Green Mars(172)
No. We are still physical reality. Atoms in their rounds. Determined on most scales, random on some others.
Ah well. We disagree. But either way, the scientist’s job is to explore everything. No matter the difficulties! To stay open, to accept ambiguity. To attempt to fuse with the object of knowledge. To admit that there are values shot through the whole enterprise. To love it. To work toward discovering the values by which we should live. To work to enact those values in the world. To explore— and more than that— to create!
I’ll have to think about that.
Observation is never enough. Besides it wasn’t their experiment anyway. Desmond came to Dorsa Brevia, and Sax went to find him. “Is Peter still flying?”“Why yes. He spends a fair amount of time in space, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes. Can you get me in touch with him?”
“Sure I can.” Quizzical expression on Desmond’s cracked face. “Your speech is getting better and better, Sax. What have they been doing to you?”
“Gerontological treatments. Also growth hormone, L-dopa, serotonin, other chemicals. Stuff out of starfish.”
“Grew you a new brain, did they?”
“Yes. Parts anyway. Synergic synaptic stimulus. Also a lot of talking with Michel.”
“Uh-oh!”
“It’s still me.”
Desmond’s laugh was an animal noise. “I can see that. Listen, I’ll be off again in a couple days, and I’ll take you to Peter’s airport.”
“Thanks.”
• • •
Grew a new brain. Not an accurate way of putting it. The lesion had been sustained in the posterior third of the inferior frontal convolution. Tissues dead as a result of interruption of focused ultrasound memory-speech stimulation during interrogation. A stroke. Broca’s aphasia. Difficulty with motor apparatus of speech, little melody, difficulty in initiating utterances, reduction to telegramese, mostly nouns and simplest forms of verbs. A battery of tests determined that most other cognitive functions were unimpaired. He wasn’t so sure; he had understood people speaking to him, his thinking had been much the same as far as he could tell, and he had had no trouble with the spatial and other nonlinguistic tests. But when he tried to talk, sudden betrayal— in the mouth and in the mind. Things lost their names.
Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.
But it turned out that remembering without words was hard. A method had to be borrowed, the palace-of-memory method, spatial to begin with. A space in the mind was established to resemble the inside of the Echus Overlook labs, which he recalled well enough to walk around in in his mind, names or no. And in each place an object. Or another place. On one counter, all the Acheron labs. On top of the refrigerator, Boulder, Colorado. And so he remembered all the shapes he thought by their location in the mental lab.
And then sometimes the name would come. But when he knew the name and tried to say it, it was very possible that the wrong one would come out of his mouth. He had always had a tendency this way. After sessions of his best thinking, when everything had been quite clear to him, it had sometimes been difficult to translate his thoughts onto the plane of language, which did not match well the kind of thinking he had been doing. So that talking had been work. But nothing like this, this halting, erratic, treacherous groping, which usually either failed or betrayed. Frustrating in the extreme. Painful. Although preferable to Wernicke’s aphasia, certainly, in which one babbled volubly, unaware that one was making no sense at all. Just as he had had a premorbid tendency to lose the words for things, there were people who tended towards Wernicke’s without the excuse of brain damage. As Art had noted. Sax preferred his own problem.
• • •
Ursula and Vlad had come to him. “Aphasia is different for every person,” Ursula said. “There are patterns, and clusters of symptoms that usually go with certain lesion patterns in right-handed adults. But in extraordinary minds there are a lot of exceptions. Already we see that your cognitive functions have remained very high for someone with your degree of language difficulties. Probably a lot of your thought in math and physics did not take place using language.”
“That’s right.”
“And if it was geometrical thinking rather than analytical, it probably took place in the right hemisphere of the brain rather than the left. And your right hemisphere was spared.”