And then chaos came tumbling back in the opposite direction—numbers, shapes, patterns, colors . . . twisting, bending, whirling, merging . . . growing, shrinking . . . lines, curves. . . . His mind plunged into the whirlpool of thought kaleidoscoping inside his head. And suddenly it was gone.
He looked around and blinked. Bob, the Navy instructor, was watching him and grinning.
“It’s okay; I just switched it off,” he said. “That blow your mind?”
“You knew that would happen,” Clifford said after he had collected himself again. “What was it all about?”
“Everybody gets that the first time,” Bob told him. “It was only a couple of seconds . . . gives you an idea of the way it works, though. See, the BIAC acts like a gigantic feedback system for mental processes, only it amplifies them round the loop. It will pick up vague ideas that are flickering around in your head, extrapolate them into precisely defined and quantitive interpretations, and throw them straight back at you. If you’re not ready for it and you give it some junk, you get back superjunk; before you know it, the BIAC’s picked that up out of your head too, processed it the same way, and come back with super-superjunk. You get a huge positive feedback effect that builds up in no time at all. BIAC people call it a ‘garbage loop.’ ”
“That’s all very well,” Clifford said. “But what the hell do I do about it?”
“Learn to concentrate and to continue concentrating,” Bob told him. “It’s the stray, undisciplined thoughts that trigger it . . . the kinds of thing that run around in your head when you’ve got nothing in particular to focus on. Those are the things you have to learn to suppress.”
“That’s easy to say,” Clifford muttered, then shrugged helplessly. “But how do I start?” Bob grinned.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start by giving you some easy exercises for practice. Try ordinary simple arithmetic. Visualize the numbers you want to operate on, concentrate hard on them and also on the operation you want to perform, and exclude everything else. Get it fixed in your mind before I switch you in again. Okay?”
“Just anything?” Clifford shrugged. “Okay.” He mentally selected the digits 4 and 5 and elected to multiply them together, just to see what happened. The torrent of chaos hit him again before he realized Bob had hit the key.
“That was a bit sneaky of me,” Bob confessed. “The best time to slot in is often when the problem is clear in your mind. Try again?”
“Sure.”
After three more excursions round the garbage loop, Clifford sensed something different. Just for a split-second it was there; the concept of the number 20 seemed to explode in his brain, impressing itself with a clarity and a forcefulness that excluded everything else from his perceptions. Never before in his life had he experienced anything so vividly as that one simple number for that one brief moment. Then the garbage came at him again and swallowed it up. For a while he just sat there dumbstruck.
“Got it that time, huh?” Bob’s voice brought him back to reality.
“I think so, at least for a second.”
“That’s good,” Bob stated, encouraging his pupil. “You’ll find for a while that the shock of realizing it’s working distracts you enough to blow it. You’ll get over that though. Don’t try and fight it—just ride it easy. Try again?”
An hour later Bob posed the problem, “Two hundred seventy-three point five six multiplied by one hundred ninety-eight point seven one?”
Clifford gazed hard at the console, visualized the numbers, and almost immediately recited, “Fifty-four thousand, three hundred fifty-nine point one zero seven six.”
“Great stuff, Brad. I reckon that’ll do for a first session. Let’s break off for lunch and go have a beer.”
* * *
A week later Clifford was learning to cope with problems in elementary mechanics—situations involving concepts of shape, space, and motion as well as numerical relationships. He found, as his skills improved, that he could create a dynamic conceptual model of a multibody collision and instantly evaluate any of the variables involved. Not only that, he could, by simply willing it, replay the abstract experiment as many times as he liked from any perspective and in any variation that he pleased. He could “feel” the changing stress pattern in a mechanical structure subjected to moving loads, “see” the flow of currents in an electrical circuit as plainly as that of liquid in a network of glass tubes. By the end of the fourth week he could guide himself through to the solution of a tensor analysis as unerringly as he could guide his finger out of a maze in a child’s coloring book.