The Memory Artists (48 page)

R.P. Feynman,
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
(London: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 59.

6
Audio recording, September 12, 1977. As I have stated elsewhere, NB’s “memory map” and mnemonic gymnastics recall those used by the Greek poet Simonides (c. 556–468 BC), the so-called “inventor of the art of memory.” At a banquet at the court of Scopas, King of Thessaly, Simonides was once commissioned to chant a lyric poem in honour of his host. This he did, but he also included the gods Castor and Pollux in his praise. His vanity offended, Scopas informed the poet that he would pay him only half the sum agreed upon, adding that “Castor and Pollux will doubtless compensate you for the other half.” Amidst the brays of laughter from the king’s courtiers and sycophants, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men on horseback were anxious to see him outside. The poet hastened to the door, but looked in vain for the men. Suddenly, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed with a thunderous crash, burying Scopas and all his guests. The corpses were so badly mangled beneath the rubble that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them. Simonides, however, remembered the exact place where each guest had been sitting at the table and was able to indicate to the relatives their respective dead. For the poet, the main principle of the art of memory was
orderly arrangement
. According to Cicero, “Simonides inferred that persons wishing to train this faculty [of memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store these images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and the places and images will be employed respectively as a writing tablet and letters” (
De oratore
, II, xxxvi, 351–4). Most synaesthetes have above-average spatial memories, and typically recall large blocks of conversation, prose, movie dialogue, and so on.

7
Among the many articles that quote me at length are Vernon McQueen’s “Extra-Sense Perception” in the Babylon
Beacon
(15.12.1977), Monika Binder’s “Eine Verabedung um grün Uhr” in
Wormser Zeitung
(28.02.1978), and Felicia Brawne’s “Mommy! I Hear Colours!” in
The National Enquirer
(09.03.1978). If my skin were thinner, I would take umbrage at Ms. Brawne’s description of my accent as “thick as dry porridge […] in screaming need of subtitles.” In the same article is a photograph, purportedly of me: the gentleman depicted has a vigorous white beard and bald head, whereas my crinal configuration is the exact opposite. He is also substantially older than I.

8
As impressive as these numbers may appear, they do not come close to the world records (34.03 seconds, 22.5 decks, 400 and 1,820
digit
numbers, respectively). The female world memory champion, incidentally, is Svetta Nemcova, a vivacious Czech and the so-called “third party” evoked (baselessly) in certain tabloids with regard to my much-publicised divorce.

9
The confabulations and fantastications of NXB, often seen in alcoholic Korsakoff cases, are described in my “Confessions of a Pathological Liar” (
Frontier Science
, May 2001). The “free drugs,” principally LSD, mescaline and psilocin (especially
Psilocybe mexicana
and
Stropharia cubensis
), refer to NXB’s participation in my pilot studies of drug-induced synaesthesia.

10
Heinrich Kluver, a forgotten scientist until I rescued his work from oblivion, identified four basic hallucinatory form constants in 1930: (a) spirals; (b) tunnels and cones; (c) cobwebs; and (d) gratings and honeycombs. The colour forms of NB’s idiopathic synaesthesia generally fall into one of these four categories, particularly the first. NXB’s drug-induced synaesthetic forms include these four, along with twenty-three others: lazy tongs (extensible frameworks with scissor-like hands), swastikas, scutiforms (shield shapes), galeiforms (helmet shapes), rowlock arches, lumbriciforms (like earthworms), cochlears (like snail shells), quadrants (quarters of a circle), doughnut shapes, amygdaloids (almond shapes), anchor shapes, botryoidals (like a bunch of grapes), clothoids (tear shapes), ensiforms (sword shapes), infundibuliforms (funnel shapes), moniliforms (string of beads), pinnate shapes (feathers), sagittates (arrowheads), unciforms (hook shapes), villiforms (resembling bristles or velvet pile), virgates (shaped like a rod or wand), scroll shapes, and sigmoids (curved in two directions, like the letter
S
).

NXB’s remark about my being “cuckolded” (see note 9 above) continues to rankle. With respect to my much-publicised divorce, the pump of scandal was primed by insinuations and fabrications of that sort—the stock-in-trade of newspapers specialising in lurid crimes and juicy sexual irregularities. For a more factual account of the divorce, see
Le Devoir
of April 2, 2001 (page-one feature beginning “In the world of brain sciences, Dr. Vorta is a star of high wattage …”).

11
NB may be referring to this passage from Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound
, a favourite poem of his father’s:

Prometheus saw, and waked the legion hopes

Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers,

Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms;

That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings

The shape of Death … (II, iv, 59–65)

12
“You wake up one morning and find you are old” (literally “the fleeting years glide by”). Alas, how I identify with Stella in this respect! I devoted my life to science, and it cost me the love of my wife and daughter. There was a moment, in the late eighties, when I realised what I was losing, and what I had to do to regain it. And still I chose another path: sixteen-hour days, drinking Maxwell House coffee to keep me awake, driving my career forward with no concessions to age or family. True scientists, like true artists, make bad husbands.

13
The provincial motto “I Remember”—as I was informed by a former Quebec Premier, who urged me to run in a by-election with a view to becoming Minister of Health—derives from an anonymous poem beginning “
Je me souviens / que né sous le lys / Je croîs sous la rose
” (“I remember / that born under the [French] lily / I grow under the [English] rose”). It is perhaps my sovereignist convictions that deterred me, subconsciously at least, from improving my spoken English. See note 7, second sentence, which continues to grate.

14
Quebec filmmaker Claude Jutras was a friend and collaborator of François Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean Rouch, and admired by Cassavetes, Cocteau and Jean Renoir. (In April of 1972, on our first anniversary, my wife and I saw Jutras’
Mon Oncle Antoine
in Geneva.) He studied medicine at the Université de Montréal and worked for a time as an intern, which is when I met him. I learned later he was the son of a prominent radiologist and descended from a line of physicians. Jutras was a Renaissance man, for he went on to work as an actor, writer, painter and, of course, film director. After being diagnosed with AD, Jutras left his home one day in November of 1986, never to return. Did he lose his way, forget who he was? The mystery was not solved until several months later, when his badly decomposed body was found floating amidst the ice of the Saint Lawrence River. He was identified by a scrawled note in his pocket: “I am Claude Jutras.”

15
Who said the Swiss have produced nothing besides the cuckoo clock? This towering sixteenth-century physician and alchemist—who was born in my native village of Einsideln—established the role of chemistry in medicine and sowed the seeds of homeopathy. He published
Der grossen Wundartzney
(“Great Surgery Book”) in 1536 and a clinical description of syphilis in 1530.

16
I have never “chemically whitened” my beard. As for the rest, read on.

17
NXB, as usual, is wildly overstating. Humans remember approximately two bits per second. Over a lifetime, this rate of memorisation would produce some 10
⁹
bits, or only a few hundred megabytes. The analogy, in any case, is flimsy: a computer is a serial processor, whereas our brain is parallel. See “Dracula, Let Me Count the Bytes” in the
Journal of Cognitive Science
12, 1998, pp. 244–65, written by a student under my supervision.

18
See note 15, first sentence.

19
In an article entitled “Oedipus Anorex” (
Scottish Journal of Art and Cognitive Neuropsychology
, April 1991), I compare Lord Byron’s incessant dieting and his equation of starvation with self-mastery with the practices of today’s young anorexics. His revulsion at the sight of women eating was obviously related to both his compulsive dieting and his mother’s obesity. As for Noel Burun’s being occasionally “fat and mad,” Noel’s weight consistently fell within the norms for his age and height, and he is no madder than I.

By now the reader will have noted my interest in the arts. My publishing house, although specialising in scientific texts, also publishes poetry, novels and short stories dealing with scientific themes. For one of the chief purposes of art lies in its cognitive function: as a means to acquiring truth. NB’s father, Henry Burun, went farther: he considered art the avenue to the highest knowledge available to man, to a kind of knowledge impossible to attain by any other means.

20
The jest may call for a gloss: it is a reference to Prince Philip’s (in)famous remark, which contains—let’s be honest—a kernel of truth. In 1996, I hired a Paki who designed a laboratory electrical system not unlike JJY’s.

21
Émile Nelligan (1879–1941) is generally regarded as Quebec’s national poet (despite the fact that his father was from Dublin). After “burning out” creatively at the age of nineteen, Nelligan spent the rest of his life in insane asylums. See my “La schizophrénie et la poésie” in
Art et neuropathologie
(Memento Vivere, 1988).

I should point out to the reader that I am not only an art theorist, but a practitioner as well: as my readers well know, it is my custom to “set the tone” for my research articles, or chapters of longer works, with an epigrammatic poem or “intermezzo” of my own composition. (In my canton, I was once the semi-official
Mundartdichter
, or local poet.) Indeed I am mistaken if a single one of these poems fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse’s lips let it fall. One of them, entitled
Der Regenbogen
(“The Rainbow”), elicited the following critical response: “Each phrase is so meticulously calibrated that we feel the concluding line as an emotional thunderclap” (
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, 09/08/99).

22
JJY, far from being “crazed,” periodically or otherwise, is a generally well-adjusted individual with an above-average IQ (in the 120–125 range). Because of a history of minor behaviour disturbances as a child, including enuresis, soiling, somniloquy and bruxism, JJY’s family physician referred him to a psychiatrist, who in turn referred him to a neurologist in our department, Dr. Charles Ravenscroft. After several tests, Dr. Ravenscroft discovered a deficiency of large nerve cells called Purkinje cells and an excess of serotonin, and thereby concluded that JJY had a mild form of autism, of which there is a familial genetic component. Because I suspected careless procedure and analytical irregularities, I personally repeated all tests and scans and reached my own conclusion: that Dr. Ravenscroft had made yet another misdiagnosis.

JJY’s memory skills are also above average: on testing he had an excellent memory for pictures, recalling 10 out of 12 objects after a 40-minute delay, and perfectly reproducing the Weschler designs after a similar delay. His memory for verbal material was not as good, but still within the average range of the Weschler Logical Memory Scale. Psychiatric profile: displaying a number of paedomorphic traits, JJY is more or less delayed at the second stage of pyschosexual development. With the loss of his mother and father, and the loss of his girlfriend to another, JJY has sought refuge in an idealised, nostalgicised youth: in the rampant “Peterpandemonium” (a term I coined back in 1992) that characterises his generation.
See my “Peterpandemonium” in
Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie
, LX, pp. 399–419.

By now, my interest in the story’s protagonists should be obvious. But for the slow-witted, here is the research pentagram: (1) NB—synaesthesia/ hypermnesia (idiopathic); (2) SB—amnesia (Alzheimer’s); (3) NXB— synaesthesia (drug-induced); (4) SD—amnesia (short-term, antidotal);
(5) JJY—nostalgesis/creativity (TMS-induced).

23
See note 15. Ulrich Boner was a fourteenth-century Swiss writer whose collection of fables in verse was the first book to be printed in the German language (1461). It was called
Der Edelstein
(“The Precious Stone”) because precious stones were said to cast a spell and Boner hoped his tales would do the same.

The French writer mentioned before him, Antoine Galland, published
The One Thousand and One Nights
, the first translation into any Western language of these ancient Persian-Arabic tales, between 1704 and 1717. One of them, “The Sleeper and the Awakener,” would prove to be an inspirational wellspring for NB.

24
My researchers assure me this is nowhere near a record. A British writer named John Creasey, over a period of seven years, wrote numerous novels for which, by the time he got his first book published in 1925, he had received 743 rejection slips. Two of these books, he claimed, were written in a week, with half-days spent playing cricket.