Honing The Talent
B Pascal
Chapter 36
Dinner was pleasant, and I was happy to be there. I knew that I wasn’t normally happy to be there, that it was ordinarily a necessary task, to feed the body to keep it running. The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great, either. Except maybe for dessert.
So me feeling so happy was actually noticeable. Larry had commented on it, and one of the other guys in the dorm, who stopped to ask Larry a question, commented on it as well. So I was pretty sure that I had been successful in linkcasting myself that particular image.
The state carried through the rest of the evening, and I had a hard time keeping my focus on the reading I was supposed to get through. I was starting to see some downsides to these images I’d been casting about so freely.
I decided to see how I felt in the morning, and went to sleep feeling joyful, a very odd feeling to accompany sleep. When I awoke in the morning, I checked myself and decided that I still had it, though it seemed slightly diminished. But to be safe, I played around with an analog of the instruction I gave myself to clear the Cum Block. It took a little trial and error, but I eventually found something that worked, and I felt myself revert slowly to my normal state, whatever that was. Certainly not brimming with peace and joy.
But it made me think that all these named images, even if they did fade from existence eventually, should come with a fixed length, after which they would cease to work. It was no problem to simply attach that as part of the named description, and decided a couple of hours should be sufficient. Except for Boner Bliss and Spitshine. I thought those needed no expiration. Those would be useful things to the recipient, and they wouldn’t become active anyway until they decided to suck a dick, so no harm, I thought, to leave them in place.
I found it fascinating that things I thought I understood had more layers under them. I wondered if I’d ever figure out all of this, when I’d find the things I didn’t even know existed, or if I would at all. How the hell is all this ability dormant within us and we haven’t discovered it?
Well, maybe some of us already had, but they were keeping quiet about it for much the same reasons as I was. Or perhaps I was the first, and it was the accidental exposure to those chemicals by Parker’s Pond—if indeed that’s what was causing this—that woke up these dormant faculties in me.
Then I wondered, if these abilities were truly part of the human mind but buried deep and dormant, why they had become dormant in the first place. Had they ever been active, say in some pre-history civilization?
I thought about it for awhile, speculating how society would change if we all could use these talents. Or worse, how society would devolve into castes of haves and have-nots. Would people with these psi abilities become a new elite, controlling the economy and the sciences and government? Christ, that was a scary thought, a new dystopian society except for the select enhanced few.
I decided to worry about the downfall of society after breakfast, because I was hungry. I showered and shaved and brushed my teeth, then went to feed my elite ass before English class.
We were approaching the end of the term, and exams loomed. I could see it on the faces of the others. It was worry. It was the look of ’Jesus, exams are coming up in a few weeks? How did that happen?’. There would be some panic studying starting soon. I was okay, having kept up with my assignments, and feeling that I had a pretty good grasp on the basic elements of the courses. I would pass.
That made me smile at the memory of middle school and high school, where the same kind of cramming happened every semester, with mixed results. It was a sad fact of pre-college education that academic success was measured by how well you could perform on exams, parroting back the facts we had been fed, with little emphasis on understanding them. Tests that have ’correct’ answers are easy to grade. It requires little analysis by the teachers who grade them. You got the fact right or you didn’t.
College was a bit better, and most instructors did make an effort to impart understanding rather than mastery of a collection of facts, and exams reflected that, but there were still facts to be assimilated, for example in history. You needed to know names, dates, places and other things, then had to interpret them. Much the same thing with chemistry. So there was still memorization involved, because it would be on the exam.
So even though I had kept up with assignments, things that I had memorized earlier in the semester were now a bit fuzzy, and I would need to refresh my memory, which meant reviewing the notes, testing myself, re-learning what I had forgotten, retesting, and so on. Exactly the kind of stuff that I had hated as a student in high school.
I envied those people born with an eidetic memory, what the public called ’photographic’ memory. They read something once and it was there in their head forever. It made school easy for them, effortless. It didn’t help with understanding the material, but they could recite the facts verbatim, even tell you on which page and paragraph in the text it was first mentioned. Some could even recite entire books from memory after a single reading.
Regurgitation of facts was mostly what was asked in exams. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a pill you could take to allow us to learn facts, like in geography, which I had hated in school? I had read that science had actually made some advances in this and had found some compounds which aided learning and retention of facts, but it was still not well understood and thus not widely available.
My mind, which had been careening around these ideas randomly, suddenly stopped still, as if caught by a snapshot in mid-flight. After some seconds, it said, ’Isn’t that the kind of thing that hypnotism excels at, forcing the mind to focus completely? And isn’t what you do kinda like silent hypnotism?’
I wonder if I could put myself into an equivalent state to a hypnotic trance where I could exclude all other sensory input and concentrate on learning the facts I had to know? Would that be possible? Can you force yourself to ignore a particular sense?
Of course, I admitted to myself, hypnotists do it all the time. “The air conditioning has malfunctioned,” he tells his subjects, “and you’re all freezing.” And the subjects wrap their arms around themselves and shiver uncontrollably, teeth chattering. Their bodies ignore what their own temperature sensors are telling themselves, and instead believe the hypnotist. I had had something similar happen when I was in my own epicenter, and unaware of sounds and sights around me. The mind can control many of the body’s own functions.
This might be worth investing some time to work this out. If I could induce such a state in myself, it would make relearning facts much more efficient. And maybe it would improve my grades, too, if it worked. I sketched out a rough outline of what it would have to do, and how I would prove to myself that it actually worked, maybe flash cards I could use to test myself afterwards. Then I bused my tray and went off to English class.
Saturday morning I went out to the quad, partly to enjoy the spring sun and partly to get away from the noise of the dorm and Larry asking me questions. I found a tree and sat down under it, thinking about the problem, defining to myself what kind of state I wanted to induce, what I wanted it to accomplish, and also to insert some ’safety’ features like a finite length for the state, and the ability to maintain a distant awareness of things or people calling for my attention.
I wanted to have a trance-like ability to assimilate facts and ideas—blocking out all the things that tended to distract us—and to be able to recall them at will. I thought it would be useful to specify the thing I was trying to learn, so the mind would know what was relevant and what was not. I wondered about setting a time limit for the retention of the information, but decided to wait to see how it worked out. I basically wanted to be an efficient learner, like the people with eidetic memories who I envied.
As with all the other visual metaphors—images—I had constructed, I should give this one a name. I discarded a half dozen awkward names, then reminded myself that I was the only one who, hopefully, would ever employ them so I needn’t worry if they sounded grown up enough. So I dubbed this one “Brain Sponge”, which was a pretty concise description of what I hoped it would do for me. Then, without actually linkcasting it to myself, I created the image that contained all the properties and behaviors I wanted it to have, and filed it away.
I returned to the dorm and dug out my chemistry book—I had to start somewhere—and went to the library. On the second floor, I found an empty carrel, one with a door, best suited for my first experiment. I closed the door, flipping up the ’In Use’ sign and got comfortable. I had brought my notebook and scratch paper, but wasn’t sure if I’d need them. I wanted to study while in the induced state, and test myself later on my retention.
I had planned on creating flash cards, but for the first pass I’d try this and perhaps have Larry or someone else skip through the book and ask me things at random. I can always refine this if it doesn’t work right.
Okay, it’s now or never. With the book open to the first chapter, I focused on myself as the target and linkcast Brain Sponge, careful to specify a time limit.
Some part of me was aware of my surroundings, I’m sure, but I was so wrapped up in the text that I couldn’t remember where I was. I was unaware of time passing, of the quiet sounds of the library ventilation, of the footsteps in the hall outside the door. When I finally looked up, I started, surprised to find myself where I was. It took me a moment to remember why I was here. I looked down, and found the book open to a page better than halfway through.
I sat up in my chair and felt a sharp twinge in my back and my neck. I was really sore. I had to get up and stretch. I realized that I likely had been holding myself in the same position for—I stopped and looked at my watch—almost two and a quarter hours! No wonder I ached. But, I noted, it was just a little beyond the time limit I’d specified.
I was suddenly aware that I was hungry. It was well past lunch time, so no wonder. But curiosity seized me, and I sat down and opened the book at random to the second chapter. I glanced down at the page and as soon as I saw it I could recite the chemical equation used in the example. I skipped forward a few pages. In a box used to set off important items, like chemical laws, I saw the name of the law and even before I read any further found myself reciting it, word for word.
This particular law I had, of course, encountered before, and in fact we had been quizzed on it in an earlier exam. While I understood it, I had always paraphrased it. Now I found I was using the exact description found in the text. I skipped forward a little further. A paragraph talked about the Third Law of Thermodynamics. As soon as I read it I knew about its formulation by the German chemist Walther Nernst, discussed on a later page. I even knew that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1920 for the work leading up to it.
Okay, this was working out pretty good so far, but I thought the book might be a kind of visual trigger and it would be better to test myself without that kind of prompting. Maybe I’ll ask Larry for help later, but right now food was calling me.
I grabbed my materials and hustled off to the dining hall, where the spaghetti and meatballs called my name. It turned out to be a disappointment, overcooked to the point of mushiness and drowned in plain tomato sauce with some oregano sprinkled on top to make it “authentic”. I made a mental note never to do that again. I tried to make up for it with a slice of apple pie, but it didn’t go well with the aftertaste of the oregano.
I went back to the library and found “my” carrel in use, so chose a different one. This time, before I started, I made some modifications to Brain Sponge. I added a suggestion to switch positions every five minutes, and to stretch occasionally. I set the time limit to three hours this time, then linkcast it to myself.
This time, I was somewhat prepared for how it would overtake me. I sat at the desk, the book open to where I’d left off, and was suddenly struck with the feeling that this book was the most important thing I’d ever seen, that I could not ignore it, that I needed to focus on it and absorb it. I felt my awareness of my surroundings fade away as I began reviewing the book.
When my focus again expanded to be aware of my surroundings I felt like something had changed. It took me a few moments to isolate it. The book was open to the closing paragraph of the text. Next page was the index. I sat up and glanced at my watch. It was pushing toward 5:00. I’d been locked into this tome for close to three hours.
I pushed myself back in the chair and felt some stiffness, mostly in my butt, but my neck and shoulders seemed fine. I must have been stretching periodically during my trance. I confess to being a bit stunned. This was an entire book I had just gone through. In the past when I had crammed for finals, it took much longer to get through it. Of course, a lot of that time was occupied with making notes to myself of “important” ideas I thought would be on the exam, so I could study them later.
I hadn’t done that here. Had I retained the information as I wanted? I picked some random spots in the text and focused on the concept the author was trying to get across. I forced myself to try to recreate his exposition of the idea in my head, then scanned the following paragraphs to check myself. I did it several more times at different places in the book and, it seemed to me, I was managing to keep the thread and follow it through.
I felt a headache coming on, but I almost didn’t care. I was elated. Sure, the results were preliminary but very encouraging. I’ll have someone quiz me later, but it looked like it had worked.
I had refreshed my memory on everything that had been discussed in class and it seemed like I had been able to retain it. In fact, there was a chapter at the end that we hadn’t even covered yet in class, and I felt like I understood it.
I closed the book and gathered my materials. I was going to have to find some aspirin, as my head was throbbing. Was this the onset of a spring cold, or an artifact of my intense study session? I hadn’t felt this pounding after the earlier session. Might it be cumulative? Could it be that the second session was too long? I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it later. I need to find some aspirin right now.
I went back to the dorm and dug the aspirin bottle out of my sock drawer. I took them to the bathroom and washed them down with water from the sink in my cupped hands. I went back, lay down on my bed, and closed my eyes.