Menno and Dominic stared at the oscilloscope display, which was showing the reconstruction of the signal being transmitted by the headset. The trace was thick, running almost the height of the scope; it looked more like white noise than anything meaningful.
Dom had taped printouts from the previous two subjects on the wall above the scope. They each showed a single, distinct line spiking and falling. Underneath, he’d written in red marker the phonemes the patterns represented.
Menno shook his head. “I can’t even tell when he’s finishing one rendition and starting another.”
Dominic reached for the intercom button. “Jim, thanks. Just be quiet for a minute, would you? Don’t say anything and don’t subvocalize. Just sit there, please.”
Jim nodded, and Dominic and Menno turned back to the oscilloscope, which was just as active as before.
“Where do you suppose all that noise is coming from?” Dominic asked.
“I don’t know. You’re certain the equipment isn’t overheating?”
Dominic pointed at a digital readout. “It’s fine.”
“Okay, well, maybe this boy is a freak. Let’s test a few other people.”
Menno was wearing his heavy winter coat; Dom had on a bright blue ski jacket with a lift ticket attached. It was 3:00 P.M. on a crisp afternoon, and the sun was already well on its way down to the horizon. They were walking along the Memorial Avenue of Elms, a road lined on both sides with trees, leading from the Fort Garry campus to Pembina Highway. Menno liked trees; he hated war. As a psychologist, he understood that this particular part of the university was a physical instantiation of the cognitive dissonance he felt working on a DoD project. The Avenue had been dedicated in 1922 to the men from the Manitoba Agricultural College who had died in the First World War; two and a half years ago, in June 1998, the dedication had been extended to include many who had died during World War II and the Korean War, as well.
“The Pentagon isn’t going to be happy with a microphone that can only be used by half their soldiers,” said Dominic, the words coming out in clouds of condensation. “For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work with some people; why they have all that noise in their auditory cortices is beyond me. I mean, if they were reporting tinnitus, it’d make sense. Or maybe if they’d all listened to super-loud rock music, or something like that. But it seems completely random.”
Menno thought about that as they walked past the block of stone with the dedication plaques. “No,” he said at last. “Not quite random. You’re right that the majority of our sample group doesn’t have the background noise, but if you look at the test subjects who came from my class—Jim, Tatiana, the others—most of them do have the noise, and…”
“Yes?”
Menno continued along, the packed-down snow squeaking underfoot. “Background noise…” he said, slowly pursuing the idea as if it were a rabbit that would flee if startled. “In the auditory cortex…” His heart was pounding. “Preferentially present in those who study psychology.”
“Well, I always said psych students were a little weird.”
“It’s not just that,” Menno replied. “Psych attracts a certain kind of student: kids trying to make sense of themselves. Cheaper than therapy, you know?”
A single puff of chilled air: “So?”
“So, they’re obviously chewing things over, ruminating, wondering.” He felt his eyebrows colliding with the wool of his cap, and he lowered his voice, as if speaking softly would make the idea sound less crazy. “The background stuff. It isn’t noise.” He shook his head. “It’s—my God! It’s inner monologue—stream of consciousness! It’s the constant background of a normal life, all the stuff you’re thinking inside: I wonder what’s for lunch. Jeez, is it Thursday already? Gotta remember to stop by the store on the way home. Those thoughts—those articulated thoughts—are made of phonemes, too. They’re never spoken, they’re never even subvocalized or mouthed. But they’re words all the same, made up of phonemes. And so the question isn’t—”
“The question isn’t,” said Dominic, coming to a dead halt beneath skeletal branches, “why some people do have background noise in their auditory cortices. The question is why most people do not.”
10
I entered the lecture hall in the aptly named Tier Building, rows of first-year students rising in front of me. Some were looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed even now, at stupid o’clock in the morning, but most still showed signs of struggling to wake up. Tim Hortons had clearly done dynamite business before class: half the students had red cardboard cups on their swing-up desktops.
I tucked my hands into the pockets of my black denim jeans and strode to the lectern. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to start with a joke. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” I smiled and waited until I had their full attention—or, at least, attention from those who usually gave it. “Here goes: why was the road crossed by the chicken?”
I continued to smile at them, but no one laughed. After a few seconds, I said, “Tough room,” and that, at least, merited a few chuckles. “Anybody? What’s the punch line?”
A white girl with long red hair in the third row started to say, “To get to the…” But she trailed off, apparently realizing that although that worked when the setup was the normal “why did the chicken cross the road,” it didn’t make sense here.
I tried again: “Anyone? Why was the road crossed by the chicken?”
An Asian boy in the fifth row folded his arms in front of his Winnipeg Jets sweatshirt. “There’s no answer to that, Professor Marchuk.”
“Why not?”
The boy’s tone conveyed that his word choice was deliberate: “Well, this ain’t English class”—and that, too, got some chuckles—“but your joke is in the passive voice. There isn’t anybody deliberately doing anything, so there’s no one to assign the motivation of ‘to get to the other side’ to.”
“Exactly!” I said, delighted, as I always was, when a session got off to a good start. “And you’re right, this isn’t English class; it’s psychology. So let me introduce you to a core psychological concept, namely the notion of agency—the subjective awareness that you are initiating and executing your own actions. And then we’re going to talk about why, although we all believe that we do indeed have agency, perhaps we really don’t…”
I returned to my condo, grabbed a shower, put on a wine-colored shirt and black slacks, and drove over to The Forks. Once again, I was listening to the CBC; The World at Six was on.
“—and the stunning news that the leader of the New Democratic Party has chosen not to seek re-election this time out,” Susan Bonner said. “We reached political analyst Hayden Trenholm in Ottawa. Mr. Trenholm, what do you make of his announcement?”
A man’s voice with a hint of a Maritime accent: “The NDP were the front-runners in the 2015 election but stumbled badly under then-leader Tom Mulcair, and his replacement certainly also failed to excite. But if they can come up with someone people from across the political spectrum can get behind, the New Democrats could make some interesting gains. Of course, they’ve been searching in vain for a person like that since Jack Layton passed away in 2011…”