Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  Before I met Joel in person, it was hard not to feel as though I was missing out on some grand superpower. How often do we complain that someone is hard to read, or that we wish we knew what someone was feeling? But when it comes down to it, would we really want to know? It must be exhausting, rebounding from emotion to emotion throughout the day.

  “Yeah, it can be,” he says. “The more I lose my reserves, the harder it becomes for me to manage other people’s emotions. But it can be such a lovely thing to have. If I’m feeling upset, I can reflect on it and ask myself, ‘Is this feeling of irritation springing forth from me or is it me reflecting the experience of someone else?’ And if the latter, I’m able to remove myself from that emotion, rationalize it, extinguish it and then address what is causing the irritation in the other person.”

  It’s like learning how to surf, he says. “You’ve got this whole emotional ecosystem going on below you that’s constantly moving but if you can understand its movements, and embrace it, you can move along with it and enjoy yourself. If there’s a big wave—whether it’s negative or positive—you can enjoy that wave.”

  “Do you ever just hang around with someone because you can see they’re happy and want a bit of that emotion?” I ask.

  He laughs. “Yeah, for sure! I deliberately smile at people so they smile back at me so I can get a hit from them.”

  “A hit? Like a boost that makes you feel better than you could alone?”

  “Yeah, exactly. I love watching people hug. It’s very warm and very comforting. And I tend to be very affectionate and congenial, and a lot of that comes from the fact that I genuinely want people to feel good, but you know, also it’s nice when they don’t have negative emotions because I don’t have them either. When they’re positive I get some of that as well. That sounds both really selfless and selfish—I guess I’m actually just a selflessly selfish guy!”

  Toward the end of our meal Joel points to the painting above my head. It is full of meaningless black and brown and white swirls but he says it looks completely different to him because the swirls resemble letters and numbers, which pop with color. I ask what else he was experiencing from around the room. I am expecting him to talk about the people sitting next to us, but instead he immediately points out that he can feel a hand on the back of his neck—it’s my hand, brushing away my hair. I smile and quickly place my hand in my lap. He says he can feel the bite of where I’d just bitten my lip. “And now I can feel the touch on the side of my face where you just touched your cheek, and now the slight tensing of the corner of your mouth and now the squinting of your eyes and the—”

  “Stop!”

  I am suddenly hyper-aware of every single movement that two seconds before I hadn’t even known I was making. In that moment, I catch a glimpse of how much of an assault on the senses Joel’s life really is.

  “And that’s why I tend not to talk about it with a lot of people,” he says quietly. “It makes them feel really awkward.”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of difficult to concentrate when I know you’re feeling everything that I’m feeling.”

  There is a brief moment of silence.

  “How close do you think your emotions match other people’s?” I ask.

  “Sometimes I feel like it’s pretty accurate, which is when it sort of feels like there’s some kind of mystical quality to it.” He laughs. “The scientist in me is throwing a fit at that phrase. But most of the time it’s an imperfect perception of what you’re feeling—I can’t take a sci-fi quantum leap into your body. It’s almost an insult to you, for me to ever assume that I could feel your pain and your emotions exactly as if they were my own. For me to say I know exactly what you’re feeling is kind of rude, and . . . violating.”

  It crosses my mind that he could be playing down his abilities to make me feel more comfortable. Perhaps he doesn’t want to reveal just how closely matched our feelings are. I sit quietly and bite my lip. I immediately wish I hadn’t. Then immediately wish I hadn’t thought about not biting my lip because it’s made me frown. And then I brush my hair aside again. I am conscious of everything I am doing. Suddenly I feel a yawn coming on. I came to Boston from London via a week working in Texas and Phoenix, and after all the time changes and the traveling, I am jet-lagged and exhausted. But as I muffle the yawn I realize there is probably no point—if Joel is feeling what I am feeling, perhaps he already knows I am tired, perhaps he knows I am trying to stifle a yawn, perhaps he thinks I am bored. How should I make it clear with my facial expressions that I am genuinely fascinated by our conversation, just tired from traveling? How does my face normally look when I’m fascinated? I am lost down a rabbit hole of self-analysis and I have completely missed what Joel has just said.

  And it is no use trying to act like I haven’t.

  * * *

  Over a shared dessert of cheese and crackers, Joel and I discuss something Ramachandran told me many years ago about how humbling it was to learn that the only thing that separates two people is a layer of skin.

  “Mirror neurons make us all alike,” Ramachandran had said. “They’re acting in the same way whether you or I make the action. If you remove my skin, I dissolve into you.”

  While Joel may feel this in the extreme, like many of the extraordinary people I have met while writing this book, it is not a characteristic unique to his brain, but an extreme example of an ability we all possess.

  Joel agrees. “There’s this constant hum of other people’s experiences that is going on all the time,” he says. “I might feel them more strongly than other people, but it’s something that affects us all.”

  It’s a delightful concept and one that we would do well to remember. That our brain does not exist in isolation. We discovered that it relies on our bodies earlier in this book, but its reach stretches farther still. It extends beyond the boundaries of our skull and enters the bodies of those around us. In that way, we are all connected with one another. When we smile at someone, we leave a tiny imprint on that person’s brain. Somewhere, deep within their motor cortex, their brain is smiling back.

  Conclusion

  Nothing Is Unthinkable

  First thing in the morning in the midst of spring, the south coast of Norway is awash with the heavenly scent of sea salt and pine. The main highway weaves in and out of the jagged fjords, which are lined with green and orange trees, giving you the occasional glimpse of the ice-blue sea between.

  Four hours’ drive from the sprawling metropolis of Oslo city center, down toward the southernmost tip of the country, is a small but beautiful coastal city called Arendal. Looking out on lots of tiny islands and considered to have the world’s most beautiful sea approach, the city itself is packed with wonky wooden houses, cobbled streets and colorful bars.

  But I hadn’t traveled seven hundred miles for sightseeing. I was there to visit a small office-supply company called Østereng & Benestad.

  * * *

  A month earlier, I had been packing up my notes, filing them away in boxes to put in the loft, when out fell the crinkled old Jumping Frenchman paper that had been the source of inspiration for this book.1 I sat crossed-legged on the floor of my study and reminded myself of the story.

  It was 1878, and George Miller Beard had traveled to Moosehead Lake in northern Maine. He had heard about a strange disorder afflicting some of the men who worked in the area. The locals cheerfully referred to them as the Jumping Frenchmen. They were of French-Canadian descent, and spent the winter working as lumberjacks, completely isolated from civilization. It must have been summer when Beard first visited, because he came across his first two Jumpers working in his hotel.

  One of them agreed to let Beard perform some experiments on him. Seated in a chair, the young man began cutting his tobacco with a knife. Beard struck him sharply on the shoulder and told him to “Throw it.” As quick as a pistol, the man jumped and threw the knife, so hard that it stuck in the beam opposite. Later, Beard shouted at him to “Strike” while sta
nding near another employee. Immediately and without hesitation, he struck his colleague on the cheek. When mildly kicked on the shin or tapped suddenly on the shoulder he would leap and cry out. He knew he was being studied, yet could not help but explode at even minor knocks and taps.

  Beard observed another Jumper of just sixteen. The crowd in the hotel, partly for Beard’s benefit, teased the teenager so much so that he was constantly on edge. His caution was fully justified. When he was standing close to another Jumper, a stranger yelled, “Strike!” They jumped and struck out simultaneously, hitting each other in the face. These were not, said Beard, “mild or polite little prods,” but “severe and painful blows.”

  During his time at the lake, Beard met many other Jumpers. Among them was a waiter who would let go of whatever was in his hands whenever anyone shouted, “Drop it!” On one occasion, this resulted in him dropping a plate of baked beans onto the head of a hotel guest.2

  SO WHAT WAS BEARD’S CONCLUSION? The men, he said, were in their prime. They were strong and extraordinarily healthy from all their physical labor. It did not strike him as a disease; instead he felt that the disorder was some kind of learned affliction resulting from the constant reinforcement of a naturally high startle response.

  We all startle—it’s a defensive reaction to sudden noises and movements and can sometimes save our life. It’s part of our fight or flight response, a reflex that happens automatically without conscious control. It increases our heart rate, directs out attention toward potential danger and shoots out hormones that fuel our subsequent actions. It varies considerably between people. My husband, for instance, jumps at things on the television that aren’t remotely startling to me. People with post–traumatic stress disorder can have an overactive startle response, due to associating powerful emotional memories with sudden noises. This puts their brain on high alert, lowering the threshold for a future reaction. It can also be modified by your surroundings: if someone jumps out at you in a friendly game of hide-and-seek, say, you’ll startle less than if a stranger jumps out at you in the middle of a dark alley. Beard’s Jumping Frenchmen seemed to have been picked out for their naturally high startle response, which was then exaggerated by their friends’ and colleagues’ constant provocation. This was aided by the fact that their reaction was one of the main forms of entertainment in the isolated woods. The attention they got from jumping was almost always positive: people would laugh, a reaction that reinforces our behavior in any context.

  * * *

  Sitting in my study, I wondered again what had happened to these men and whether the condition still existed. To find out more, I set up an interview with Marie-Hélène Saint-Hilaire, associate professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. I explained how their story had encouraged me to write this book. I told her that I thought she might have been the last person to meet a Jumper.3

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it,” she said, “how people seem to be really taken by this condition. I think it’s all in the name.”

  Back in the 1980s, Saint-Hilaire was a medical student in Montreal. One day, her neurology professor asked whether she had ever met a Jumping Frenchman, since she had been brought up in Quebec, an area close to Maine.

  “I’d never met anyone like he described,” she said. “But since I was about to do some rotation work, which had to be in a different location, I decided to go back to my hometown and ask my grandfather if he knew anyone that jumped.”

  Her grandfather told her, “Sure, the guy down the street is a Jumper. It’s great fun to make him jump—we’d do it all the time when we were little.”

  Saint-Hilaire and her father, a neurologist, decided to go and speak to the Jumper and film their interaction. “We asked him about other Jumping Frenchmen,” said Saint-Hilaire. “He told us about two other guys, as well as his sisters.”

  All of the Jumpers were either lumberjacks themselves or related to a lumberjack. The men told Saint-Hilaire that they would spend the summer working on the farms and in hotels, and in the winter they’d head into the forest. There they would spend six months without leaving the camp. At the beginning of the season, it was traditional to find out who was a Jumper and to begin startling that person as much as they could.

  Saint-Hilaire filmed the men while her father asked about their medical history and performed a neurological exam. I got in touch with the journal that subsequently published a paper that Saint-Hilaire and her dad wrote about the Jumpers. They still had the video—now almost forty years old—in their archives and sent me a copy. It opens with an image of a seventy-seven-year-old ex-lumberjack sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair covered with a thick leopard-print blanket, surrounded by pictures of his wedding day. Saint-Hilaire’s father is off to the side, sitting on a stool, inquiring about his days in camp. Suddenly, he makes a noise and lunges toward the old lumberjack, prodding his leg and torso. “Whooaa!” shouts the old man, his legs flying into the air and his arms waving from side to side above his head. Both men laugh and there is giggling in the background from behind the camera.

  “My father made them jump while I filmed it,” said Saint-Hilaire. “It was very interesting. They described this elaborate reaction that occurred when they were young, but it had become muted with age. We assume because they were no longer startled very often. They’re older, away from the environment that started it, so the reactions were still exaggerated but not as marked as they once were.”

  They no longer repeated commands or carried out automatic actions that were demanded of them, although most still had a defensive reaction.

  “My father once screamed at this one older lady to ‘Dance!’ and she didn’t dance, but she did try to punch him.”

  “Are any of the Jumpers you spoke to still alive?” I asked.

  “No, they’ve all passed away now,” she said. “I think the condition ended with them. Soon after that time, life in the camps changed. There was more machinery, more technology—they were no longer as isolated or in need of that kind of entertainment.”

  And so there the story finished. I packed up my papers and taped shut the lid of the last box, thinking my journey had finally come to an end.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  I STARED AT THE SCREEN and watched the clip for the third time that morning. It was a YouTube video sent to me by a friend.

  “Isn’t this like that Jumping Frenchman disorder you talk about?” she’d said.

  The video was entitled “The most easily scared guy in the world?”4 It consisted of a short excerpt from a Norwegian TV broadcast revealing the antics of Basse Andersen and his colleagues at paper company Østereng & Benestad.

  Basse was a gray-haired, middle-aged man with a strong Scandinavian jaw, black-rimmed glasses and a wide smile. In the video (which currently has more than three million views) Basse’s colleagues ask him to collect a box from the warehouse. Little does he know that the box is in fact covering the head of a person hidden inside a larger box beneath. As Basse lifts the top box, he discovers the head and screams, runs backward and falls over. The interviewer talks to Basse’s colleagues, who say he likes being the center of attention, that he finds it funny. As the interviewer asks Basse the same question, a soft toy lands on his desk. Basse jumps so high that for a split second he is completely aloft in the air before falling onto the floor. Other videos show Basse being teased by his colleagues—they throw balls of paper onto his desk, tap him on the back when he’s not looking, even attach party horns to his chair so that they go off when he sits down. Each and every time, he screams, jumps and sometimes throws a punch.

  There were certainly aspects of Basse’s character that fit the Jumping Frenchman condition. Here he was, a source of entertainment among his friends, who had identified him as a Jumper and who had begun to startle him frequently, their laughter seemingly reinforcing his behavior.

  I immediately got in touch with him. I explained that I thought he might be a modern-day Jumping Frenchman and wondered whether we
could meet for a coffee. Which is how I came to be in Arendal.

  When I arrive at Basse’s office, it is late in the working day and most people have gone home. We sit opposite each other in a small, floor-to-ceiling glass-walled office. Basse tells me how it all started.

  “It was that box prank that they videoed—once everyone saw how easily scared I was, they started doing it again and again. Now it happens all through the day.”

  He points to his desk. It is surrounded by high walls, near the front door. “I have to concentrate really hard while I’m working, so they can easily creep up behind me and make me jump. They do it all the time.”

  He recounts these tales with a huge smile on his face, and laughs out loud as he thinks back to the times he’s jumped the most.

  “The worst was in Amsterdam when I went to one of those dungeon experiences, where they take you around and scare you. I jumped so much that I threw up and had to be carried out.”

  He laughs again and shakes his head. “It’s hard when it happens, it makes me shaky, but I also see the humor in it. Most of the time I just think to myself, ‘What an idiot you are!’”

  I wonder whether any of his family have the same overactive startle response. “No,” he says. “I have one brother and two sisters and they’re not like this at all.”

  “Do you think it got worse once the guys at work cottoned on?” I ask.

  “Absolutely,” says Basse. “It’s definitely become worse. Now I’m forever on high alert—waiting for the next time they’re going to do it. I understand why they do it: it’s funny. I normally don’t mind, but sometimes when I’m really busy I ask them to be kind to me.” He pauses. “Actually, I don’t even need other people around to make me jump anymore.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I often make myself jump.” He points to his collar. “Sometimes, just catching a glance of my own collar out of the corner of my eye will make me scream and jump.”