Elephants on Acid (8 page)

MacLean’s theory predicted “an abrupt 15-dB transition at the critical point.” This was not experimentally confirmed.
¹⁹
Instead, noise levels rose steadily. There was no evidence of an abrupt transition point. The NRC scientists suggested MacLean’s formula failed to factor in phenomena such as appreciative laughter and wide variability in the speech power of talkers.

Of course, this entire line of research assumed cocktail parties populated by well-mannered guests who did not have to compete with blaring music. At parties where music is blasting, such as the typical college party, the research of Charles Lebo, Kenward Oliphant, and John Garrett would be of more use. During the 1960s these three doctors investigated acoustic trauma from rock-and-roll music by measuring sound levels at “typical San Francisco Bay Area rock-and-roll establishments frequented almost exclusively by teenagers and young adults, of whom many fall into a group popularly designated as ‘hippies.’” They discovered sound levels far in excess of those considered safe. They made the following suggestion to the hippies:

Attenuation of the amplification to safe levels would substantially reduce the risk of ear injury in the audience and performers and, in the opinion of the authors, would still permit enjoyment of the musical material.

The hippies would have heeded the warning—really, they would have—but the music was too loud to hear what the doctors were saying.

Memory, the theme of this chapter, is an ancient obsession. For millennia people have tried to find ways to increase it, delete it, or hold on to what they have. In the sixteenth century, an Italian inventor named Giulio Camillo claimed to have designed a Theater of Memory that enabled scholars to memorize all forms of knowledge, in their entirety. The Memory Theater was supposed to be a physical structure, although whether it was ever built or merely existed as plans on paper is not known. A scholar would stand inside the theater and see arrayed before him tiers of wooden shelves bearing cryptic images, each of which represented a form of knowledge. Studying the location and meaning of these images, Camillo claimed, would allow vast amounts of information to somehow, magically, flow into the savant’s brain. Needless to say, there is no evidence this worked. In the modern world, Hollywood has envisioned equally fantastic memory-altering technologies. For instance, there was the Neuralizer, carried by the government agents in the
Men in Black
films, that erased the memory of anyone who stared into its flash; or the Rekall mind-device machine, from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie
Total Recall
, that allowed people to take imaginary adventures by implanting false memories of what they had done. In real life, scientific researchers have not yet achieved the kind of total memory control artists have dreamed of, but not for lack of trying.

Wilder Penfield is poking around in your head—literally. You lie in an operating room. The top of your skull has been cut away, revealing your brain. But you are still awake. If there was a mirror on the ceiling, you could see the Canadian neurosurgeon moving behind you. Penfield lifts up an instrument, a monopolar silver-ball electrode, and touches it to your brain. You cannot feel this, because there are no nerve endings in the brain. But suddenly a memory flashes before your eyes, something you hadn’t thought of in years. You see your mother and father standing in the living room of the house you grew up in, and they’re singing. You listen closely. It’s a Christmas carol. “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa-la-la-lala, la-la-la-la.” The tune is so clear you can hum along with it. You start to do this, but just then Dr. Penfield removes the electrode, and the memory vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

The phenomenon you have just experienced is electric recall. While performing brain surgery on epileptic patients during the 1930s and 1940s at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Penfield discovered that sometimes, when he touched an electrode to their brains, random memories would intrude into their conscious thoughts. It was as though he had found the mind’s videotape archive. When he pushed the magic button,
zap
, scenes from the patients’ pasts would start playing. Penfield himself used this analogy: “Applying the stimulus was like pressing the start button on a tape recorder. Memories would start playing before the patient’s eyes, in real time.”

Penfield was poking around in these brains to orient himself during the surgical procedure—because everyone’s neurons are wired a little differently—as well as to locate damaged regions. He would touch his electrode directly to a region, such as a wrinkle on the temporal lobe, and ask the patient what sensation, if any, she felt. Then he would stick a numbered piece of paper on that spot. When he was finished he took a picture of all the little pieces of paper. The resulting photo served as a convenient map of the patient’s brain he could then refer to as he worked. Kind of like surgery by numbers.

The first time one of his patients reported spontaneous memory recall was in 1931. He was operating on a thirty-seven-year-old housewife. When he stimulated her temporal lobe with an electrode, she suddenly said that she “seemed to see herself giving birth to her baby girl.”

Penfield was sure he had stumbled upon evidence of a memory library within the brain. He imagined it as “a permanent record of the stream of consciousness; a record that is much more complete and detailed than the memories that any man can recall by voluntary effort.” He began a systematic search for this memory library in other patients. Over a period of more than twenty years, he touched his electrode to hundreds of exposed brains, prompting subjects to report a variety of memories. These memories included “watching a guy crawl through a hole in the fence at a baseball game”; “standing on the corner of Jacob and Washington, South Bend, Indiana”; “grabbing a stick out of a dog’s mouth”; “watching a man fighting”; “standing in the bathroom at school”; and “watching circus wagons one night years ago in childhood.”

It was as though Penfield were Albus Dumbledore of
Harry Potter
fame, dipping his magic wand into a Pensieve and pulling out stray, glittering thoughts. The science fiction quality of all this was not lost on author Philip K. Dick. In his novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
, later adapted for the screen as Blade Runner, characters use a device called a Penfield Mood Organ to dial up emotions on command. (Dick also wrote the novel on which the movie
Total Recall
was based.)

Penfield’s discovery generated excitement during the 1950s, when he first publicly revealed his findings. Some hailed it as clinical confirmation of the psychoanalytic concept of repressed memories. But as time wore on, the scientific community grew more skeptical. Other neurosurgeons failed to replicate Penfield’s results. In 1971 doctors Paul Fedio and John Van Buren of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke in Maryland stated bluntly that, in their extensive work with epileptic patients, they had never witnessed the phenomenon Penfield had reported. Brain researchers noted that it was definitely possible to provoke brief hallucinations by means of electrical stimulation of the brain, and experimenters such as Elizabeth Loftus of UC Irvine, whom we shall meet again in a few pages, built on this observation to argue that Penfield must have mistaken such hallucinations for memories. Basically, not many brain scientists today take seriously Penfield’s idea of a complete memory library hidden in our brain.

Still, it would be cool if Penfield were right and we
could
access everything we had ever seen or heard. We could press
²⁰
a button on a remote control and remember where we parked our car, or what we were supposed to buy at the supermarket. The only problem is that we’d still end up forgetting where we put the remote.

An elephant walks into a bar and challenges the bartender to a memory contest. “Loser pays for the drinks,” says the elephant. What should the bartender do?

Before answering, the bartender might want to consider the elephant-memory experiments of Bernhard Rensch. During the 1950s Rensch explored the relationship between brain size and intelligence in the animal kingdom. This led him to conduct a series of tests on a five-year-old Indian elephant at the Münster Zoological Institute, of which he was the director. His results suggested that while it’s not literally true that elephants never forget, they do have excellent memories.

Rensch started with a simple test. He presented the elephant (never identified by name) with two boxes, each marked by a different pattern, a cross or a circle. Would she remember that the box with the cross on its lid always contained food? It took her a while, over 330 tries, but eventually she figured it out. Rensch helped her by screaming “nein!” every time she chose the wrong box. Once she got the idea, she really got the idea. From then on she consistently chose the cross over the circle.

Rensch next introduced her to new pairs of positive (food) and negative (no food) patterns: stripes, curvy lines, dots, etc. Now that she understood the game, she was on a roll. She quickly mastered twenty pairs, a total of forty symbols. In a test using all the symbols, given in random order, she chose the correct pattern almost six hundred times in a row. Many humans would be hard-pressed to do as well.

The elephant could also pick out the correct box from a choice of three negative patterns and a positive one. However, when Rensch presented her with a negative-patterned box and a box with a blank lid (neither of which contained food), she got mad, tore the lids off the boxes, and trampled them. Apparently, elephants don’t like trick questions.

The hardest test was yet to come. Rensch waited a full year and showed the elephant thirteen of the symbol pairs she had previously learned. She immediately recognized them. In 520 successive trials, she scored between 73 and 100 percent on all the pairs except one, a double circle versus a double half circle. And even on that pair she scored 67 percent. Rensch declared it to be “a truly impressive scientific demonstration of the adage that ‘elephants never forget.’ ”

Science can’t generalize about an entire species based on a sample of one. Perhaps Rensch’s subject happened to be a genius. However, similar tests have confirmed the remarkable recall of elephants.

In 1964 Leslie Squier trained three elephants at the Portland Zoo to distinguish between lights of different color. They received a sugar cube as a reward for a correct response. Eight years later Hal Markowitz salvaged Squier’s equipment from a scrap heap and retested the elephants. One of them, Tuy Hoa, walked right up and gave the correct answers. She clearly remembered the test. The other two elephants didn’t
²¹
perform as well. But when Markowitz examined them he realized there was a reason for this. They were almost blind and couldn’t see the lights.

Given all this, how does our bartender respond to the challenge? Simple. He throws the elephant out on its trunk.

The elephant: “Why did you do that?”

The bartender: “Because you never paid your bill last time you were in here.”

The elephant: “That was three years ago. I didn’t think you would remember.”

The moral: Bartenders never forget, either.

Barmaids, it turns out, have pretty good memories, too. Anecdotal accounts have them remembering up to fifty drink orders at once on busy nights. Suspecting cocktail waitresses might be a previously unrecognized population of master mnemonists, Professor Henry Bennett of the University of California, Davis, set out to test just how good their memory skills were.

During the early 1980s he and a coinvestigator canvassed bars in San Francisco and Sacramento searching for waitresses willing to participate in their experiment. Whenever they found one who was agreeable, they whipped out a portable testing kit—a Ken-and-Barbie-style cocktail lounge housed in a suitcase. It had two miniature tables (covered with green felt), chairs, and male and female dolls, aka customers. The dolls were decorated “with different fabrics and jewellery appropriate to the doll’s gender. Hair color was painted on and some males received beards and/or moustaches so that, as in real life, each doll customer was a unique individual.” Bennett did not record whether the dolls wore ’80s-appropriate fashions such as Jordache jeans or
Flashdance
-style leggings.

As the life-size waitress looked on, the miniature customers placed their orders. They proceeded either sequentially around the table or in random order. A tape recording supplied their voices:
Bring me a margarita . . . I’ll have a Budweiser
. The experimenter wiggled each doll in turn to indicate who was speaking. Following a two-minute waiting period, the waitress had to deliver the drinks, which were “small laboratory rubber stoppers” with drink name flags poked into them. No real alcohol for Ken and Barbie.

After forty waitresses had been tested, Bennett repeated the experiment on forty UC Davis undergraduates. The result: The waitresses wiped the floor with the students. They averaged 90 percent correct, versus the students’ 77 percent. Furthermore, “waitresses were nearly twice as efficient in time to place each drink as were students.”

When interviewed, the waitresses had no idea why they were so good at remembering drink orders. They had never received any special training. It was just a skill picked up on the job. Intriguingly, most of them commented that their memory skills improved on busy nights when they got “in the flow.”

This stands in stark contrast to the memory skills of bar patrons. Their powers of recall decline on busy nights in an
²²
almost perfectly inverse relationship to the improvement seen in barmaids.