Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Read Free Page B

hell under the right circumstances.
    The whole face is like
this, everything properly proportioned and harmonized with just
the right complementarity; I mean, the chin beneath that delicately
sensuous mouth is the chin that should be there, the plane of the
cheeks so fittingly flowing into the gentle lifting of that
delicate nose, the brows and forehead providing such pleasingly
subtle emphasis to the warm eyes—even her hair, softly lustrous,
sort of ash blond with just the right shading to perfectly backdrop
all that.
    If it sounds like I am a
bit smitten, you are exactly right about that. Of course, I am
especially vulnerable to beautiful women—sensitized, you might say,
by a highly active libido that reflexively responds quite a few
steps ahead of intellectual reaction. If the object of that reflex
is especially alluring, then, of course, the intellect has a hell
of a tussle on its hands. At this particular moment with Alison
Saunders the intellect is already aware that it is locked in a
losing battle, but it keeps trying, anyway.
    We have returned Jane Doe
to her room and made sure that she is secure and comfortable. Doc
Saunders and I are now at a small table in the cafeteria—facing
each other knee to knee, as it were, and I am electrically aware of
those knees that are almost but not quite touching mine, except now
and then, as one of us "accidentally" makes contact. Although we
are engaged in a very absorbing clinical discussion of Jane Doe,
one little corner of my mind is still under libido domination and
wondering if she is feeling what I am feeling beneath all the
shoptalk.
    Alison has just finished summarizing the
physical effects of Jane's hemispherectomy, and now we are getting
into the psychological effects.
    "Of course," she has just
told me, "the human brain is a highly complex organ. It is probable
that no two are exactly alike in the way they are organized. This
is the first hemispherectomy I have dealt with directly, and the
literature itself is not all that rich. But there have been
cases—especially, it seems, in women—where lateralization before
damage or surgery was not all that marked, and therefore both
hemispheres have developed verbal abilities."
    I was searching my mental
textbook for that one. "Lateralization is, uh ..."
    "Hemispheric
specialization," she explained. "This usually begins developing at
about the age of six, after the neural connections between the left
and right hemispheres have matured. For most of us the
lateralization process begins favoring the left hemisphere for
verbal and the right hemisphere for spatial development. It has
been discovered that in general, females become less lateralized
than males. Don't ask me why, but it surely has something to do
with natural selection and sex roles. However, that does not appear
to be the case with Jane. She has only the most primitive verbal
ability, which indicates that her right hemisphere—the surviving brain
tissue—was strongly lateralized—that is, specialized —for nonverbal
functions."
    I said, "She cusses pretty well."
    Alison laughed softly and
replied, "That's characteristic, I'm afraid. Swearing seems to be a
right-brain specialty. Most right brains, it seems, develop a
capability for emotional verbalization. To some extent, too, even
in the marked cases of lateralization, there seems to be a rather
rich right-brain store of prelateralized memories—even verbal
memories, such as nursery rhymes and other words learned by
rote."
    "Why can't Jane remember her own name,
then?" I inquired.
    "Perhaps she does."
    "Then why has she not produced it?"
    "Possibly she simply cannot access it."
    "You mean, like
..."
    "A proper stimulus. She
swears because of an emotional stimulus—frustration or anger. About
ninety percent of what Jane is right now, Mr. Ford, is emotion. I
mean, that is what her consciousness is at this point; a nonverbal,
nonassociative, noncommunicative person-ality caught up in a
nonlinear, almost purely