The Memory Artists

by Jeffrey Moore

  Dr. Vorta was undeniably a brilliant neuroscientist; he was not, as Norval Blaquière contended, a jealous mentor trying to undercut a brighter protégé. Nor was he a “quack.” With the exception of A-1001, all his discoveries were verifiably his own. All his awards, save those for A-1001, were earned. Over the course of his career, however, Dr. Vorta made several enemies—his wife among them—who were determined to discredit him. The last decade of his life was spent trying to ward off a series of accusations, including medical malpractice, criminal negligence and insider trading.

  In the early 1990s, for example, Dr. Vorta developed a promising drug for treating early-onset Alzheimer’s, but Food and Drug Canada (FDC) withheld approval from the company he was working with (Memoria Drugs) because of shortcomings in its clinical trials. It later emerged that he sold his shares in this firm just before the FDC’s decision was published. Dr. Vorta was subpoenaed for insider trading but not charged.

  In the mid-1990s, charges that Vorta put pressure on the Chief Scientist at the FDC to greenlight or fast-track drug approval were dropped for lack of evidence.

  In the late 1990s, Dr. Vorta was accused in the press of receiving kickbacks from corporations sponsoring psychomnemonic research, as well as excessive fees to refer patients to clinical trials; a money trail allegedly led back to two European drug companies, an instant-coffee manufacturer and an investment firm, Helvetia Capital Management.

  In 2002, following allegations from an anonymous “whistleblower” that Dr. Vorta’s students wrote many of his articles, the Experimental Psychology Department of the University of Quebec conducted “a full investigation.” The unanimous conclusion, announced on November 4, 2002: “total exoneration.”

  In 2003, a number of scientists, including Dr. Hyalmar Tjarnqvist of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, challenged some of Dr. Vorta’s discoveries, in particular his claim to have placed an artificial memory in Noel Burun’s hippocampus. Yolande Foisy, the Administrative Director of the Experimental Psychology Department and wife of Quebec’s former Health Minister, oversaw two investigations. The unanimous conclusion from the ad hoc panel: “complete endorsement and corroboration” of Dr. Vorta’s discoveries. His lab displayed “scientific rigour and exemplary laboratory practices” and “allegations to the contrary are unfounded.”

  In December of that same year, after Dr. Vorta received his lifetime achievement award in Oslo, a University of Quebec colleague, Dr. Charles Ravenscroft, accused him of administering a substance (“Vortagon”) that induced Alzheimer’s disease in at least two patients: Stella Burun and Norval Blaquière. No proof of this accusation has yet been found.

  That same month, with regard to the so-called “date-rape video” shot at the Experimental Psychology Laboratory, Dr. Vorta was charged with administering a noxious substance to commit an indictable offence. But not with rape or sexual assault, as there was no evidence to support either charge. At a disciplinary hearing of the Collège des médecins du Québec, Dr. Vorta denied any involvement, but could not explain away the DNA evidence linking him to the crime. At a pre-trial criminal hearing, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was committed to the Philippe Pinel Institute in February of 2004.

  A subsequent investigation by the Association des neurologues du Québec absolved him. Norval Blaquière, who had shot the video with a hidden camera for his “private investigation” of Dr. Vorta, demonstrated that the two individuals in lab coats, one wearing Vorta’s coat, were actually Drs. Charles Ravenscroft and Isabelle Rhéaume. Their voices, in a barely audible exchange involving the words “excess” and “palace of wisdom,” were identified by Noel Burun.

  A preliminary hearing revealed that the couple was attempting to avenge “past injustices”—including Dr. Ravenscroft’s dismissal—by planting false evidence. Before driving Samira Darwish to the police and then home, they evidently decided—impulsively, and at the husband’s instigation—to take her to Dr. Vorta’s lab to plant incriminating DNA evidence and microscopic fibres. As their attorney pointed out, however, the couple did not administer the date-rape drug (the offender has yet to be found), and they did rescue Samira from a potentially more serious crime. In a plea bargain, they each received 18 months of probation, a $5,000 fine and 150 hours of community service at two assisted-living facilities on the island of Montreal.

  Stella Burun, who was destined for one of these facilities, made a full recovery and has returned to the classroom, teaching history at a Montreal Cégep. She is currently dating a younger colleague in the department who has been in love with her for years: a widower with a ten-year-old daughter. The couple plan to get married in Aberdeen, Scotland in the summer of 2006.

  JJ Yelle’s retreat into boyhood ended when he met his ex-girlfriend at Montreal’s Greek Independence Day Parade. An ageing prostitute, she had just come out of detox—“as if waking up from a nightmare after hibernating in hell,” he remarked in an audio interview. They lived together for nine months but did not marry. After JJ helped her get back on her feet, financially and emotionally, she decided to go back to her biker boyfriend. Which did not unduly upset JJ, because he was then free to propose to Sancha Ribeiro, the Bath Lady. The couple now live on a hothouse farm in northern Vermont, where they are experimenting with a genetically modified hybrid of skunk cabbage and Oriental sassafras, a healthy replacement for tobacco. Projected income in 2006, including patent earnings and seed money from R.J. Reynolds: $6.2 million. JJ is currently negotiating to purchase Mount Royal Cemetery.

  Norval Blaquière never got to Z, never got beyond S. Nor did he get beyond the first round of Tip of Your Tongue. After completing his twenty-six Sunday school classes at the university chapel, and releasing his “exposé” on Dr. Vorta, Norval was hospitalised in early 2004 for short-term memory loss and brain-tumour-like symptoms, thought to be the result of ingesting experimental psychotropic drugs over an extended period—among them methaqualone (which produces excessive dreaming and amnesia), chloral hydrate and Vortagon, an applicationless drug suspected of triggering Alzheimer’s disease. Norval’s memory lapses were first noted by Noel Burun in a journal entry from October 24, 2003:

  “What the Christ are you talking about?” said Norval. And I could see by the look in his eye—I’d seen the same in my mother’s—that he really couldn’t remember. “What alphabet?”

  After checking himself out of the Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu in the spring of 2004, Norval journeyed to Hucknall in Nottinghamshire, where he stayed briefly at Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B. On a cloudless Saturday in mid-April, his body was found on the north shore of Byron’s lake at Newstead Abbey, where Teresa had drowned herself twelve years before.

  Since November 2005, when Amaranthine-1001 received FDA approval, Noel Burun has declined all interviews, public honours and scientific awards. He has also declined credit for the compound, attributing its discovery to a research team composed of Henry Burun (now deceased), Norval Blaquière (now deceased), Jean-Jacques Yelle and Samira Darwish. Patent and other monies are therefore to be split four ways, with the estate portions going to Norval’s mother and Henry Burun’s widow.

  With regard to Noel Burun’s synaesthesia, it was not eradicated by Dr. Vorta but rather reduced to a hyper-mild form, one that no longer warps his communications with strangers. His memory, accordingly, was reduced to a fraction of its former potency. Despite suffering acute— vein-openingly acute—despair over his looted inner world, he has come to accept this disease of ordinariness as a trade-off.

  While Noel Burun and Samira Darwish have jealously guarded their privacy, there are unconfirmed reports that the couple lived briefly on the southwest coast of Long Island, and in the fabled city of al-Hillah, where Samira did the groundwork for a community/arts centre. There are also unconfirmed reports that their baby girl is a synaesthete.

  Notes

  1 This entry from NB’s adult diary (05/05/91) first appeared in my Curiosités mnémoniques (Montréal: Memento Vivere, 1993, p. 27). Seem
ingly sunk without a trace, the book, thanks to discerning praise from several scientists, slowly grew to a recognition it has never forfeited. Reproduced below, from the book’s twelfth impression, is NB’s colour chart.

  2 Synaesthesia (following definitions by Fleurnoy 1895, Vernon 1930, Marks 1975, Cytowic 1989, Vorta 1990) is a condition in which one type of sensory stimulation evokes the sensation of another. In NB’s type, sound triggers the perception of vivid colour; like Vladimir Nabokov and many others, NB also perceives written letters in colours. In North America, female synaesthetes predominate in a ratio of 5:1 and left-handed synaesthetes (like NB) at 4:1. Synaesthesia is also reported by those who have used hallucinogenic drugs, such as lysergic acid diethylamide or mescaline, as we shall see.

  3 I have never used chimpanzees in my research.

  4 There is no evidence to suggest that Proust was a synaesthete, nor do I recall ever mentioning him (possibly a misread word in NB’s diary). Be that as it may, we can add two painters to the list, Kandinsky and Hockney, as well as French composer Olivier Messiaen and (perhaps) the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eistenstein and Japanese poet Basho¯ . No two synaesthetes, of course, see the same sound colours: to Rimsky-Korsakov the key of F# major appeared green, to Scriabin it appeared violet. (The score of the latter’s Prometheus incorporates multicoloured lights.) Rimbaud’s synaesthesia (“I invented the colours of the vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green— I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant,” he says in Une saison en enfer, “Délires II: Alchimie du Verbe”) was enhanced by hashish and absinthe. As for Baudelaire, he alludes to his synaesthesia in the poem Correspondances: “Like drawn-out echoes, which from a distance/Merge into a deep and shadowy unity/As vast as night, as vast as light,/Scents, colours and sounds harmonize.” And in Flowers of Evil he declares, immortally: “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.”

  5 Physicist Richard Feynman among them, who declared: “When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahke and Emde’s book, with light tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”

  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 109 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.