The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [89]
“He also predicts the winners of horse races. Not very well.”
“Does he think you’ll be a great artist because his favourite authors— Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nabokov—all had synaesthesia?”
“Probably. But great art like that is definitely out of my league. So is mediocre art, for that matter.”
Samira held Noel’s eye for a full quarter of a minute, until he looked away. “Are there any great scientists who had it?”
“Richard Feynman, for one.”
Samira laughed. “You’re kidding. I just read an article on him—in a section of the paper I never read, even while listening to my mom on the phone. There was a long delay in the metro. A suicide jump, I think. He was into quantum mechanics, right? In the sixties?”
Noel nodded. “My father liked him because of his … range. Because he wasn’t your average boring scientist, as you probably know. He wrote on science and religion, on the role of beauty in scientific knowledge, on gambling odds. He cracked uncrackable safes, played bongo drums for a ballet …”
“Painted a nude female bullfighter.”
Noel smiled. “Right. My father once had a drink with him. In Queens.”
“Are you serious? Wow, a brush with greatness. I’m just trying to remember … Didn’t he have some famous last words?”
“‘I’d hate to die twice—it’s so boring.’”
Samira burst out laughing. “That’s it. Almost as good as Dylan Thomas’s.”
“Really? What were his?”
“‘Seventeen whiskeys. A record, I think.’”
It was Noel’s turn to laugh. “What number are we on?” He held up the bottle then poured.
“Three—we’ve a ways to go.” She swivelled in her chair, put her feet up. “So I can see why your father liked Feynman. Maybe one day you’ll be like him.”
Noel gazed at Samira’s dark brown ankle boots, at the criss-cross of laces wound through button hooks. “There’s no’ a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening, as my mother would say.”
“Great Scottish accent! Almost as good as Norval’s.”
“Right.”
Samira traced her finger round the lip of the beaker. “You’ve made quite an impression on JJ. He says you’re a genius.”
“JJ has kind words for everybody—it takes some getting used to. But there’s more to genius than having a good memory.” Noel’s mind began to stray, but he corralled it. “The funny thing, about Feynman I mean, is that I got some ideas about memory loss—about memory being physical particles—after looking at a Feynman diagram in my dad’s notes.”
“What’s a Feynman diagram?”
“Well, briefly, it’s a graphic method of representing the interactions of elementary particles, a way of calculating the processes that occur, for instance, between electrons and photons. One axis, for example the horizontal axis, is chosen to represent space, while the other represents time. Straight lines are used to depict fermions—particles with halfintegral values of intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, and wavy lines are used for bosons—particles with integral values of spin, such as photons …”
“This is the brief explanation, right?”
“Sorry, I … I’m not a very good storyteller. Or teacher. I always lose people.”
“No, no, it’s … it’s my fault. Entirely. Go on.”
“I’ll get to the point. Descartes, as I’m sure you know, famously divided the world into two parts—‘extended things,’ i.e., the physical world, and ‘thinking things,’ i.e., the mind. So the brain for him has two kinds of material—mental material, in which the thought exists, and physical material, which is where the memory is stored. So ever since Descartes philosophers and scientists have debated whether the human mind will ever be knowable.”
“Because if it’s not physical, how can you study it?”
“Exactly. But now, the standard view of neuroscience is that when we have a new thought, or a new memory, our brain has physically changed. With the formation of engrams, memory-traces. So the mind doesn’t exist beyond that—beyond the grey mush, the nerve spaghetti of the brain— and therefore memory is a biological process that can be manipulated like anything else. And not only can you manipulate it, you can improve it.”
“With a memory pill, for example.”
Noel smiled. “Precisely.”
“So Descartes