Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  We are by no means close to understanding the mind in its entirety. In fact, none of what we call our “higher” functions—memories, decision-making, creativity, consciousness—are close to having a satisfying explanation. For instance, we can spark a hallucination in anyone using a simple ping-pong ball (I’ll show you how later), yet we have few ways to treat the hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia.

  What is clear is that the strange brain provides a unique window into the mysteries of the so-called normal one. It reveals some of the extraordinary talents locked up inside us all, waiting to be unleashed. It shows us that our perceptions of the world aren’t always the same. It even forces us to question whether our own brain is as normal as it would have us believe.

  AFTER COMPLETING MY DEGREE in neuroscience, I decided to become a science journalist. I figured it was the best way to discover new and mysterious ways in which the brain works while simultaneously feeding my passion for learning about people’s lives and telling a good story. I studied for a master’s in science communication at Imperial College London and then worked my way up to becoming a news editor at New Scientist magazine.

  Now, as a freelance journalist, I work for a variety of media outlets, including the BBC and the Guardian. But despite writing about all sorts of health matters, I always find myself being drawn back toward the strange brain. I attend neurological conferences, devour scientific papers and collect stacks of quirky medical journals for the merest hint of a study that describes someone with an unusual mind. Nothing else fascinates me half as much.

  It’s not an easy job. Gone are the case studies of old—the rich tales presented by the case-historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who would describe their patients’ lives in full and glorious color. Today’s case studies are objective, cold and impersonal. Patients are known only by their initials, their defining characteristics are lost, their lives go unmentioned. The subject of neurology—the owner of the brain in question—has largely become inconsequential to the science that surrounds them.

  But one evening, late in the office, I came across a paper unlike any other. It described a condition, first discovered in 1878, deep in the forests of Maine. There was a mysterious behavior afflicting a small group of lumberjacks, and the American neurologist George Miller Beard had been asked to investigate. What he found seemed implausible. Among this group were a few men whom Beard later called “the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine.” Startle a jumper with a short, verbal command and he will obey it and repeat the command, immediately, no matter the consequence. Tell him to throw a knife and he will throw it. Tell him to dance, and he will dance.

  What stood out as much as the description of the disorder itself was the picture on the second page. It was of a woman who had the condition. There she was, leg in the air, mid-startle. It was taken in her own home. It was the first time I had seen a photograph of a case study published in a scientific paper in years.

  Beard had spent weeks in those woods, and in the hotels where the jumpers worked in the off-season. He had spoken to their friends and families. He had written about their hobbies, their relationships. He had tried to find out about their brains by learning about their lives. He told a fascinating story.

  Staring at the picture, I wondered what would happen if I did the same thing today. Could I follow in Beard’s footsteps and find out about the most unusual aspects of the human brain by going out and meeting the people who live with them?

  I was reminded of something Oliver Sacks once said: To truly understand someone, to get any hint of one’s depth, you need to lay aside the urge to test and get to know your subject openly, quietly, as they live and think and pursue their own life. There, he said, is where you will find something exceedingly mysterious at work.

  I glanced at the pile of papers stacked in front of me—a ten-year collection of the strangest brain conditions known to science, most of them described only by their initials, their age and their sex. I carefully lifted the pile from the desk and spread the pieces out on the floor around me. I sat there reading for hours. All over the world strange things were happening to normal people—what kind of lives did they lead? I wondered. And would they let me tell their stories?

  OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS, I traveled around the world to meet people with the most extraordinary brains. They have all been tested, scanned and analyzed by multiple doctors and researchers, but they have rarely—if ever—publicly divulged information about their lives. Sacks, of course, did something similar on a number of occasions, most notably in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In this book he calls his case studies “travellers to unimaginable lands.”6 Without their stories, he says, we would never know that such perceptions of the world were possible.

  I felt it might be the right time to revisit this idea, to see what a thirty-year neurological revolution had revealed. What new lands might have appeared? I also wanted to do something Sacks hadn’t. I wanted to divorce these case studies completely from the hospital environment and from the eyes of a neurologist. I wanted to see them as a friend might, play a part in their world. I wanted to ask the questions that scientists avoid. I wanted to hear stories of their childhood, how they find love, how they navigate the world when their mind works like no other. I wanted to understand how their life differs from my own. I wanted to know just how extraordinary the brain could get.

  I started my journey in America, where I met a TV producer who never forgets a day of his life, and a woman who is permanently lost—even in her own home. In the UK, I spent time with a teacher whose memories don’t feel like her own, and the family of an ex-con whose personality changed overnight. I flew across Europe and the Middle East to meet with a man who turns into a tiger, a woman who lives with a permanent hallucination, and a young journalist who sees colors that don’t exist in real life. And then there was Graham, a man who, for three years, believed he was dead.

  I met with people who had embraced their strange brain for years, and others who had kept it secret from the world until now. Along the way, I came across researchers on the fringes of science, people trying to answer questions about the nature of reality, about the existence of auras, about the limits of human memory. And toward the end of my travels I met a man, a doctor no less, whose brain was so extraordinary it changed the way I felt about what it means to be human.

  At the beginning of my journey I wondered whether I would be able to understand their unique encounters with the world. What I discovered was that, by putting their lives side by side, I was able to create a picture of how the brain functions in us all. Through their stories I uncovered the mysterious manner in which the brain can shape our lives in unexpected—and, in some cases, brilliant and alarming—ways. But they also showed me how to forge memories that never disappear, how to avoid getting lost, and what it feels like to die. They taught me how to make myself happier in a split second, how to hallucinate, how to make better decisions. I learned how to grow an alien limb, how to see more of my reality, even how to confirm that I am alive.

  I can’t say exactly when it happened. Maybe it was the time I started seeing people who didn’t exist, or the moment I discovered the way to hear the sound of my own eyeballs moving. But somewhere between a blizzard in Boston and a dusty camel racetrack in Abu Dhabi, I came to the realization that I wasn’t just learning about the most extraordinary brains in the world, but was uncovering the secrets of my own.

  Some of my tales begin very recently, others centuries ago. And so it is that we start this journey not in the twenty-first century but back in ancient Greece, at a banquet, moments before a terrible catastrophe is about to occur.

  Bob

  Never Forgetting a Moment

  In 500 BC, the poet Simonides of Ceos was sitting in a large banquet hall. Rather than enjoying the meal, he was angry with his host—Scopas, a rich nobleman. Simonides had been promised a fine sum of money to compose a poem in his host’s honor, which he had recited to the
guests. But Scopas had refused to pay him the full fee. He told Simonides that the poem spent too long referring to the mythical twins Castor and Pollux and not enough time on his recent victories.

  Midway through his main course, Simonides received word that two young men were waiting outside for him. He left the building just in time; as he stepped through the door, the roof of the banquet hall came crashing down, killing everyone inside. The two young men were nowhere to be seen, prompting later rumors that they were in fact Castor and Pollux, who had saved Simonides’s life as a reward for his belief in them.

  As the dust settled and the rubble was removed, it became clear that the people inside the hall were crushed beyond all recognition, so disfigured that none could be identified. As friends and relatives searched through the remains, Simonides surveyed the destruction. He closed his eyes and thought back to where he had been sitting. He pictured the guests eating around him, Scopas at the head of the table. Suddenly, he realized he could identify the bodies by remembering the exact location in which everyone had been seated. In that moment, Simonides began to unlock the secrets of memory.

  IT’S CROWDED, HOT AND NOISY at Heathrow Airport, where I’m sitting waiting to board my delayed twelve-hour flight. To pass the time, I’ve taken to watching two children play a game on the floor in front of me. One by one they turn over cards to reveal brightly colored animals. When they reveal two of the same kind they get to keep both cards. It seems appropriate, I think, as I mentally play along.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision, working out who to visit first. When looking back over all the extraordinary people I’d come across in my career as a science journalist, the one who immediately came to mind was Bob—a man whom medical papers describe as being able to remember every single day of his life.

  I thought about Bob a lot.

  I’d thought about Bob as I stared at the strange pile of food on the kitchen counter earlier that month. It was Sunday afternoon and I had sent my husband, Alex, out on an errand. I asked him to get some oranges, pasta and a bulb of garlic. Twenty minutes later he returned with three bananas, an onion and some dog food. I thought, not for the first time, what a strange thing memory was.

  I’d thought about Bob when a week earlier, having arrived at work, I was suddenly convinced that I had left my kettle bubbling away on the gas stove. Over and over again I replayed the events of the morning, but just couldn’t remember if I had turned the gas off. I imagined the steam pouring out of the kettle’s spout. I saw the water boiling and evaporating until the flame started burning its dry base. By the time I returned home, I was convinced that I would see a smoldering pile of ash where my house once stood. Despite the relative calm at the front of the building, I rushed inside and into the kitchen, where the kettle rested quietly on the unlit stove.

  I thought about Bob as I sat there watching the children turn the cards over and over.

  I find it odd that something so fundamental to our daily lives so often fails us. Why is it that I can remember the first time I built a snowman, my seventh birthday cake, or the phone number of a friend I haven’t seen for twenty years, while other memories, far more vital to my present well-being, float away as if they had never happened? How many hours of my life have I spent trying to remember things that I had forgotten? Where I put my keys, whether I’d fed the dog, when the trash went out, why I came downstairs. Sure, there were bits of my life that I’d happily forget forever, but there was so much more that I wished I could remember. It seemed like the obvious place to start my journey—to meet Bob and find out what it is like to have the perfect memory.

  HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT about what a memory actually is? Scientists have been searching for the answer to that question for centuries. In the 1950s, a piece of the puzzle arrived in the shape of Henry Molaison.

  A handsome young child with dark sweeping hair and a strong jawline, Molaison had a promising life in front of him. But he noticed the cyclist speeding along the road just a second too late. It was never clear whether or not his seizures were caused by the accident, but by the time he reached twenty-seven they had become so bad that he was unable to work. In 1953, Molaison agreed to an experimental technique that had never been trialed before. In an attempt to cure his seizures, doctors drilled holes into his brain and sucked out the areas responsible for them—a seahorse-shaped region on either side of the brain called the hippocampus. The operation was a success in that it largely cured his seizures, but it had one disastrous side effect: Molaison could no longer form any conscious, long-term memories. Despite retaining a great deal of information that had occurred before the operation, he forgot any experience after the surgery within thirty seconds.

  A young postgraduate researcher called Suzanne Corkin met with Molaison, and began to study him. In a book she later wrote about their friendship, she called him a willing student.1 She said that in living in a world bound by only thirty seconds he was not stressed by the anxiety that stems from worries about the past or plans for the future. And as weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.

  It started when Corkin, and her former supervisor, Brenda Milner, at McGill University, showed Molaison a sketch of a five-pointed star.2 They then asked him to trace its outline with a pencil but only by looking at his drawing hand and the star as reflected in a mirror. Try it for yourself: it’s not an easy task. Over time, Molaison became better at this skill, and others like it, despite having had no recollection of having performed them before. It proved he could retain long-term memories for motor movements. His unique brain provided the first fundamental evidence that specific types of memory are processed in different places, and indicated where those memories might be stored. Corkin continued to meet with Molaison regularly over the next forty-six years, although for Molaison each day they spoke was like the first. “It’s a funny thing,” he told her. “You just live and learn. I’m living and you’re learning.”3

  MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY after Molaison’s surgery, scientists are still debating the exact nature of memory. Most agree that there are three kinds—sensory, short-term and long-term. Sensory memory is the very first kind of memory that enters your brain; it lasts for just a split second—just enough time for you to sense your environment. The touch of your clothes against your skin, the smell of a bonfire in the air, the sound of the traffic outside. But unless we attend to that memory, it disappears for good. Ten seconds ago you didn’t notice your socks against your feet. It shot into your brain and right back out again. Now you can’t stop thinking about your socks, and that’s because I mentioned them, nudging that sensory memory into your short-term memory.

  Short-term memory is your memory of current events—the things that you are thinking about right now. You use it all the time without realizing. For instance, you can only understand what happens at the end of this sentence because you remember what happened at the beginning. Our short-term memory is said to have a finite capacity of about seven items, which can be held in mind for fifteen to thirty seconds. Rehearse those items, however, and you could transfer them into your long-term memory—our seemingly limitless warehouse for storing recollections for the long haul.

  This is arguably our most important type of memory. It is this that allows us to time-travel mentally to the past, and also to predict our future. It is no exaggeration to declare that memory allows us to make sense of the world. In his autobiography, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel sums it up neatly: “Life without memory is no life at all . . . our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”4

  * * *

  Solomon Shereshevsky’s editor was incredibly annoyed. He had just come out of a news meeting in which he had given Shereshevsky a large list of instructions—people he needed to interview, information about a breaking story, addresses of places he had to visit. As usual, Shereshevsky didn’t take a single note. The editor was going to have to say something. He called him into his office, sat him down and
told him off for being inattentive. Shereshevsky was unapologetic. He hadn’t needed to take any notes, he said, and proceeded to repeat back his editor’s complicated instructions word for word.

  Shocked, Shereshevsky’s editor persuaded him to pay a visit to Alexander Luria, a Russian psychologist. Luria discovered that the secret to Shereshevsky’s perfect recall was a condition known as synesthesia. This is when a person experiences the joining of senses that are normally experienced apart. They might, for instance, taste lemon when they hear the sound of a bell, or see red when they think of a number. We will encounter this condition several times in this book. Shereshevsky’s linked senses meant that if asked to memorize a word, he would also taste and hear that word simultaneously. This meant that when recalling the word at a later date, he had several triggers to remind him of it. Shereshevsky’s imagination was so vivid that in one experiment, he was able to raise the temperature of one hand while lowering the temperature of the other, merely by imagining one on a stove and one on a block of ice.

  Luria began to test Shereshevsky in the 1920s, and continued to do so for thirty years. According to his notes, he eventually gave up trying to find the limits of his incredible memory.5

  While there are very few accounts of people with such natural talents of recall, there are many about those who have learned to perform extraordinary feats of memory. Take George Koltanowski, for instance, who took up chess at the age of fourteen, and three years later was Belgian champion. He was also able to play blindfolded by memorizing his opponents’ moves after being told them by a referee. In 1937, he set a world record by playing thirty-four simultaneous games of chess blindfolded. His opponents were sighted, yet he won twenty-four games and drew ten. His record remains unbeaten today.