Notes & Queries response - Could rocks be conscious? Why are some things conscious and some not?
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I was almost out of the room when I heard the motors in Pat Orris-Bird's all-terrain wheelchair whir into life. I glanced backwards. The chair was lumbering hesitantly across the unruly brown shagpile towards me. Pat was strapped securely into the seat. Her lightly-bobbing head was slumped against one of the padded side rests. Her vacant eyes were emptier than the painted-on gaze of a shop-floor mannequin. Her dry mouth hung open, slightly more so on one side. Earlier in the day, a visiting beautician, named Ivy, had carefully painted the lips pink.
Her left hand was draped over a small joystick at the end of the armrest. Her fingers twitched with currents of muscle memory as if they were in the process of being possessed. Alerted by the sound of the chair, nurse Yettin raised her head from some paperwork on a clipboard. Very gently, she lifted the old woman's fragile hand from the control.
“Sam's just going to get your rocks, Pat. We going to stay here and wait for him.”
It took me five minutes to walk to the other side of the house where Pat's sprawling bedroom (itself a sequence of interconnected rooms) was inconveniently located. The case was where nurse Yettin had said that it would be, skulking in its own cubby hole in amongst the hat boxes. It was made from smooth blue plastic and resembled a large picnic cooler.
When I returned to the orangery, nurse Yettin was in the process of erecting a safe space for Pat. I had heard other members of the house staff refer to it as “her paddock.” The white-painted metal sections of the guardrail lay flat on the floor like fallen prison bars, with tufts of the shagpile poking through the long rectangular gaps like strips of dead grass. Yettin was standing at one end combing the stringy fibres of the carpet flat with a broad-headed landscaping rake.
“You found it okay?” she said. “Take the rocks out and place them in the sun on the windowsill over there. They work better when they are heated by solar radiation. Be very careful with them. The cheapest cost over £10,000. The most expensive is over £350,000.”
I unfastened the toggle catches on the case and opened the hinged lid. Inside there were three layers of plastic insets that were sub-divided into smaller open-topped compartments. Each of the rocks was homed inside its own crushed velvet, drawstring pouch.
“Do I take them out of their bags?”
Across the room, nurse Yettin diverted her attention from the two sections of disobedient guardrail that she was attempting to screw together. She held her gaze sternly for a second, as if to reinforce her unspoken opinion that I had just asked a deeply stupid question.
I removed the tannite from the pouch and placed it under the sun on the far end of the sill. Next came the pink almite. Then the garriement. The house I grew up in was shingled with the same material. This piece was different – a lump of dislocated blocks, unevenly fused together by antediluvian geothermal forces. The surface sparkled dimly, unlike the roof slates of my childhood home that held the gloomy shadow of the rain long after the dark clouds had moved on, and the sky had returned to blue.
The Terorine was a pale spearmint green, with the incohesive, silty texture of dried-out toothpaste. There were a few small crumbs of it in the bottom of the pouch that I turned out onto the sill, just to be on the safe side.
There followed the malyte, the dauriate, the harosium, the bokel, the rodicite and the ogdenase. Ten rocks in total, laid out in a row, each one an ill-fitting jigsaw piece salvaged from the crumbling mind of Pat Orris-Bird.
The old woman remained inanimate in her chair, in the centre of the room, as the metal fence went up around her.
~
“When mummy was diagnosed with early-stage dementia we talked about the memories she would most like to preserve,” said Penelope Pearl-Orris-Bird. “We talked to the Heiron people. What they do is they record an experience in situ. They take several impressions of the brain activity associated with it, then they layer them and tweak out any negative spikes on the EEG.
“One of the experiences that mummy wanted to safeguard was the view from the wall of the terrace at the bottom of the garden, overlooking the Eaststream. Heiron arrived in a giant lorry filled with all kinds of equipment. At the time mummy could still walk. They taped electrodes to her forehead. There is an implant in the base of her neck that they plugged into. I recently commissioned them to plug back in, just to see if there was anything salvageable, but there was no real activity; the occasional surges, but nothing consistent.
“With support from my husband, we were able to stretch to fifteen recorded impressions. The most complicated one to do was when we assembled the family for a birthday party. It was like we were rehearsing the same scene in a play, over and over again. Whenever people are involved what you are preserving isn't a real spontaneous event; it is more idealised and based around what you would like to remember.
“So far, we've been able to encode ten of these impressions into appropriate mineral rocks. When you rest the warm stones gently against her forehead, they become an extension of her brain. The neural activity flows back and forth. Her face comes back to life and it always, without fail, assumes an expression of contentment. It is a wonderful thing to watch, but also awful when it slowly fades.
“Eventually, we hope to encode all fifteen of the memories, but we also have to factor-in the re-encoding of the existing stones. After a while the memories they hold become corrupted. Some of the minerals are more fragile than others and need to be replaced. It has been very expensive.
~
Sillhoo Bhandara's home is filled with resonant ornaments that will chime when struck.
“Growing up, I was my father's laboratory,” she explained, rolling her large brown eyes. “He was constantly harvesting my childhood for impressions. He encoded them into all kinds of objects.”
She flicked a brass statuette of a little girl, posed in mid-run on top of an antique occasional table, towards painted wainscotting. As the sharp tone ebbed from the room, my mind coalesced around the slowly-fading sensation of running unsteadily across grass towards a pair of hazy parental figures. I was overcome by a feeling of unbound happiness and excitement.
“A form of telepathy,” I said.
It is more distinct for me than it is for for you,” said Bhandara. “The sound interacts with physical structures in my long-term memory. If you were exposed to the tone on a regular basis, your brain would begin to form similar structures and the memory would become your own.
“With mineral transference, which is used as therapy for people with dementia, it is a two-way street. The impression encoded in the mineral lattice is slowly corrupted by the transferral of junk data from the mind of the patient. Every so often we have to take the stones away and purify them if we can, or re-encoded them whenever that is not possible.
“Recently we have started working on a pilot program with the Barcelona police. We have encoded the memory of an Alpine meadow in full flower, into some rocks. The police use them to calm down people who are mentally ill, who have become aggressive, and people who have been made loco by alcohol or drugs. The meadow has become a kind of... holy grail for repeat offenders. It is a memory of some place they have never visited, but that brings them peace when they think about it.”
The grandfather clock in the hallway struck eleven. My mind was filled with the looming impression of a snow-covered mountain, the veins of rock in the crumpled formation starkly outlined on one side by crooked bars of shadow.
“It is in the Swiss Alps,” said Bhandara. “My father made the impression to remind me to always aim high in whatever I am doing.”
~
“When she was compos mentis, she called them her anchor stones,” said nurse Yettin.
She helds the harosium lightly against my forehead. I was visited by the sketchy image of a blonde Labrador jumping at me with a red ball in its mouth. I was jogging across a meadow. Tall trees in the distance marked a leafy boundary in partial silhouette. Light was shining through small chinks in the canopy. It was early morning, I think. The dew still on the grass.
“Max,” said nurse Yettin, as she withdrew the stone. “Maximilian as she referred to him. She thinks he's still alive. She tries to call him sometimes. On her good days.”
She placed the harosium back in line on the sunlit sill.
“After she dies, she wants the stones to be tossed into the sea. Heiron are legally obligated to erase any data associated with her, so the memories will cease to exist. Her daughter is not mad keen on the idea. She wants to preserve the connection with her mother after she has gone.”
Later, I pondered on what would occur if some marine animal where to make contact with one of Pat Orris-Bird's sunken memory stones. Would their neurological architecture be compatible with the mind of another species? I pictured a dolphin, it's consciousness suddenly flooded by the alien impression of running across grass in open air; thrust into a glimpse into a life on dry land that it would never experience.
I hope this is of help.
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The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.
This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.
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