The Memory Artists

by Jeffrey Moore

  18 See note 15, first sentence.

  19 In an article entitled “Oedipus Anorex” (Scottish Journal of Art and Cognitive Neuropsychology, April 1991), I compare Lord Byron’s incessant dieting and his equation of starvation with self-mastery with the practices of today’s young anorexics. His revulsion at the sight of women eating was obviously related to both his compulsive dieting and his mother’s obesity. As for Noel Burun’s being occasionally “fat and mad,” Noel’s weight consistently fell within the norms for his age and height, and he is no madder than I.

  By now the reader will have noted my interest in the arts. My publishing house, although specialising in scientific texts, also publishes poetry, novels and short stories dealing with scientific themes. For one of the chief purposes of art lies in its cognitive function: as a means to acquiring truth. NB’s father, Henry Burun, went farther: he considered art the avenue to the highest knowledge available to man, to a kind of knowledge impossible to attain by any other means.

  20 The jest may call for a gloss: it is a reference to Prince Philip’s (in)famous remark, which contains—let’s be honest—a kernel of truth. In 1996, I hired a Paki who designed a laboratory electrical system not unlike JJY’s.

  21 Émile Nelligan (1879–1941) is generally regarded as Quebec’s national poet (despite the fact that his father was from Dublin). After “burning out” creatively at the age of nineteen, Nelligan spent the rest of his life in insane asylums. See my “La schizophrénie et la poésie” in Art et neuropathologie (Memento Vivere, 1988).

  I should point out to the reader that I am not only an art theorist, but a practitioner as well: as my readers well know, it is my custom to “set the tone” for my research articles, or chapters of longer works, with an epigrammatic poem or “intermezzo” of my own composition. (In my canton, I was once the semi-official Mundartdichter, or local poet.) Indeed I am mistaken if a single one of these poems fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse’s lips let it fall. One of them, entitled Der Regenbogen (“The Rainbow”), elicited the following critical response: “Each phrase is so meticulously calibrated that we feel the concluding line as an emotional thunderclap” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09/08/99).

  22 JJY, far from being “crazed,” periodically or otherwise, is a generally well-adjusted individual with an above-average IQ (in the 120–125 range). Because of a history of minor behaviour disturbances as a child, including enuresis, soiling, somniloquy and bruxism, JJY’s family physician referred him to a psychiatrist, who in turn referred him to a neurologist in our department, Dr. Charles Ravenscroft. After several tests, Dr. Ravenscroft discovered a deficiency of large nerve cells called Purkinje cells and an excess of serotonin, and thereby concluded that JJY had a mild form of autism, of which there is a familial genetic component. Because I suspected careless procedure and analytical irregularities, I personally repeated all tests and scans and reached my own conclusion: that Dr. Ravenscroft had made yet another misdiagnosis.

  JJY’s memory skills are also above average: on testing he had an excellent memory for pictures, recalling 10 out of 12 objects after a 40-minute delay, and perfectly reproducing the Weschler designs after a similar delay. His memory for verbal material was not as good, but still within the average range of the Weschler Logical Memory Scale. Psychiatric profile: displaying a number of paedomorphic traits, JJY is more or less delayed at the second stage of pyschosexual development. With the loss of his mother and father, and the loss of his girlfriend to another, JJY has sought refuge in an idealised, nostalgicised youth: in the rampant “Peterpandemonium” (a term I coined back in 1992) that characterises his generation. See my “Peterpandemonium” in Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, LX, pp. 399–419.

  By now, my interest in the story’s protagonists should be obvious. But for the slow-witted, here is the research pentagram: (1) NB—synaesthesia/ hypermnesia (idiopathic); (2) SB—amnesia (Alzheimer’s); (3) NXB— synaesthesia (drug-induced); (4) SD—amnesia (short-term, antidotal); (5) JJY—nostalgesis/creativity (TMS-induced).

  23 See note 15. Ulrich Boner was a fourteenth-century Swiss writer whose collection of fables in verse was the first book to be printed in the German language (1461). It was called Der Edelstein (“The Precious Stone”) because precious stones were said to cast a spell and Boner hoped his tales would do the same.

  The French writer mentioned before him, Antoine Galland, published The One Thousand and One Nights, the first translation into any Western language of these ancient Persian-Arabic tales, between 1704 and 1717. One of them, “The Sleeper and the Awakener,” would prove to be an inspirational wellspring for NB.

  24 My researchers assure me this is nowhere near a record. A British writer named John Creasey, over a period of seven years, wrote numerous novels for which, by the time he got his first book published in 1925, he had received 743 rejection slips. Two of these books, he claimed, were written in a week, with half-days spent playing cricket.

  25 I considered it my moral duty.

  26 In psychiatric terms, NXB suffers from satyriasis, or Don Juanism: an excessive preoccupation with sexual gratification or conquest, a chronic pursuit of high-risk behaviour, leading to persistently transient and exploitative relationships. He steadfastly resisted my efforts to refer him to a psychosexologist.

  27 The feverish room and that white bed,

  The tumbled skirts upon a chair,

  The novel flung half-open where

  Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints, are spread;

  The mirror that has sucked your face

  Into its secret deep of deeps,

  And there mysteriously keeps

  Forgotten memories of grace;

  And you, half dressed and half awake,

  Your slant eyes strangely watching me,

  And I, who watch you drowsily,

  With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

  This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)

  Will rise, a ghost of memory, if

  Ever again my handkerchief

  Is scented with White Heliotrope.

  —Arthur Symons, “White Heliotrope” (1895)

  28 NB, as usual, is correct: sea lions have the best memory of all nonhuman creatures. Although many other mammals, including the macaque monkey and chimpanzee, have impressive long-term memories, the sea lion outperforms them all. In 2000, a California sea lioness named Rio broke animal memory records by remembering a complicated trick involving letters and numbers—ten years after first learning it. Marine biologists (Kastak and Schusterman, 2001), employing a mnemonic model strangely resembling one I designed for rhesus monkeys in the mideighties (Vorta and Rhéaume, 1986), taught sea lions to relate specific gestural signals to objects (e.g. bats, balls, rings), modifiers (e.g. large, small, black, white), and actions (e.g. fetch, tail-touch, flipper-touch). For example, in the simplest “single object” instruction, the presentation of the signs SMALL/BLACK/ RING/ TAIL-TOUCH would result in the sea lion touching the small black ring with its tail, while ignoring the other objects in the pool. Years ago, when I took my ten-year-old daughter to MarineLand in Niagara Falls, she remarked how “cool” these animals were, and suggested we move to Ontario to study them. Given my current problems in Quebec, I should have listened to her!

  29 To finish JJY’s sentence, what I gave him was a memory “escalator” (essentially balm of Gilead and sage) that he himself exhibited at the 2000 Cultiver sa mémoire symposium in Montreal. It improved his memory not one iota.

  30 In Muslim legend /Arabian demonology, a jinnı is one of the sprites or spirits able to assume human or animal form and exercise supernatural influence over people. It brings to mind a comment made in 1989 by a Genevan television critic regarding the inspiration for one of my epigrammatic poems (see note 21): “The lines seem to be whispered by a jinnı , communicated by a dream, or revealed by an angel from on high …”

  31 Henry Burun was bi
-polar, what we used to call “manic depressive”— as were numerous artists, including poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, painters Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe, jazz pianist Charles Mingus, etc. Had he had access to today’s new generation of antidepressants, Henry would have been able to “hold the dragon at bay,” as he described it, and still be alive today.

  32 In his classic The Mind of a Mnemonist, the Russian neuroscientist Aleksandr Luria recorded the case of “S” (Solomon Shereshevski), a man who appears to have forgotten nothing. S was also a synaesthete; after meeting the legendary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the 1930s, he described his voice as “a flame with protruding fibres.” Although possessing a greater eidetic memory than NB, S had similar difficulties in understanding and adapting to the everyday world around him (die alltägliche Umwelt). Neither one, to say the least, can be considered a typical synaesthete.

  33 NB’s mistake here was crediting information supplied by NXB. I am not using chloral or chloral hydrate in any of my studies, either for amnesia or brain cancer. And although the drug was clearly from my lab, I am not the one who ordered it. It may have been part of NXB’s “literary studies,” as the highly addictive—and dangerous—drug was prescribed for insomnia in the nineteenth century. It hastened the mental collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche, gave paranoid hallucinations to Dante Rossetti and Evelyn Waugh, and destroyed André Gide’s memory.

  34 Coincidentally, Alois Alzheimer, who practised in Germany in the 1890s, took an interest in his own country’s “Decadents,” particularly Jakob Wassermann, Frank Wedekind and Hanns Heinz Ewers. He makes only passing reference, however, to the earlier French Décadents Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Huysmans; and none at all to the English Decadents of the “Yellow Nineties”: Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson.

  35 Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights,” in Poems (1890).

  36 Art therapy is based on the premise that words can act as a barrier, preventing people from expressing what is on their minds, and that creating art can allow people to describe their feelings without words. Through creating art and talking about the process of art-making with an art therapist, patients can “increase awareness of self, cope with symptoms, stress, and traumatic experiences, enhance cognitive abilities, and enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of artistic creativity.” I’m quoting from an Art Therapy of America pamphlet belonging to my wife, who took (expensive) courses in it. Some of this stuff is flaky at best, and most of it unproven.

  Far more interesting are my experiments in transcranial magnetic stimulation, which will have applications for cognition, creativity and well-being. Using my own modified stimulator (VTMS©) on research subject JJY, I enhanced his visual and spatial memory, along with his creative skills and pleasure quotient. I targeted an island of tissue in the human gyrus, near the left ear, which serves as a kind of booster rocket for creativity. Below are the results of an experiment in which I asked JJY to draw a picture of a cat four times, at different stages of his exposure to VTMS©:

  I then asked him to rewrite a line from his novel The Right Chemistry:

  Her blouse was a really loud red colour.

  Her blouse was scarlet, like the scream of someone falling through a skylight.

  1. Before

  2. After

  At the final stages of each of these tests, JJY had a broad grin on his face. Like sex and eating, creating and experiencing art are pleasurable acts. Since the brain reinforces creative acts by rewarding brain cells with the neurotransmitter dopamine, creativity has an obvious role to play in our health and survival. Creative expression, in fact, may be the brain’s natural method of protecting itself from disease. I play the xylophone, for instance, as a means of preventing neurodegeneration: compared to the general population, a much lower percentage of musicians get Alzheimer’s disease. See my “Art Therapy and Alzheimer’s: Why Researchers Have Been Wrong Until Now” in Psychology Tomorrow, winter 2001.

  37 Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line “The surest poison is time” in “Old Age,” Society and Solitude (1870). Memoryless and demented, Emerson died of Alzheimer’s disease twelve years later.

  38 It is not always possible to control the ambitions of one’s subalterns, who clearly flirted with unprofessionalism in this regard. One of the experiments that NB refers to was conducted to see whether memory impairment occurred in synaesthetes after electrical stimulation, as it normally does with non-synaesthetes. Another was inspired by experiments conducted by the Montreal neurologist Dr. Wilder Penfield (who was once called “the greatest living Canadian,” even though he was born and educated in the US). Penfield found that by stimulating the temporal lobes he could evoke memories incorporating sound, movement and colour, which were much more vivid than usual memory, and often about things unremembered under ordinary circumstances. In short, he made his patients relive the past as if it were the present. As Cytowic (1989) memorably describes it, “This was Proust on the operating table, an electrical recherche du temps perdu.” Patients were shocked (pardon the pun) to re-experience long-forgotten conversations, a kindergarten classroom, a certain song, the view from a childhood window. They were convinced that what they experienced was real, even though they also knew they were on an operating table in Montreal. Now, the obvious next step is to open up the cranium of a synaesthete, stimulate the visual cortex and see whether the resulting experience resembles their experience of synaesthesia. Treading on thin deontological ice, you’re thinking? Perhaps, but not with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is what we used on NB. This gentler method of stimulating the cortex generates a magnetic impulse that passes through the skull and causes nerve cells in the brain to “fire.” In non-synaesthetes I have been able to elicit colour percepts, or chromatophenes, by stimulating the occipital lobes. My next step is to stimulate the same regions in a synaesthete, and compare the two “optical” events. Should they prove to be similar we might, all of us, experience the rainbow world of a synaesthete!

  39 Speak, Memory by name, wherein Nabokov—who spent the last eighteen years of his life in Switzerland—describes his synaesthesia:

  I present a fine case of coloured hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the colour sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanised rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites.

  (Speak, Memory, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967).

  Nabokov’s parents, wife and son, interestingly enough, were all synaesthetes.

  40 My preliminary research points to three ways in which caffeine can protect against or reverse dementia-related changes in the brain: (1) it can stimulate brain cells to take in choline, needed to make acetylcholine, which is reduced in dementia; (2) it can interfere with another neurotransmitter called adenosine, a knock-on effect that may disrupt AD mechanisms; (3) it seems to tone down the activity of “housekeeping” cells called glia, which, although important in ridding the brain of dead and injured cells, can sometimes be overzealous and damage contiguous areas. My department is currently engaged in double-blind studies involving caffeinated and decaffeinated Maxwell House coffee.

  41 See note 15.

  42 Overleaf is KL’s synaesthetic alphanumeric character set (this colour chart, and the one in note 1, account for this book being slightly more expensive than most):

  43 In essence, this was “it” as it turned out: the pharmaceutical Cinderella, the magic bullet, the Viagra for the Mind. I should perhaps take the time here to clarify my role in its discovery. (1) At least two of its ingredients (federally unapproved at that time) I personally obtained for NB, at considerable risk to my career and reputation, and at least one other was spagyrically tinctured by JJY, who was then working under
my direction. (2) It is no secret that Henry Burun’s notes served as a compass for his son’s research. In the context of our professional relationship, Henry and I often discussed psychopharmacological issues relating to mnemonics and nootropics, as his lab books clearly indicate. (3) The Nepenthe-Amaranth-56 “memory pill” (later modified and named Amaranthine–1001) has its roots in a discovery made by a former teacher of mine, the Montreal neuroscientist Wilder Penfield, who published a paper in 1955 that described the strange effects of applying electrical currents to the brain, including hallucinations, memory loss and, in one case, a woman who said she felt as if she had just left her body. The crude instruments of the era were unable to determine the specific area of the brain involved or to replicate the out-of-body effect, but in 2002 Swiss scientists identified the part of the brain involved: the right angular gyrus, which sits about an inch above and behind the right ear. Although my genius was not, strictly speaking, of the same titan calibre as Dr. Penfield’s, as a student-technician working under him I strongly suspected that this was the area involved, and I must have discussed this idea years later with Henry Burun. A disruption at the right angular gyrus—involved in processing information from the visual system, the balance system and the somatosensory system—creates an illusion of floating in which one’s own body feels and looks distant. The phenomenon has inspired talk of a spiritual self that can roam free of the body and, after many accounts of patients “watching” themselves before pulling back from the verge of death, has been seen as evidence of an afterlife. I myself became interested in the topic when, as a student at the University of Basel, during an indescribable parlour game in which someone with scissors made an “animal sculpture” out of my beard, I underwent an intense outof-body experience, visiting Renoir’s house at Cagne-sur-mer on the Côte d’Azur. To verify whether I had actually left my body, the following day I went up to the roof to see whether it bore the convex terracotta tiles I had seen while floating over my dorm. Shockingly, it did. But I digress. A-1001 is a benzoquinone-naphthoquinone-methaqualone-based compound with a dual mechanism of action: (a) it activates the right angular gyrus and hippocampus, improving brain metabolism and protecting the cell membranes against lipid peroxidation and dysregulated calcium; (b) it inhibits an enzyme that breaks down the chemical messenger acetylcholine, while acting on key receptors in the brain, which leads to the release of more acetylcholine. It is rooted in an important discovery: the “missing link” between plaques, tangles, and the death of acetylcholine-producing neurons. The connection between these three processes has eluded scientists for years. As sometimes happens in science, its discovery was a fluke; I searched independently for the link for years, methodically and pertinaciously, and finally the sorcerer’s apprentice, NB, found it more or less by accident. (His conception was right, but he was a haphazard experimenter.) On which more in a future article.