortex and see whether the resulting experience resembles their experience of synaesthesia. Treading on thin deontological ice, you’re thinking? Perhaps, but not with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is what we used on NB. This gentler method of stimulating the cortex generates a magnetic impulse that passes through the skull and causes nerve cells in the brain to “fire.” In non-synaesthetes I have been able to elicit colour percepts, or chromatophenes, by stimulating the occipital lobes. My next step is to stimulate the same regions in a synaesthete, and compare the two “optical” events. Should they prove to be similar we might, all of us, experience the rainbow world of a synaesthete!
39 Speak, Memory by name, wherein Nabokov—who spent the last eighteen years of his life in Switzerland—describes his synaesthesia:
I present a fine case of coloured hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the colour sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanised rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites.
(Speak, Memory, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967).
Nabokov’s parents, wife and son, interestingly enough, were all synaesthetes.
40 My preliminary research points to three ways in which caffeine can protect against or reverse dementia-related changes in the brain: (1) it can stimulate brain cells to take in choline, needed to make acetylcholine, which is reduced in dementia; (2) it can interfere with another neurotransmitter called adenosine, a knock-on effect that may disrupt AD mechanisms; (3) it seems to tone down the activity of “housekeeping” cells called glia, which, although important in ridding the brain of dead and injured cells, can sometimes be overzealous and damage contiguous areas. My department is currently engaged in double-blind studies involving caffeinated and decaffeinated Maxwell House coffee.
41 See note 15.
42 Overleaf is KL’s synaesthetic alphanumeric character set (this colour chart, and the one in note 1,