much, never had, but by the last high wavering note he was weeping into his
hands, and he knew that if she wanted him, she could have him forever, and oddly
enough, considering his age and what eventually happened, he was right.
He would learn to play the violin before he had his first doctorate, and during
a lifetime of remarkable amity they would play together for ten thousand hours,
but all of that would come after the big idea. The big idea–“Why aren’t all
blind people geniuses?”–was planted that very night, but it didn’t start to
sprout for another week.
Like most 13-year-olds, Cletus was fascinated by the human body, his own and
others, but his study was more systematic than others’ and, atypically, the
organ that interested him most was the brain.
The brain isn’t very much like a computer, although it doesn’t do a bad job,
considering that it’s built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure
chance than anything else. One thing computers do a lot better than brains,
though, is what Cletus and Lindy had been talking about over their little squids
in tomato sauce: partitioning.
Think of the computer as a big meadow of green pastureland, instead of a little
dark box full of number-clogged things that are expensive to replace, and that
pastureland is presided over by a wise old magic shepherd who is not called a
macroprogram. The shepherd stands on a hill and looks out over the pastureland,
which is full of sheep and goats and cows. They aren’t all in one homogeneous
mass, of course, since the cows would step on the lambs and kids and the goats
would make everybody nervous, leaping and butting, so there are partitions of
barbed wire that keep all the species separate and happy.
This is a frenetic sort of meadow, though, with cows and goats and sheep coming
in and going out all the time, moving at about 3 x 108 meters per second, and if
the partitions were all of the same size it would be a disaster, because
sometimes there are no sheep at all, but lots of cows, who would be jammed in
there hip to hip and miserable. But the shepherd, being wise, knows ahead of
time how much space to allot to the various creatures and, being magic, can move
barbed wire quickly without hurting himself or the animals. So each partition
winds up marking a comfortable-sized space for each use. Your computer does
that, too, but instead of barbed wire you see little rectangles or windows or
file folders, depending on your computer’s religion.
The brain has its own partitions, in a sense. Cletus knew that certain physical
areas of the brain were associated with certain mental abilities, but it wasn’t
a simple matter of “music appreciation goes over there; long division in that
corner.” The brain is mushier than that. For instance, there are pretty
well-defined partitions associated with linguistic functions, areas named after
French and German brain people. If one of those areas is destroyed, by stroke or
bullet or flung frying pan, the stricken person may lose the ability–reading or
speaking or writing coherently–associated with the lost area.
That’s interesting, but what is more interesting is that the lost ability
sometimes comes back over time. Okay, you say, so the brain grew back–but it
doesn’t! You’re born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have. (Ask any child.)
What evidently happens is that some other part of the brain has been sitting
around as a kind of back-up, and after a while the wiring gets rewired and
hooked into that back-up. The afflicted person can say his name, and then his
wife’s name, and then “frying pan,” and before you know it he’s complaining
about hospital food and calling a divorce lawyer.
So on that evidence, it would appear that the brain has a shepherd like the
computer-meadow has, moving partitions around, but alas, no. Most of the time
when some part of the brain ceases to function, that’s the end of it. There may
be acres and acres of fertile ground lying fallow right next door, but nobody in
charge to make use of it–at least not consistently. The fact that it sometimes