did work is what made Cletus ask “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?”
Of course there have always been great thinkers and writers and composers who
were blind (and in the twentieth century, some painters to whom eyesight was
irrelevant), and many of them, like Amy with her violin, felt that their talent
was a compensating gift. Cletus wondered whether there might be a literal truth
to that, in the micro-anatomy of the brain. It didn’t happen every time, or else
all blind people would be geniuses. Perhaps it happened occasionally, through a
mechanism like the one that helped people recover from strokes. Perhaps it could
be made to happen.
Cletus had been offered scholarships at both Harvard and MIT, but he opted for
Columbia, in order to be near Amy while she was studying at Julliard. Columbia
reluctantly allowed him a triple major in physiology, electrical engineering,
and cognitive science, and he surprised everybody who knew him by doing only
moderately well. The reason, it turned out, was that he was treating
undergraduate work as a diversion at best; a necessary evil at worst. He was
racing ahead of his studies in the areas that were important to him.
If he had paid more attention in trivial classes like history, like philosophy,
things might have turned out differently. If he had paid attention to literature
he might have read the story of Pandora.
Our own story now descends into the dark recesses of the brain. For the next ten
years the main part of the story, which we will try to ignore after this
paragraph, will involve Cletus doing disturbing intellectual tasks like cutting
up dead brains, learning how to pronounce cholecystokinin, and sawing holes in
peoples’ skulls and poking around inside with live electrodes.
In the other part of the story, Amy also learned how to pronounce
cholecystokinin, for the same reason that Cletus learned how to play the violin.
Their love grew and mellowed, and at the age of 19, between his first doctorate
and his M.D., Cletus paused long enough for them to be married and have a
whirlwind honeymoon in Paris, where Cletus divided his time between the musky
charms of his beloved and the sterile cubicles of Institute Marey, learning how
squids learn things, which was by serotonin pushing adenylate cyclase to
catalyze the synthesis of cyclic adenosine monophosphate in just the right
place, but that’s actually the main part of the story, which we have been trying
to ignore, because it gets pretty gruesome.
They returned to New York, where Cletus spent eight years becoming a pretty good
neurosurgeon. In his spare time he tucked away a doctorate in electrical
engineering. Things began to converge.
At the age of thirteen, Cletus had noted that the brain used more cells
collecting, handling, and storing visual images than it used for all the other
senses combined. “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?” was just a specific
case of the broader assertion, “The brain doesn’t know how to make use of what
it’s got.” His investigations over the next fourteen years were more subtle and
complex than that initial question and statement, but he did wind up coming
right back around to them.
Because the key to the whole thing was the visual cortex.
When a baritone saxophone player has to transpose sheet music from cello, he
(few women are drawn to the instrument) merely pretends that the music is
written in treble clef rather than bass, eyeballs it up an octave, and then
plays without the octave key pressed down. It’s so simple a child could do it,
if a child wanted to play such a huge, ungainly instrument. As his eye dances
along the little fenceposts of notes, his fingers automatically perform a
one-to-one transformation that is the theoretical equivalent of adding and
subtracting octaves, fifths, and thirds, but all of the actual mental work is
done when he looks up in the top right corner of the first page and says, “Aw
hell. Cello again.” Cello parts aren’t that interesting to saxophonists.
But the eye is the key, and the visual cortex is the lock. When blind Amy
“sight-reads” for the violin, she has to stop playing and feel the Braille notes