Memory Man
Joseph Conrad slumped heavily into his leather armchair. He was cross. No, he was very angry and he let fly at a glass on the side table which went flying across the room and smashed against the far wall. The sharp, splintering sound of crystal glass brought him to his senses a little and he cursed himself for being so weak and lacking in self control. Slowly pushing himself out of the plush chair he strode determinedly to the large fridge in an alcove to his den. He rustled around in the freezer compartment and brought out a clear bottle, all encrusted in ice. Scraping the ice onto the floor with his hand he held the bottle up to the light to check on the contents. Only half full he mused with satisfaction knowing that at least he wouldn’t get blind drunk if it was full. Unscrewing the top, he took a sip and found the clear liquid far too cold and burning to take the huge swig he wanted. He was about to carry it back to the armchair when he remembered smashing the glass, so turning to a small wall cupboard, he retrieved a new glass tumbler from within and quickly returned to his comfortable chair. He poured a good three fingers worth of the Polish vodka into the tumbler and took a satisfying sip followed by a gulp.
Still seething he found the freezing hot liquid had cooled his anger somewhat and he sat there recounting the events of the afternoon. He had been invited by the Board of Governors at Stanford to present his case for the next stage in his research with human beings rather than rats and had been turned down. He should have been better prepared, less confident of himself and foremost, should have done his research thoroughly on who would be present. No one told him that Professors Hutchinson from Harvard and Grimes from MIT, his arch enemies and rivals, would be specially invited to scrutinise his proposals.
They had turned him down and abused him in front of his colleagues so that he had no option but to resign his post. No one had the guts to stand up for him and say a good word in his defence. They were all jealous of the fact that he was the youngest Professor in the Medical Faculty and that he had published more papers in the various learned journals than the rest of them put together and he was barely thirty.
The invited Professors annoyed him intensely by goading him, firstly with reference to his namesake ‘The Joseph Conrad’ and that he should stick to fiction; secondly that he shouldn’t prophesise like his other namesake ‘JC’. ‘Stick to rats sonny,’ growled Professor Grimes, amongst smiles of agreement from the rest of the board. The reference to ‘Sonny’ he didn’t mind since he looked ten years younger, more like a mere undergraduate but the dismissive way of Grimesy, had upset and disgusted him.
He had miscalculated the mood and feeling the Board had for him and had only then realised the jealousy that existed. Even his plea that his research might lead to a delay or cure to dementia and Alzheimer’s fell on deaf ears. They had wanted to bring him down a few pegs probably but he had had enough by then and called them some choice names and told them he was resigning and taking his research elsewhere. He was probably shooting himself in the foot and giving succour to his rivals but there was little point, he thought, of staying on without moral support at the top.
Savouring another few sips of his vodka he reflected on his past achievements. He was a full Doctorate in three separate fields of study, Mathematics, Astronomy and Medicine. Numerous establishments had fought over him in offering Professorships and healthy monetary inducements. He had accepted Stanford in California because of the nice climate and they allowed him some teaching time which he enjoyed and kept him in touch with the real world outside. He hadn’t realised that he had stepped on toes and made enemies internally. The external ones he knew about and could generally hold his own but when the whole Board turned on him it was time for a ‘quick exit’ as his father would say.
The image of his father brought on a bout of nostalgia and thoughts of his childhood. His father was a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and should have been made a Professor but for his energies being somewhat divided between teaching and raising a family of five unruly boys, all neatly spaced, four years apart. Mother, God bless her, had had enough of childbearing, praying for a daughter, turned herself into a cabbage and was of little use in the household other than cooking and cleaning, when she was in the mood. Joseph was slap bang in the middle of the five and when number five came along it was his duty to look after the baby, his four year old brother and the mother. Dad did his best with the two eldest and occasionally managed to influence them to help around the house, with a little bribery.
Up to the age of five he was a normal bright lad as were his brothers but soon after that he suddenly became a ‘child prodigy,’ more to his amusement than concern. He suddenly started to read widely, books available on all kinds of topics held in the house, especially his father’s mathematic and astronomy books and notes. The complexity of the topics didn’t seem to hinder him and he mastered all the mathematics that his father was delivering to his undergraduates. Primary school was wasted on him in that he was way, way ahead in all subjects. The only plus point was that his class were allocated a brand-new young teacher who was more interested in fashion magazines and men than her charges.
Joseph took it on himself to organise the teaching by getting the brighter kids to monitor the slower ones in small groups. He went around and introduced new topics and new stages, at the same time honing his pedagogical skills. History was taught by all the battles and major events being enacted by the whole class. The monthly tests prescribed by the Curriculum Board were a walk over for even the dullest in the class, whilst their teacher preened in the praise. This lasted for two years when his dad had decided he was being wasted at school and brought him home for special tuition.
At the age of seven and eight he immediately could master whatever was thrown at him. During the school holiday he was sent off to spend a month with his cousins in Quebecand came back with fluent French. The mother tongue of many of his classmates was Mexican Spanish so he had full mastery of that in no time. He helped his elder brothers with their homework and assignments in exchange for help around the house. All the local kids would congregate at his house to play after school. He organised the games of cowboys and Indians in their back yard, re-enacting some of the famous battles in history. To make things more authentic he learned some Sioux from a primer in the house and all the Indians in the yard had to utter authentic cries during the battles.
He remembered he had a mechanical bent and all the neighbourhood kids would bring their bikes for him to repair. At the age of ten, he was repairing lawn mowers, motorbikes and even cars. He even ferried his younger brother to school and in the evenings would drive the car to Walmart for the family shopping. He had a tailor’s dummy, masquerading as a passenger and with the tinted windows, no one suspected that a ten-year-old was driving. He just used the cruise control paddle on the automatic car to control the speed since his feet couldn’t touch the pedals.
Having quickly mastered the piano, violin and guitar he would play comfortably at the school assemblies and meetings. He wasn’t precocious and the kids liked him even though the adults were suspicious of his abilities. His father tried to make a circus act of him but he managed to resist that, other than agreeing to a series of lectures at the University. His father happened to be on the Board that invited speakers on various topics and he arranged for his son Joseph to take part. By the time the other members of the board realised that it was a ten-year-old that was performing, it was too late. He had already given a one-hour lecture on a first-year mathematics topic to great success. His style was somewhat theatrical in that to be seen above the lectern he had a long table positioned with four stout wooden chairs against the white board on which he demonstrated his calculations and made explanatory notes.
He would introduce himself by jumping up on the table so that all could see him. With clear diction, he would tell his audience what he was going to teach them, why it was important to them for their future understanding and that they should listen to him carefully and ask questions if they didn’t understand. At first the students were amused but quickly found the lecture compelling. To make special points and little ‘Aide memoirs’ Joseph would hop onto the tall back of a chair, tilt it onto its rear legs, neatly balanced, whilst he wrote on the board and gently tilt the chair so that he could step back on the tabletop. The audience would applaud and he would bow pointing out that they should memorise the point made.
Questions would come thick and fast and he fielded them expertly, never belittling the student or rising to the bait from the older students who had joined the crowd for some light amusement. The general opinion was that Joseph had been expertly primed on the topic of the lecture and not beyond but soon the rogue questioners found that he knew more about higher mathematics than they did. Quickly the student body took him to their hearts and he became a celebrity in his own right. Any move to stop the course was quickly overturned by the demands of the students. He even had to switch to a larger hall with longer table and more chairs to balance on. At the last lecture he got a standing ovation and was carried out on the shoulders of the students. From that point, his father got him to tweak his own lecture notes to make them more interesting but without the gymnastics.
Joseph insisted on going to the local Secondary school even though he was far beyond their tutelage. He liked the company and got him away from his mother who was a burden. The teachers just let him do his own thing and he spent much of the time in the library or helping his fellow students when they needed it. He was generally liked and mixed well. He liked individual sports such as tennis, table tennis, squash and pool but he excelled as coach in the team sports. He was the one who could immediately identify the weakness in the opposition and ways to exploit it. His team talks became legendary and each team heeding his words of advice, won comfortably.
By the age of sixteen he had completed the course work for a full degree courses in five subjects; Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. At seventeen he had bothered to take exams in Mathematics and Astronomy and completed the course work in Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering and English literature. Only the intensive laboratory work needed prevented him completing the full degree exams. His elder brother was studying Medicine and that caught his interest and he managed to persuade his father to let him take up a course in Medicine, which he did with great success. On graduation he immediately took on research on some obscure topic of the brain and also in Astronomy. Within a year he had published his chosen thesis in both subject to overall acclaim and also gained his Doctorates in both subjects. The next few years were spent touring US, Canada, France and Englandas a visiting lecturer whilst he was choosing a speciality to follow, all the time he was writing articles for various learned publications and gaining acclaim.
Having successfully drained the half bottle of best Polish vodka, and feeling in good spirit again, he stopped his reminiscing and decided on a course of action. He would call up his friends in Tokyo, tell them truthfully of his current position and suggest they might find a way of accommodating his impressive talent at their faculty, to carry on research and allow him some teaching time. A couple of months over there should be sufficient to brush his Japanese up to teaching standard and the students would want to improve their English if he had to resort to that. He checked the time and calculated the time difference and decided to place the call.
The news of his departure was already known to his friends in Tokyo, thanks to the internet and they would be delighted to accommodate him in their faculty at his earliest convenience. He requested to be booked into a nearby apartment hotel and he would fly over the following day and spend some time acclimatising before taking on his new post. He packed a small suitcase, searched out a Japanese primer, copied the accompanying CD lessons to his laptop and decided that an early night was called for.
Arriving at the faculty, he decided on a low profile for a while, whilst he developed a fully blown strategy that would allow him to progress his research to humans rather than rats. The University allocated him a small laboratory and he shared his time between that, learning Japanese and his miniscule apartment. His teaching duties would be allocated at a future time. His passion and field of current research was into memory in the human brain. One of his faults that he recognised was that instead of couching his findings in complicated terminology to impress and confound his critics he used the simplest terms possible for the explanation he came up within his research. His peers criticised him mercilessly for this, accusing him of oversimplification and making his work sound shallow and perfunctory. Joseph couldn’t abide gobbly-gook and would annoy his compatriots by finding even simpler way of explaining his findings.
In simple terms he used to tell his students and anyone who would listen to him that memory was the most important capacity of the brain that helped along the other functions of reasoning and logic. The little cells in the brain had little switches that could be triggered to retain information or simply reject it. The brainy people had more of this function switched to ‘On’ than the less able. He used to say that he believed that only a very small portion of these switches in a normal person’s brain were actually in the ‘On’ position and his research was to find the mechanism to activate the switches. If all the switches were in the ‘On’ position, then the brain would go into overload and probably the person would just go mad. The self preservation mechanism that we all had was to be very selective with the switches so for instance we could switch off a bad memory or something unimportant. The trick in his view was to increase the ‘On’ effect in a small way and do this very gradually so that the brain could accommodate the changes and not crash as a computer would do or an electrical fuse with overload.
He proved this with laboratory mice and rats by perfecting the switching mechanism so that they would speedily remember and also logically work out the route to food through the complicated mazes he set them. He wanted to start a similar experiment and research on humans but his enthusiasm had frightened his critics and mentors and they wouldn’t allow him to proceed. He wasn’t one to become the ‘Nutty Professor’ of fictional films and do this in secret. He wanted it to be valid research, open to full scrutiny and all safety measures applied.
Having found and developed a trigger mechanism that threw the switches on command he had discovered target areas in the rat’s brain so that he could control specific functions. He somehow needed to apply the same technique, in a controlled way to the human brain. In his tiny laboratory, he made up a simple electroencephalogram, in the shape of a scull cap that using extremely low voltage and tiny sensors that could send the right signal to the correct part of the brain. The problem was getting the explicit feedback from the rats. However, much he created complicated tests he could only get minimum feedback from his rat population. One little human test would be a huge milestone in his research and ratify that he was on the right track that the knowledge and technique was transferable to humans.
He built a series of these skull caps with sensors for his rats and could control their limited memory at will. He decided to construct one to take a human skull so that he would be ready to demonstrate to his peers when the time was right. It took a long time with much testing and programming of the sensors so that he had full control. After he had finished model forty-three ‘E’ variation ‘M,’ he decided that he couldn’t go any further without human assistance. He would re-apply to the faculty board for permission to carry on his research on live human beings. He laid out a research plan with detailed safeguards at all stages and was ready to submit. Although he wasn’t going to divulge this information unless pressed very hard, he had carried out some successful experiments on his own brain by donning the electronic skull cap and discovering some surprising powers of his own grey matter. One could have argued that he could have just carried on in this fashion but research of any substance required and specified controls to verify the actions he had taken.
The morning of the meeting of the Tokyo University Board plus the Faculty Professors, Joseph, feeling very nervous and a little insecure decided to go through and rehearse all of his speech, demonstrations and also, if it came to the push, show his electronic skull cap, no his ‘Conrad electroencephalogram’ as he called his devise, to impress the audience, if they needed impressing. He put it on his head, switched on the laptop and started up the main programme to ensure a smooth delivery, with no slip up or delays. He got carried away with the excitement of it all and forgot the time. Looking up suddenly, he realised he would be late if he didn’t depart now. He pressed the keys to close the programme and in his hurry, he pressed them in the wrong order. Instead of closing down, the machine switched to full power.
The next day, the porter opened the door to Joseph’s apartment at the insistence of the Head of the Faculty, to find a disgustingly filthy man inside wandering aimlessly around the apartment, only uttering grunts. All of Joseph Conrad’s memory cells had been turned to ‘OFF!’ as a natural safeguard to protect the brain from overload.
