When I was a kid, they still had stage acts and, of course, Ed Sullivan with his bag of variety performances (now they have America Has Talent, which I haven't watched, but from what I've heard, isn't true). One stage act I saw, and also saw repeated on TV in various formats, was the mentalists, and they always fascinated me, as they did everyone. This was way before mentalist acquired its current definition of mind reader, which I believe occurred when mind reading left the circus tents and became a popular entertainment. A mentalist, in the old sense, would come on stage before an audience. The audience would then stand up at random and provide the mentalist with an identifying name. After the mentalist had about forty or fifty of these names, he would proceed to do something else. Ten or fifteen minutes later, he would face the audience and tell the people he called to stand up. He then proceeded to call the names out in the exact order he had learned them.
Like everything that mystifies us, I thought the mentalist had a prodigious memory. Others said he had a photographic memory. I've always thought the photographic memory was a myth of the novelists, and checking Wikipedia, which of late has gotten some bumps for false information, we find a number of recorded examples of people with extraordinary memories, a man who memorized the order of cards in a randomly shuffled 52-card deck in 42.01 seconds, for instance. This guy is doing the same thing the mentalist of yore did on stage.
What are they doing? A number of years ago, I read a book, I don't know by whom, if my memory serves correctly, it was translated into English back in the twenties, which provided the answer. A mentalist who indeed made his living on stage the very way I described wrote the book. That was the reason I read the book because I wanted to find out how they did it. He said it was really quite simple, a process he had learned from, I think, his uncle, who was also a mentalist. His uncle told him to pick a four block square section of the city and then walk it. As he walked it, he was to pick out some permanent physical fixture, a window, a lamppost, a staircase, a curbstone, a marker and so forth. Pick fifty or sixty items, and make a note of them as you go.
He wasn't to memorize the list, he was to keep it with him for reference purposes, and then every day, over and over, he was to walk the route and name the next fixture, keeping one ahead of the one he was actually seeing. He followed this route many thousands of times over the next years as he grew up. By the time he was an adult, the route was indelibly inscribed in his memory. He couldn't forget it if he tried.
The next step was relatively simple. Take the case of the card player. The first card is the six of hearts, so the mentalist associates the six of hearts with the first fixture in his journey. The next card is the ten of clubs, and the mentalist associates the second card with the second fixture in his journey. He can do this through the entire 52-card deck, and when he restarts his journey, each fixture recalls a card and he names it. The same association happens with names. As the mentalist stands before the audience, he is, in his mind, taking his journey, attaching each name he hears with the sequential fixtures in his journey. Until the names are disassociated from the fixtures, the mentalist will recall them as part of his journey.
This, of course, provides two extremely useful insights into how the mind operates. I read it at a time when I had no theory about the mind's operation, but when I set up my daily activities, I realized I was always finding myself thinking about the next item on my list when I was finishing up the current item. I realized the reason this was happening was because I always carried a 3x5 pad in my breast pocket on which, at the beginning of each day, I wrote out what I needed to do and then I arranged the tasks in a manner that would allow me to accomplish them in the shortest period of time.
I remember wondering at the time, could memory really be that simple, one thing leads to another? I pretty much forgot the whole thing, however, until I read a book that described management practices back in the last decades of the 19th Century. Henry Ford had yet to invent the production line, the ultimate form of sequencing, but modern managers were grappling with it in the years up to its invention without really knowing what it was. A company would produce bicycle parts, or parts for a generator, or even the generators themselves, all of the trappings of what was to become our production based society. Production was usually set up at the direction of the owner of the company or someone the owner had hired. Once the process for production was set, new employees were taught how to fit in, and that was that, production went on without any reference to the possible efficiencies of altering the process.
Everybody knows from experience that there are ways to do things and there are ways to do things. Some people do things in a certain way simply because that's the way they are used to doing something. But anyone who's taken on a task with a number of activities involved in its completion knows that there is an efficient way to do something and an inefficient way to do it. Most tasks require one activity before the next one is useful to completing the task, but that is not apparent at the outset of the task. It is only by trial and error, by changing the order of doing things, that we soon realize that there actually is one efficient way to perform the task. In the marketplace, where production is judged on costs, the more efficient a task can be performed, the less time it takes to perform it and the cheaper it is. The profession of efficiency experts came into existence, and reading some of the things they encountered in the old management books is fascinating, but they had the advantage of looking objectively at the overall production process and putting the tasks together in proper order. These professionals were simply sequencing external functions.
The mind utilizes sequencing to allow us to perform the perfunctory actions that are a part of our everyday reality without interfering with the more important function of the mind, which is to deal with that reality. We all know that we don't try to put the toothpaste on the brush without first opening the tube. We don't really form a conscious picture of ourselves taking the cap off the toothpaste tube before we take the cap off the toothpaste tube. Yet we can't perform any action in reality without first forming a picture of ourselves taking that action. If we didn't have a picture of ourselves taking a cap off the toothpaste tube, we might be puzzled how to go about doing it. But we have such a picture, and we do form it, we just don't concentrate on it. We have a picture of ourselves performing every task involved with brushing our teeth, and the only problem we will have with brushing our teeth is if something in external reality doesn't match the picture we have formed of ourselves doing the particular activity. There are not many surprises, which are what we call pictures of external reality that don't agree with what we expect of external reality, involved with brushing our teeth, but the kids might have bought some fake toothpaste made out of peppers, and then we'd be surprised.
For the most part, though, we are going to go through the process smoothly, and this is because our mind is sequencing the series of pictures we are forming to do the task. Pick up brush recalls open toothpaste recalls spread toothpaste on brush recalls put brush in mouth recalls move brush back and forth. One memory recalls the next memory in line until the task is finished. We can sit there and think about anything we want, what we're going to do that day, where we're going to go, what we're going to have for lunch, but the moving picture of the sequencing is quietly running in the background controlling our external physical actions.
Empirical science likes to claim this is the product of the unconscious mind, that vast storehouse of misery that lies just below the puny consciousness we possess of reality. See column 49-05. The fact is, while we have only one mind and can form only one picture at a time, forming pictures to act does not stop us from thinking about other things while we are acting, and it is sequencing that allows this to occur. Our pictures of reality are recallable because we generate the specific current level the picture is stored at. See column 25-06. When we create a sequence, we are creating a series of pictures stored at approximately the same current level, with one picture generating a current level that recalls the next picture. This is not a product of voodoo magic, it is a product of our ability to think independently of the acts we are performing, the benefit of sequencing itself. When I make my list up in the morning and sequence what I want to do, I'm creating recall of ordering pictures that are already in my recall, and when I say pictures, I include sequencing pictures like the one burned into the mind of the mentalist walking the four blocks. All those images were things he was familiar with, pictures he already had in his mind. But he was creating another memory unit, a picture that contained a sequence of existing pictures.
As I go through my day, I start out with the first item on my list. It's something I've done before, of course, so when I undertake that activity, the sequencing memory unit for that activity kicks in and I can perform it while I'm thinking of other activities. Of course, this is not true of activities that are new to me. Each column, for instance, is something new to me. However, the activity, sitting at a computer working a keyboard, is a separately sequenced activity, and I can carry that out while I write the column. When I come to something that isn't right, something that is either inconsistent or I haven't thought of, the sequencing stops cold because my mind now has to refocus on something else, what is it about the territory I've entered that isn't ringing true, and my typing stops because I can no longer form a picture of myself typing.
This means that sequencing gives us the chance to think independently of what we are doing. The very process of thinking produces sequenced memory units, memory units that tie together bits and pieces of other existing memory units. Creating these sequenced memory units is how we advance ourselves, both theoretically and practically. Empirical science defeats the purpose of sequencing by concentrating itself into smaller and smaller segments of reality, robbing it of the ability to exploit the massive amounts of information we've collected about reality. Going back to the 19th Century management problem, each employee was told to learn his job and focus on it. There were a lot of people doing a lot of jobs, but none had access to the information necessary to operate the whole. The sequenced memory units we can form are dictated by the existing memory units we have, and if we have memory units for gravity that do not provide an explanation for gravity, memory units for motion which do not provide an explanation for motion, memory units for light and matter that don't provide an explanation for light and matter, the sequenced memory units we create will be crippled at the outset and our theories about reality won't reflect reality.
The second part of the mentalist's trick, associating pictures he has no memory units for to parts of an existing sequenced memory unit, demonstrates not only how the mind works, but how empirical science fails to exploit it to probe reality. The fact that we all have short term and long term memory is well known. There are things we need to know right now that we'll never need to know again. When the mentalist associated the face and name of Jenny with a lamppost, he created a short-term memory unit. As long as he recalls that memory within a short period of time, he'll remember it. If he doesn't, the memory unit will fade into nonexistence. Thus, what he's doing is creating fifty or sixty short-term memories that are fixed in a sequencing memory unit, and they'll stay there for a short period of time. When he goes to perform the next time, he's got a sequenced memory unit with no existing memory units, and he can make the associations all over again.
What empirical science does, however, is create a sequenced memory unit, a narrative of reality, and then attaches long term memory units to it. Every field has a narrative of reality, and that narrative is set out in textbooks and course materials to be attached together to produced a sequenced memory unit of the field. As empirical fields narrow, the sequenced memory units become more restrictive. No cross fertilization between and among the various sequenced memory units occurs, so the result is entirely new fields of empirical endeavor creating sequenced memory units that attempt to consistently explain the existing sequenced memory units. As the existing sequenced memory units have all been corrupted by incorporating existing memory units that don't explain reality, the emerging fields become wilder and wilder, string theory, multi-dimensional space warps, disrupted space/time continuums, no fantasy is too wild so long as it accommodates the basic sequenced memory units that referenced nonexplanations for reality.
We really can't understand reality if we can't explain how our minds work, and we're dealing with empirical science, which denies the existence of the mind.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com