Fernyhough - A Box of Birds

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Charles Fernyhough is a writer and psychologist. His first novel, The Auctioneer, was widely praised. The Baby in the Mirror, his book about the first three years of his daughters psychological development, was translated into seven languages. His most recent non-fiction book, Pieces of Light, is about the science and stories of autobiographical memory. He divides his time between London and County Durham.

FICTION

The Auctioneer

NON-FICTION

The Baby in the Mirror

Pieces of Light

For Valerie and her grandchildren

When you begin to study the warblers you will probably conclude that you know nothing about birds, and can never learn. But if you begin by recognizing their common traits, and then study a few of the easiest, and those that nest in your locality, you will be less discouraged; and when flocks come back at the next migration you will be able to master the oddities of a larger number.

Florence Merriam,
Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889

Tit lark
I dont know it

Red Lark
never seen it

Great Lark
dont know it

John Clare,
Bird List of 182526

They turn up in fancy dress, expecting a party. They can arrive at my lab done up like naughty French maids, jolly pirates still drunk from the sea, or maybe a pair of gorillas with realistic flaring nostrils. Once, they broke into someones amateur dramatics costume cupboard and came straight here with the spoils, and I spent an hour teaching the essentials of synaptic signalling to both ends of a moth-eaten pantomime horse. I tell them that neuroscience is a serious business, but its hard to be serious about anything when youve chosen your third-year options and theres no coursework due this side of Easter. Gareth shows up first, glancing around at the framed photographs of professors on the corridor walls, wondering which door is my lab and what he would have to do to get in there. James swaggers on behind, carrying his public-school confidence like a bulky parcel on a busy street, expecting people to get out of his way. Theyre not meant to be up here on the research floors at all, given the security situation, but this is the only part of the Institute where I can hide their threadbare costume dramas from fellow scientists eyes. Besides, I have to get some facts down them if theyre going to have a chance of passing anything this year. At least if they come up here to my office, they cant attract any attention. Persuade them to keep the noise down, and no one will have to know theyre here.

Im going to need a volunteer, I tell them.

Gareth dumps his file onto one of the comfy chairs and offers himself uncertainly. Today hes turned up as a Franciscan nun, complete with black veil, polyester tunic and clunky plastic neck-cross. His eyes are anxious and shadowy, and cant stand anything for long. He gives the constant impression that someone is shooting at him.

Im going to need you to sign a consent form. What were doing involves pretty harmless magnetic fields, but we need to get the paperwork right.

James finally gives up on trying to read the secrets of my desktop and settles down in the other chair. Shes going to experiment on your brain, Gaz. Shes going to wire you up to her machines and find out what makes you tick.

Am I wearing that? Gareth says.

I grapple with the box. I come up holding an aluminium-cased helmet padded thickly with foam. A spacesuit visor slots over integrated goggles. A spinal column of processors and cables hangs down from the back.

For a little while, I say. Just long enough for us to find out what youre thinking.

Better take your wimple off, Sister, James says.

Ive pulled the blinds down in the office. The one-way glass of the observation window looks out onto the black emptiness of the lab. Outside its daylight, a bright March afternoon in the heart of the Forest Campus. James and I are perched on the workbench by the door, separated by a pile of research papers. Gareth is sitting in the comfy chair with his head inside the helmet, which is feeding real-time outputs to a desktop machine linked to a distant mainframe. The output of the software is going to a series of floor-mounted projectors planted in a fairy ring on the carpet. The space between us is filled with a huge 3-D hologram of Gareths brain.

What does it look like? Gareth says.

Colourful, James replies. Id say the rude thoughts are the pink ones.

Gareth makes a snorting sound behind the visor, and a blob of brilliant yellow shoots out from the centre of the light-show and dissolves into the rose-threaded haze of his frontal lobe.

Can you actually tell what Im thinking?

I laugh, and realise I shouldnt. This isnt the movies, Gareth. You cant read someones thoughts like you read a computer file. You can see which brain areas are active, but thats pretty much all. Its a toy, really. Something to keep my brightest students interested.

Think of something pleasant, Gaz, James says.

His friends lips move behind the visor. Blue streaks of neural activity loop from front to back of the brilliant ghost-brain, and a warm red glow swells in his limbic system, that blurred loop of nuclei lodged between the two hemispheres.

Not that pleasant, perv-features ...

Im wondering how far back this friendship goes. The fancy-dress thing, the nerdy jargon, this shared certainty about whats funny and not funny. It suggests a schoolboy closeness. A history.

Have a look, I say.

Gareth lifts the visor. As soon as the light sparks on his retinas you can see a smudge of activity way over in his visual cortex, on the far right from where were looking.

Thats you seeing. The bit at the back is where you process visual information.

So you could download this stuff...you could put all my thoughts and memories onto some massive hard drive and have a virtual Gareth Buckle sitting there on your computer?