Quantum Night

14

YouTube has countless films of psychological experiments, and I often used the ceiling-mounted projector to show them to my students. One of my favorites is the Heider and Simmel animation from 1944, which starts by showing a large hollow square with a black triangle inside it. Soon one side of the square hinges open, and the triangle moves out. A smaller black triangle and a small circle move in from the right side of the frame. The three solid shapes slide around the screen, sometimes touching, while the hinged square periodically flaps open and closed.

I remember when I first saw that cartoon myself as an undergraduate in Menno Warkentin’s class. He asked us to write down what had happened in the film. I’d said the large triangle was a monster unleashed from a cage to chase off a boy and a girl who were out exploring; the boy—yeah, back then, my consciousness about gender-role stereotypes hadn’t yet been raised—bravely fought off the monster, while the girl snuck into the big square to steal treasure; eventually, the boy and girl escaped, and, in a fit of anger at having been bested, the monster destroyed its cage.

My response was typical if idiosyncratic. Others had seen mating rituals, battlefield maneuvers, or slapstick comedies—but we’d all experienced some sort of story. When Heider and Simmel first did this test, only three of their hundred and fourteen subjects dispassionately described what the film actually depicted: two squares and two triangles moving about an empty space. Everyone else constructed a narrative, pretty much out of whole cloth.

As always, my own students did not disappoint. Boris, in the front row, said, “It’s a political allegory, right? The big triangle, that’s the United States. And Mexico, that’s the little triangle. The flapping box represents the border, sometimes open and sometimes closed, and in the end, by trying to keep everyone out, the US ends up destroying itself.”

You could hear the crickets in the room; nobody else had seen anything quite like that, I guess.

I let a few more people share their interpretations—which ranged from bawdy to rom-com treacly to shoot-’em-up mayhem worthy of Liam Neeson—and then I got down to the point.

“There’s a word for what all of you have just done. It’s confabulation. We tell ourselves stories, building them out of almost nothing, then convince ourselves they’re true…”

Menno Warkentin didn’t come in to the university on Thursdays, so after my morning class, I headed over to his apartment in the heart of downtown. As always, the CBC was on in my car, this time with news that did surprise me.

Hayden Trenholm, the same pundit I’d heard interviewed yesterday, was speaking with Piya Chattopadhyay.

“So,” Piya said, in her bubbly voice, “former Calgary city mayor Naheed Nenshi has just thrown his hat into the ring, running as the federal NDP candidate in the riding of Calgary Southwest. Hayden, what do you make of that?”

“It’s a coup for the NDP,” said Trenholm, “since there has long been speculation that Nenshi was being wooed by the Trudeau Liberals. The fact he went to the NDP might be seen as an indication he has bigger ambitions than Cabinet. I wouldn’t be surprised if the caucus declares him the acting leader in the next few days.”

“And what about the riding he’s running in?”

“It’s the perfect choice if Nenshi is being positioned to lead the New Democrats. Calgary Southwest is Stephen Harper’s old riding; the folks in it know well the perks that go with being the home base of a prime minister. But people all across Calgary love Nenshi, and they enjoy that he’s become an international star. Back in 2013, when Rob Ford was the butt of jokes in Toronto, Nenshi was doing a conspicuously spectacular job in Calgary—so much so, as you’ll recall, Piya, that Maclean’s named him the second-most-important person in Canada, right after the prime minister.”

“True.”

“And in 2015, the City Mayors Foundation awarded Nenshi the World Mayor Prize, naming him the top mayor on the planet. The only other North American contender, Houston’s Annise Parker, came in seventh.”

I made a right turn onto Portage and started looking for a place to park.

Piya said, “When he was first elected in Calgary in 2010, Nenshi became the first Muslim mayor in North America.”

“Yes, that’s right,” replied Trenholm. “He practices Nizari Ismaili, a branch of Shia Islam.”

“But mayor is one thing,” said Piya. “Prime minister is something else. Is Canada ready for a Muslim at 24 Sussex Drive?”

“Well,” replied the pundit, “that’s for the people to decide—four weeks from today.”

As they moved on to the next story, I found a spot on the street—a rare find this time of day—and even though it was three blocks from Menno’s apartment, I took it.

I’d dropped him off a few times before but had never been up to his second-floor suite (no point paying extra for a view, he’d quipped). I was somewhat curious about how—or if—he’d decorated the place.

In fact, it turned out to be nicer than my condo; the living-room furniture, in silver and cyan, was clearly a matching set, and each wall had a lovely framed Emily Carr print showing the British Columbia coast. Replica Haida totem poles—dark, unpainted wood—flanked the door to the kitchen.

Menno was dressed as old professors usually were, in slightly baggy beige slacks and a brown cardigan. He had his dark glasses on; I wondered if he normally wore them when alone or had put them on when I’d buzzed from the lobby.

“Jim!” he said when I’d arrived at his unit’s door “Welcome! What brings you here?” He motioned for me to come in. Pax was eyeing me from across the room. “Have a seat.”

I did so, settling onto the couch. Menno sat in the easy chair that faced it at an oblique angle. There was a little table next to it on the left; Pax sat down beside him on the right.

“I’ve seen the video interviews with me,” I said.

“About the Devin Becker trial?”

“What? No, no. The ones you did. In 2001. With me. In the old physiology building at Fort Garry.”

Protracted silence, then: “How did you find those?”

“The truth? I had a look around your office.”

Menno was quiet again. “Oh,” he said at last.

“I’d asked you what had happened during that period. Why didn’t you show me the tapes?”

“I know it was news to you that you’d lost your memory, Jim. But it wasn’t news to me.”

“Jesus, Menno. How long have you known?”

“Since 2001. Since you lost it. I’m sorry, but, well, it was obvious back then. I didn’t realize you’d lost six whole months, but it was clear you’d lost some amount of time.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Because you were on the mend.”

“The mend? From what?”

“I don’t know,” Menno said. He couldn’t see my expression, but must have sensed I was going to object because he held up a hand. “Honestly, I’ve tried for twenty years to figure it out.” He exhaled loudly. “You know what? It’s a relief to get to talk about it. Since Dominic moved away, I’ve had no one to discuss this with.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Dominic Adler and I were working on developing a device to detect phonemes that hadn’t been spoken aloud—that is, for detecting articulated thoughts in the brain. You’d responded to our notice in The Manitoban, looking for experimental subjects.”

I did a lot of those sorts of things back then; anything to bring in a few extra bucks. “I remember. Some sort of helmet contraption…?”

Menno nodded. “We had two of them, actually. We started out with the first one, and we could indeed pick up the activity in your brain, but it was very faint, and it was being drowned out by what we thought was noise. So we developed a second helmet that added transcranial ultrasound. The idea was to see if we could boost the signal we wanted in your primary auditory cortex, make it more of an internal shout rather than a whisper, so we could pick it up better with our scanner. But instead you and—you lost consciousness.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, you did. TUS stimulation was completely new back then; we didn’t expect it.”

I put a hand on my chest. “What I do remember from that period is the knifing, but…”

“Yes?”

“Well, from what I can tell, I was here in Winnipeg on New Year’s Eve 2000, not in Calgary.”

Menno lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know where you got the idea of the knifing from, but it didn’t happen, at least not then. But… yeah. You were here that night—and got knocked out by our helmet, and when you came back, well, you didn’t come all the way back.”

I looked at him quizzically, but he couldn’t see that. “What?”

“You’d had an inner voice beforehand—I’d seen it on the oscilloscope—but, as we soon discovered, it was gone afterward.”

“What do you mean, ‘an inner voice’?”

“Just that: an internal monologue; articulated phonemes in the brain even when you weren’t speaking. But after you blacked out, it was gone. The lights were on—”

“—but nobody was home?” I said. “Seriously? Really?”

“Yes.”

“A fucking p-zed? A philosopher’s zombie? Jesus. Not just amnesia, but…” I shook my head. “No. No, that’s just a thought experiment. A philosopher’s zombie can’t really exist.”

Menno was quiet for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, in a soft voice, he said, “They do. They’re everywhere.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Most of the people we tested didn’t have inner voices.”

“Then your equipment must—”

“Stop! You think we didn’t triple check? What I’m telling you is true.” He waved generally in my direction. “The only thing remarkable about you was that you had started out with an inner voice, then lost it for a time after you blacked out.”

“How long was I out?”

“Maybe five minutes. And a few days later, we tested you again—without the TUS, of course—and, well, your inner voice was gone.”

“And so you decided to interview me on a regular basis to see—”

“To see if there was any difference. I wish we’d done some interviews with you beforehand, but we had no way to know what was going to happen.”

“I didn’t watch the interviews all the way through, but I didn’t notice anything different—”

“There wasn’t anything major,” confirmed Menno. “Your external behavior was much the same as before.”

“Until the final tape,” I said.

“Oh,” Menno said, very softly. “Right.”

“It wasn’t just on that tape. People could tell; Kayla could. I’d changed.”

“Kayla?”

“My girlfriend—at the time, I mean. Kayla Huron, and—”

Menno looked startled. “Huron?”

“She was one of your students. I saw her yesterday, for the first time in almost twenty years. She told me I—I hit her back then. Me!” I shook my head, still struggling with that reality. “And then, my God, the horrible things I said in that last interview. Un-fucking-believable.”

He nodded slowly. “You did change near the end. I don’t know why.”

“You must have some idea! And, for Pete’s sake—why’d I change back to normal?”

“Jim, honestly, I don’t know. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, for almost six months before that change, you were indeed a philosopher’s zombie.” He moved his head left and right—perhaps in negation, perhaps visualizing the hordes that had haunted him for decades. “And you were just as vacant, just as empty, just as dead inside as the countless millions of others surrounding us all the time.”

I walked—or staggered—out of the lobby of Menno’s condo onto Portage Avenue. Here, at lunch-time, there were thousands of people going east, and thousands more going west, and I just stood still, an island in the stream, fighting to keep my balance.

Coming toward me was a man with his head bent and his thumbs typing away on his phone. Behind him were two men wearing earbuds—both, as it happened, with the distinctive white Apple cables. They flowed past, not even glancing at me, just mindlessly navigating around an obstacle.

Mindlessly.

Jesus, could it be?

Three teenage girls were coming toward me now, smoking. The Surgeon General’s report had come out probably before their parents had been born, but still, vapidly, they smoked. This time, I was the one to move out of the way, trying to avoid their exhalations.

And since I was moving, I continued to do so; Newton’s first law, and all that. I passed a homeless man, a cardboard sign next to him saying, “Hungry—Please Help.” In front of him was an empty Campbell’s soup can; some people had tossed coins into it.

I wonder if Canada eliminating pennies from circulation in 2013 had much of an impact on panhandlers. Of course, anyone offering a single penny would have been rightly cursed for it, but, still, there was a lot less small change to go around. On the other hand, Canada had one- and two-dollar coins in wide use, something Americans had never managed; maybe our indigents did better than theirs.

Years ago, I’d read that the introduction of the first credit cards had had a big impact on the incomes of bunnies in Playboy Clubs. Before that, when they’d had to pay cash, men would say “Keep the change,” even if it resulted in exorbitant tips. But once they started filling out charge slips, they did the math and tipped the normal percentage.

Christ, what digressions! But that’s the way my mind works—one thought sparking another, a cascade of notions and connections. And I’d always assumed it was that way for everyone, but…

But if what Menno had found was true, then most of these people weren’t having inner monologues like mine; most of them didn’t have thoughts bouncing around from place to place. No, most of them weren’t thinking at all, at least not in a first-person, self-reflective way; they weren’t having any subjective experiences.

I looked at them as I continued to walk. Hundreds upon hundreds of people wearing blue jeans—a default, an easy choice, a simple rule.

I remember Monty Henderson, who lived on my parents’ street. He’d gone on to join the Calgary Police. He said that on the first day of training the new recruits were told to “fit in or fuck off”—and they all just capitulated.

I was moving mostly against the flow of pedestrians now; for whatever reason, the tide had turned, and the bulk of them were going west. One bumped into me. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and beetled on.

I’d once seen a documentary about flocking behavior in birds. To get the effect we observe, each bird only has to apply three simple rules. The “separation rule” says avoid crowding your neighbors—you gotta give the other birds some room in order to avoid collisions. The “alignment rule” says look at where all the other birds are going and pick a heading for yourself that’s an average of everyone else’s trajectories. And the “cohesion rule” says move toward the average position of all your neighbors, an edict that prevents the flock from dissipating. Computer models that employ these rules produce behavior indistinguishable from real flocking; similar rules control the schooling of fish.

Could the movements of humans be equally simple? Birds almost certainly did this without conscious thought; fish clearly did.

A flock of birds. A school of fish. A crowd of humans.

Were we really all that different?

And were other rules just as simple, and just as mindlessly applied? Choose clothes that are similar to those that others are wearing; adopt phrases you’ve heard others use; lower your gaze when passing someone; try not to bump into people, but if you do, apologize.

So many of the things we do are clearly algorithmic. Did I really think I was the first unathletic kid to fake tripping over a nonexistent stone to explain a pathetic performance in a race? They all do that. The first guy to try the old yawn-becoming-an-arm-around-her-shoulders-at-the-movies bit? They all do that. The first person to…

Maybe it didn’t even take three rules; maybe it took only one.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.