Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Read Free

with
plenty of separation between us. Because her eyes were fixed
leftward, she had to swivel her head toward the right shoulder in
order to look at me.
    I positioned her head straight on with one
hand and said to her, "Look at me." Her head fought my restraining
hand, trying to comply, but I held firmly and kept repeating, "Look
at me."
    The only evidence that she
was trying to do so was in the muscles of the good left side of her
face as she squinted, scowled, twitched the cheek, curled the lip.
After about twenty seconds of that she exploded with a frustrated
expletive: "Shit!"
    I laughed. She laughed. I
released her for a moment, showed her how I did it with my own
eyes, positioned her straight on again, said, "Now, dammit, look at
me."
    Again she yelled, "Shit!" But there was a
movement there—a twitch, anyway. We kept at it. After a minute or
so she was starting to get the hang of it, but I was not sure that
the eyes were tracking together. Curious thing about the visual
fields. Each eye has two of them, left and right field in each eye,
each field wired to the corresponding control side of the brain.
Right brain, left visual field; left brain, right visual field.
Since Jane Doe had no left brain, she also had no right visual
field in either eye. Which would indicate, I gathered, that she
could not take in a whole image with a single glance; she would
have to "scan" the object with the single field available to her
and reconstruct the fractured pictures thus gained into a whole
image. I had already noticed that she "saw" in somewhat this
fashion, evidenced by a slight quivering of the eyes while locked
leftward.
    But don't get the idea
that I was dabbling in physical therapy. I lay no claims to
expertise in that area. I presumed that someone was working with
this woman to restore all possible bodily functions. My interest
was in her mind itself and how it worked through only half a brain,
the surviving nonverbal side. It had immediately become obvious
that she was processing information and trying to respond
intelligently—"thinking," in other words. But thinking how and
with what? It had been scientifically demonstrated that the right
cerebral cortex is superior to the left in certain areas of human
consciousness, but virtually all that we regard as intellectual
processes are typically handled by the left hemisphere.
    For example, if Jane Doe had lost her right
hemisphere instead of the left, her closest friends would see
little noticeable difference in her personality. Her speech may be
a bit flat, unemotional, and tending toward the literal—no
appreciation for metaphor or delicate shadings of meaning. Ask
left-brained Jane, "What time is it?" and she may well respond,
"What time is what?" Or ask her how she feels and she may tell you
that she feels with her hands. She may get lost inside her own
home, not be able to find the bathroom, have difficulty fitting her
arms and legs inside her clothing, and never dream again, but she
could sit and chat with you for hours without demonstrating any
loss of intellectual ability.
    But I was dealing with a
right-brained Jane—a person whose memories were largely sensory and
emotional impressions and whose thoughts were not structured
through language. So how the hell were they structured, in what
kind of format did she think, and how could I tap into those
thoughts? I was not all that concerned about her fixated eyes; I
was going for the mental reaction to all that.
    What I got, though, was
quite a bit more than I had been going for. I had been patiently
wrestling with her head for about five minutes when she snarled,
"Well, fuck it!" just as clearly and with the same level of disgust
experienced by any normal person. She kissed my hand, then
maneuvered herself close against me and nuzzled my throat, moaning
softly and agitating her pajama-clad body against mine.
    I thought, Oh shit! and
was trying to gracefully extricate myself from the situation when
an obviously very