The Martians(124)
And Hiroko too, God damn her. If she ever reads this, if she really is alive and out there hiding as they all say, which I doubt, may she get the message: God damn you. Come back.
Sax Moments
When Sax was pretending to be Stephen Lindholm, he often asked the lab's computer to display articles from The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and though most of the articles were silly, some made him laugh. He was still spluttering one day when he came into Claire and Berkina's lab to describe to them Henry Lewis's “Data Enrichment Method."
“Say you do an experiment to see if sounds can be detected at various decibel levels, and you have your data in a table. Then since you want more data but don't actually want to do more experiments, you assume that if a sound isn't heard at decibel level a, it wouldn't be heard at any lower levels either, and so you add the result of test a to all the trials at lower decibels.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Then say you're trying to prove that coin tosses are more likely to turn up heads the higher the altitude you make the toss at—”
“What?”
“That's your hypothesis, and you make your trial and arrange your data in the same kind of table, see here” (he had printed it out) “and it looks a little ambiguous, sure, but you just use the data enrichment method as described with the decibels, so that every time you get heads, you add it to all the tests higher up the stairs, and there you have it—the higher on the stairs you toss the coin, the more heads you get! Very convincing!” And he collapsed on a chair, giggling. “It's exactly how Simons showed that CO
levels were going to drop after they got them to two bar.”
Claire and Berkina stared at him, nonplussed. Claire said, “Stephen likes the reductio ad absurdum."
“I do,” Sax admitted, “I definitely do.”
“It's science,” Berkina said. “Science in a nutshell.”
And they all sat there grinning.
"Nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows."
Sax read that in a book and went out for a walk to think it over.
When he came back he read on. “If one has character one also has one's typical experience, which recurs repeatedly.”
Sax found this Nietzsche an interesting writer.
The more Sax studied memory, the more worried he got that there would be anything they could ever do to improve it. During one night's reading early on, the worry turned to cold fear.
He was reviewing the classic Rose papers on memory in chicks whose intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrales had been burned away before or after training sessions with sweet or bitter pellets of food. Chicks that had been given left-hemisphere IMHV lesions forgot later lessons to avoid a bitter pellet; chicks with right-side lesions remembered. This gave one the impression that it was the left IMHV that was necessary to memory. But if the training was done before the lesions, the chicks needed neither IMHV to recall the lesson. Perhaps, Rose postulated, the memory was actually stored in the lobus parolfactorius, left or right, so that once learned, neither IMHV was needed. Further lesions seemed to confirm this hypothesis, eventually justifying a pathway model, in which lessons are first registered in the left IMHV, then move to the right IMHV, and then move on to both the left and right LPOs. And if this model were correct, then a pretraining right-IMHV lesion, already shown not to be amnestic by itself, would disrupt this flow, and post-training LPO lesions, otherwise amnestic, would no longer be so because the memory would have been stranded in the left IMHV. And that proved to be the case. It followed, then, that a pretraining right-IMHV lesion, followed by a posttraining left-IMHV lesion, would also produce amnesia, for first the transfer path would be blocked, and then the only repository destroyed.
Except it wasn't so. Right lesion; train chick; recall displayed; left lesion; and the chick still recalled the lesson. The memory had escaped.
Sax left his desk and took a walk down to the corniche to think this over. Also to recover from the stab of fear that had struck him: that they would never understand. Darkness, voices from restaurants, clanking dishes, starlight on the still sea. He couldn't find Maya, she was in none of her usual haunts.
He sat on one of their benches anyway. The mind was a mystery. Memories were nowhere and everywhere: The brain had a tremendous equipotentiality, it was a hugely complex dynamic system, almost anything was possible.
In theory that should be a cause for hope. Surely with such a flexible, versatile system, they could shore up the failing parts, shunt the memories elsewhere. If that was the right way to state it. Very possibly; but in such an immensity, how could they learn (quickly enough) what to do? Didn't the very power of the system place it beyond their comprehension? So that the greatness of the human mind actually added to the great unexplainable, rather than lessened it?