Honing The Talent
B Pascal
Chapter 18
I had continued to exchange emails with Karen, sometimes daily if we could. I loved getting her ideas and insights on her work, her new interests, her new friends, but it also made me remember how much I missed her. I was now thinking that I couldn’t recall exactly what her voice sounded like. I was looking forward to Christmas break when we might be able to spend some time together again.
I had to pull myself back from thinking about her too much, and trust that she still cared about me. The pessimist in me continued to assert to anyone who’d listen that she was going to meet some handsome guy she liked better than me.
So it took some effort to step back into the now and to trust that she still thought about me in the same way. I forced myself to get back to my reading and other class assignments.
I hadn’t forgotten about my foray into my own epicenter and the few tantalizing items I’d uncovered about memory. I thought about how I might test that idea on a new target. Some part of me thought I ought not try that in class in front of everyone, because I still didn’t know what the effects of rummaging too deeply in someone’s head were.
I wondered if I could somehow get close to a professor when they weren’t teaching, perhaps when they were having a conversation with one or two people about some topic related to their field of study. Maybe, I’d have to think about it. Then I thought, wait, it doesn’t have to be a lecturer, does it, just somebody who has way more knowledge of a subject than I.
Then I remembered my chemistry recitation class on Wednesday mornings. In this class, the TA (teaching assistant), a chemistry grad student, reviewed the high points of the most recent lecture, answered questions, and sometimes gave quizzes to test our knowledge. A grad student should have a good understanding of undergrad chemistry, and some advanced classes, too. If it works on them, it would probably work on a professor.
I could find out if probing their memory affects how they act while I’m doing it. If something goes wrong, the class would just attribute it to grad student overwork, or lack of sleep.
So on Wednesday morning, I got into the classroom a couple of minutes early to grab a seat in front. They were usually mostly empty anyway, because people wanted to hide in the back so they wouldn’t be called upon, but I wanted to make sure.
Right on time, Ron McCarthy, our TA, strolled in and dropped his books on the desk. He started reviewing the highlights from the previous lecture, helpfully pointing out the ideas that would likely be on an exam because they were important. I got eye contact and found the thread and walked it up into his epicenter.
I was impressed. An organized guy. The ideas he was planning to discuss seemed to be arranged, ordered, in the sequence he was likely to use them, all laid out in front of him. Nice. It made my job easier.
So while he chatted about chemistry and how interesting it was—he really was fascinated with it—I looked around, away from the center of his thoughts, at the periphery of the ’room’. It was almost as if the ’doors’ were disguised to fit inconspicuously into their surroundings, so they wouldn’t be noticed. I had to look carefully.
There’s one. I’m sure there were others, but one’s enough for the moment as proof of concept. I stepped through the ’door’ and found, as expected, a darkened area with darker amorphous objects, lacking any specific form.
How the hell do I rummage through someone’s memory when I have no real understanding of their subject area? I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I grasped at something that we’d been told about briefly in a lecture, stoichiometry, which was how you calculated the quantities of chemicals involved in a particular chemical reaction. The textbook was embarrassingly vague on the explanation of how it was done.
I visualized stoichiometry in the same way that I visualized, say, orgasm intensity when I was trying to adjust the strength of a partner’s climax. You visualize what you want to adjust and it glows on a ’control panel’ somewhere. It was the first thing I could think of to try.
But as much as I focused on stoichiometry, nothing changed, nothing moved. I didn’t know how the chemical facts were stored in his head, how they were classified and organized. In my mind, there were at least two separate ’rooms’ for mathematical concepts, so perhaps stoichiometry was stored in another place.
I stepped out and looked carefully at my surroundings. That might be another door over there.
Yes, it was, and I stepped through it. I repeated the process, visualizing stoichiometry. This time, I saw some movement as things moved and shifted, and it was as if the knowledge were on some kind of large Rolodex or revolving file, and it rotated to the front.
And there it was! I looked at it and saw stoichiometry in its framework and understood how it worked, at least in some kind of theoretical sense. I knew it. I could probably work out some simple problems with it now, given my new sense of understanding.
True, this was a very small subset of the science of chemistry, but I hadn’t known it or understood it before, and now I did. Concept proved. I stepped out of his epicenter and back to class, because I didn’t want to appear too vacant and glassy-eyed for too long.
I listened to McCarthy answer some student’s question and thought about this. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t distracted or confused while I’d been poking around in there, and my having brought the idea of stoichiometry out of cold storage hadn’t interrupted his train of thought in any obvious fashion.
A very positive result, I thought. I’d try to identify some other useful targets and figure out how to get close. And more specifically, what knowledge might be most useful to acquire.
Later, the more I thought about it, I realized that it was, in fact, a very big step. All through high school I’d convinced myself that I could ’listen in’ only to the thing the speaker was currently discussing, what was in their epicenter. And also, I had discovered, things that were closely related to the focus topic.
I had decided the latter because, when I first noticed the ’doors’ in the back of the epicenter and looked inside, I saw only those things that were related. Everything else was, well, dark, and the only things that were observable were those things related to the thing being discussed.
As I thought about it now, it sort of made sense. The speaker drew upon all his knowledge of the thing he was explaining, even those parts that he wouldn’t talk about because we really aren’t able to recall memories selectively. There’s always extraneous stuff attached to them, and the mind just ignores the bits it doesn’t need at the moment. Otherwise, the mind would quickly become overwhelmed.
What I had observed in high school, it now seemed to me, was the speaker recalling his own facts and memories, just as I had. Those were the only things that were tangible, visible. Everything else was dark, as it was in my own mind until I specified the thing I wanted to recall.
At the time that it happened, back in high school, I had not yet come across the concept of the
’control panel’ and how to visualize the thing I wanted information about. I was just watching the speaker do it, but I wasn’t able to see the process by which he recalled the facts.
So, if I was reading this correctly, I could step into a person’s epicenter and ask for specific information. I believed—but I would have to prove it more definitively—that doing so wouldn’t upset their train of thought, confuse them, or bring about some psychological conflict that would cause psychic damage. I’d have to walk this line very carefully.
This was exciting, a liberating discovery. But at the same time it was also the thing I had been long afraid of. I didn’t want to become a kind of mental voyeur, either intentionally or inadvertently, rummaging through people’s minds, looking for the dirt, the scandal, the things they wanted to hide from public view. I thought that would lead me down a very dark road. As useful and exciting as this gift was, it had some serious ethical downsides.