by Maya, Tara
Finally, Dr. Chopra sighed. He put down the mirror and picked up the pen out of nowhere – perhaps he had had it the whole time.
"For some patients with hemineglect, mirror work can enable them to perceive the left side, and gradually retrain their brains to do so regularly. In certain other cases, the damage has apparently been more comprehensive. This appears to be your case. There are still other tests I would like to perform, but perhaps you might begin to consider if you want to go the other route."
#
After another six frustrating months of having to take turns sitting on opposite sides of the breakfast table for fifteen minutes each in order to eat my whole plate, I was ready for the experimental cell growth stimulation procedure. It proceeded slowly, with the doctors, including Dr. Chopra, monitoring my progress carefully. All seemed to go quite well, knock on wood. According to Dr. Chopra, by the end of the series of treatments, I now had more active synapses in the part of the right hemisphere devoted to attention than I had ever had in my life. The doctors expected most of the additional neural connections to die back , leaving me with a normal number.
#
I laughed when I saw the pictures I had drawn for Dr. Chopra when I had been suffering from hemineglect: flowers with the petals all to one side, houses with windows and roof on only one side, one sided clocks and lopsided number lines! My drawings for Dr. Chopra were now quite normal. I also passed the wiggling finger test with flying colors.
As for the headaches, Dr. Chopra didn't like the sound of that, but he assured me it was probably nothing to worry about as long as they did not persist. He did urge me to mention if I noticed anything else amiss – or if any of my nearest and dearest noticed anything I missed.
I felt I was doing better, and my friends and family agreed. In fact, I appeared to finally have a run of good luck. I work in a tall building, with a four-elevator lobby. It's always a guessing game which elevator will arrive first, but I found that now my guesses were invariably correct. I found it easier to find parking spaces. I no longer lost my way on strange roads.
#
"Doctor, now I'm seeing things," I complained to Dr. Chopra.
"What kinds of things?"
"It's hard to explain. I see things before they happen. Not very far in advance, only a few seconds or a minute at most. Especially in mirrors. It's as though I catch a glimpse of something that isn't reflected from anywhere, just like when you gave me that pen test. But then it always arrives a second or two later, just as I saw it in the reflection."
"Well." Dr. Chopra considered this. "Would you like to try the mirror test again?"
"Yes."
He set it up, just as before, first placing a pen behind me while he held the mirror in front, then to each side of me. I had no trouble, on this occasion, reaching for the pen opposite each reflection.
Then something strange happened.
Quite clearly, I saw Dr. Chopra's assistant walking down the hall and open the door to his office. The angle was quite odd, as if it were only a reflection but I did not see it in the mirror.
"Your assistant is coming," I said to Dr. Chopra.
"What makes you think so?"
"I saw her reflection."
"Dr. Chopra, here is the Minsky file—" said the secretary, opening the door to his office and setting a file on the table.
"I knew it," I said. "I saw her."
"You must have heard her coming," Dr. Chopra said.
I might have believed him if this had been the first time it had happened.
#
Dr. Chopra and the other doctors on my case were quite disappointed with me because my perception problems worsened. I began to see "doubles" of people, as if they were both near and far from me at the same time. I couldn't tell if an object was on my right or on my left – sometimes it appeared to be both. I almost lost my license after I crashed my car into a semi. I hadn't been able to tell if the intersection had been in front of me or behind me, if the light had turned green yet or remained red. I became confused about the sequences of things, sometimes seeing things reflected before they happened, other times seeing events repeated after they happened.
Convinced that the procedure had been a failure and that my brain damage crippled me more than ever, I stopped going out much beyond my daily commute to and from work. I took the train rather than drive. I wondered how long I could continue to function to even this conscribed degree. There were times that the train appeared to be coming in two opposite directions at once.
By now my world had turned into a kaleidoscope. I saw doubles and triples and multiple reflections everywhere. Some showed the future, some the past, some a simultaneous instant but from a wholly odd angle. My overactive perception had turned the once rational universe into a funhouse mirror maze.
Brain scans revealed that the neural growth stimulated by the procedure had died back, just as the doctors had predicted. But for me, ironically, this pruning of neurons had been accompanied by an exaggeration of the quixotic flaws in my perception, not a reduction. In an attempt to cheer me up, Dr. Chopra joked that if before I had suffered hemineglect, I now suffered from hemihyperactivity. I chuckled only weakly because he also admitted he had no idea how to help me.
#
I avoided family and friends and spent most of my time holed up in the den, surfing the net. Consciously, I had given up on searching for medical answers to my condition, but unconsciously, I guess I still wanted a philosophical explanation for it.
I found the answer in the last place I expected--a university website on astrophysics.
Astrophysicists, it seems, are concerned about the possibility that our universe might be infinite. For a variety of reasons, some argue that it must be finite. The problem is that measurements of the rate of expansion since the Big Bang indicate that our universe is hyperbolic, or in other words, that spacetime is negatively curved.
The reconciliation between these two arcane pieces of evidence could be that our universe has a "nontrivial" topology. Instead of being a simple plane or sphere, in other words, our universe could possess a rather complex shape.
For instance, suppose our universe were a cube in which the right side of one cube corresponds to the left face. This would result in video game rules of movement: exiting the right side of the screen would cause you re-enter on the left side. If you stood directly in the center of the cube and looked either to the left or right, you would see an apparently infinite number of reflections of yourself, turning your head in synchrony with you. If you stood a little to one side of the cube, the light from the closer face might hit you faster than the light from the far face, allowing you to see into the "future" and see yourself turn your head in the reflection you appear to do so, while the light lagging from the far side would show a delayed reflection of your past. In fact, of course, all activities would be simultaneous, and you couldn't change the future.
Our 3-dimensions of space are almost certainly embedded in a larger number of hyperdimesions, but the theorists don't agree how many or what transdimensional shape our universe ultimately takes. Scientists search astronomical data for evidence of "ghosts" or reflections of the same galaxies repeated over and over in the night sky. Such reflections would indicate that we dwell in a nontrivial space.
What if the search did not have to be so far afield? What if we lived our lives literally surrounded by refractions from the hyper-shape of our universe, but were blind to it?
We assume, naively, that our senses evolved to reveal to us the construction of reality. Not a bit of it. Our senses evolved to provide us with the information we needed to stay alive. What our brains allow us to perceive is controlled by what input our brains evolved to process. As I had discovered for myself, once my brain decided that the left side of the universe no longer needed to exist for me, it effectively ceased to exist as far I was concerned. If every other human being had lost the ability to perceive left sidedness at the same time as I had, not one of us wo
uld have ever known there was anything wrong with us.
What if there was another side, neither right nor left, up nor down, that our brains had never evolved to perceive? If that were true, then even if information, such as light refraction, reached us from that other side, we would simply ignore it. If we all ignored it together, there would be no one to point out our mistake to us.
I started leaving the house again. I had an idea. I began to exercise my new sense of perception, experiment with it. I became more and more convinced that my hunch was right. There existed not just one "other" side, but many. Depending on where I stand in relation to the "faces" of the hyper-shape in which we live (it isn't as simple as a cube, but I haven't figured out exactly what it is yet) I can catch reflections of a few seconds into the future or see replays of a few seconds from the past. I can see people I am speaking with from the front and back at the same time. I can watch my own reflection from around corners. I knew the correct answers to questions by peeking into my own future and noting what I replied. Once I saved myself from a mugging by spotting myself in the future avoid walking by a dangerous spot. (There was no time paradox because I saw myself do what I did.) My newfound talent also proved useful for finding parking spaces.
All these doubles and reflections and time asynchronities used to bewilder and frighten me, but now that I've learned to intuit the topological rules of the game, I can use it to my advantage. So, the last question is, if what I perceive now represents both a more accurate picture of the shape of reality and it gives me a personal advantage in dealing with others, why can't everyone do it? Why did our brains evolve to teach us to ignore rather than perceive such an important aspect of reality?
I suspect I know the answer. The perceptive faculties of our brains are basically not much different than those of cows, lizards, and fish. Yes, in general, perception has increased along with brain size and complexity. The vertebrates have more complex senses than the invertebrates, the higher mammals may see in more detail and color than the lower mammals. But the trend doesn't always hold. Dogs smell better than we do, and bats echolocate better than either of us. Nature can discard extraneous senses as well as refine them.
Most animals can't recognize themselves in a mirror. If they notice their reflection at all, they assume it is another animal and try to flee or attack it. Perhaps the same thing happens to animals that perceive the extra sides of reality. I myself found it very confusing, especially the time distortions. It wasn't until I studied the theory behind the topology of higher dimensions that I comprehended what I perceived well enough to exploit it.
Until the existence of the human neocortex , capable of complex imagination, planning and memory, no animal brain existed for whom it would be an evolutionary advantage to perceive the extra sides. Previous animals didn't need to see from those angles, so they ignored them.
But then, how had stimulating growth in my brain enabled me to see them? A seed of the ability must have already been planted in the structure of my brain.
Something Dr. Chopra had said niggled at me. When the left hemisphere suffered damage, the victim did not experience a loss of the sense of the right side. Somehow the right hemisphere compensated and allowed the person to retain a sense of both left and right.
What if there was a latent ability of the right hemisphere to see some of the other dimensions? The brain normally repressed or subordinated the ability as a mere reinforcement of the normal perceptions of left and right and up and down. Yet it existed, and even ordinary people might have a glimpse of it at times when flashes of insight came to them about the immediate future or an event just out of their ordinary perception. "Extrasensory perception" would be a misnomer. The senses involved, mostly sight (for humans), were quite mundane. Only our ability to notice what we sensed changed. The talent should be called "extraperceptory sensing."
Evolution never stops winnowing new tricks. If the capacity to imagine and comprehend topology made the ability to perceive nontrivial topology an advantage for me, it must be an advantage for other homo sapiens as well. All of us had already evolved a right hemisphere able to dimly perceive the other sides. Just by the luck of the genetic draw, the talent would be greater in some than in others.
Somewhere in the world today, there must be people who have the same talent I do, not because of a medical procedure but because of a natural genetic quirk that meant they were born with a larger part of their brain devoted to perception of the hyperspace dimension. I want to find them. If they really are the next wave of hominid evolution, then one day in the future there will probably be a conflict between the hyperhominids and Homo sapiens sapiens. When that day comes, I want to be on the right side.
Comments on Refractions From The Neglected Side
If I had a second brain, and if that brain could pass Calculus (unlike my first brain) I would use it to be a neurologist. Have you noticed how many neurologists are also brilliant storytellers? Or perhaps it is just that Oliver Sacks opened the field of neurological case studies as a genre. Either way, I am thankful.
Hemineglect or hemi-inattention, is a real condition. It is mentioned in the case of Mrs. S, in "Eyes Right!" of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. My scientist, Dr. Chopra, is loosely inspired by V.S. Ramachandran, who wrote about another case of hemineglect in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. Ramachandran designed the mirror tests described in the story. Incidentally, Ramachandran also predicted the existence of mirror neurons, which have been discovered to be of importance in how we empathize with other human beings, how we learn, and how we imagine other minds. Without mirror neurons, there could be no novelists.
In this story, I tried to what imagine hemineglect would feel like to the person suffering it. And then I tried to take that one step further.
Burn
(8 of Swords)
In that kingdom, witches burned. Sir Grethory, a Templar of the Omniscient, one of the Eight, was sent to capture the witch known as Elieth. His blessed sword led him to where she hid in a barn. Her tendrils of soot dark hair smoked around her pale shoulders, and her eyes, two coals, smoldered in her frightened face. His gauntleted hand curled around her wrist as if around the neck of a tiny, trembling, woodland creature. Madness moved him, or magic, or love.
"Marry me," he whispered to her, "And I will safeguard you."
Fear forced her, or despair, or love, to say yes. He took her to his manor, where he married her according to the sacrament of the Omniscient. Each night, he cut her eight times to hide her essence from the other seven Templars who hunted witches with their swords blessed by the Temple. One stroke cut away her beauty, which had the look of a witch. The second cut away her laugh, which had the sound of a witch. Three, four, five and six cut away the fragrance of her skin, the touch of her hand, the taste of her and those of her movements that were the movements of a witch. Seven pared down her words. Eight cut away those of her thoughts that were the thoughts of a witch.
The blessed sword that found thoughts was Sir Grethory’s own, and by it he had found her that first night. By the beauty of her thoughts as much as of her flesh, he had loved her. Yet now he cut down her thoughts, to better safeguard her. Such was his love, or his magic, or his madness.
Thus dragged years. Each night, he cut her and caged her. Each morn, Elieth awoke paler, weaker, less herself. When they went out to a fete at the Temple or at the castle of the king, she lifted no bite of food to her mouth save first she checked whether his brows knotted or lifted to chide her for gluttony or encourage her to eat more. In Grethory’s home -- she belonged to it more than it belonged to her -- she strained her ear for the weight of his footfall and the tenor of his sigh, to judge whether his mood demanded her in his bed or away from it. A sunny day in the garden would be eclipsed by his frown; a romantic dinner by moonlight would be an ordeal to nurse his smile.
The morning came when Elieth awoke too weak to rise from bed. She wilted towards dying.
Vag
uely, she knew when Grethory loomed over her bed. Seven others stood with him.
"A pity," one of the other Templars murmured, clapping Grethory on the shoulder.
"Yes," Grethory said. "It will be hard to find another witch with as much magic in her eight essences for me to siphon into my sword. Yet how rewarding the irony that all these years the demon’s blood has sustained the work of the Omniscient."
Then at last did Elieth understand how the Templars quarried their prey, not with a single stroke, but with a thousand.
"Up, witch," said Grethory. He slapped her face.
The Eight Templars lifted her from the bed, bound her hands behind her back, and marched her to gibbet before the Temple. There they surrounded her with their blessed swords, preparing to perform the sacrament of holy murder.
Elieth had not been weakened so much as they supposed. She reached into her eight essences. She combusted. The blaze that exploded around her tossed aside the cage of swords. The Eight Templars caught fire. Their roasting flesh and burning robes smelled like pork and saffron. They fell to the ground, screaming, trying to roll out the flames. Still ablaze, Elieth strode away from that Temple, free for the first time.
In that kingdom, witches burned.
Comments on Burn (8 of Swords)
I have an ongoing project to write a story for every Tarot card in the deck. Two are included in this anthology. Ideally, I try to work in the motif of the card – in this case, eight swords – into the story in a way that makes sense. The most important thing, however, is to try to capture the spirit of the card. Eight of swords traditionally shows a woman chained up, and represents a block, a stoppage, detention, jail, or prison. For writers, it can signify writer’s block. One day, I hope to illustrate each story and create my own deck.