Chapter 11: Living in a Same-Sex Foursome

Thursday, February 24 to Monday, March 21, 2005

Some of the consequences of the latest merge were as expected. One of those was that I quickly found my schoolwork even easier, usually to a ridiculous degree. I self-studied more and more. I only needed one mind to be tuned into the teacher in any class while my other three minds did other schoolwork. The teachers eventually gave up trying to catch me out with ambush questions when I looked inattentive. Sooner or later they all let me work on whatever I wanted during class time, as I was completely on top of everything they were teaching.

Also as expected, at least initially, was how our memories worked. Memory is a strange phenomenon at the best of times, particularly because the perspective of the viewer distorts the memory so much. Whether we had two or four minds, our memories were private to each mind. Not just the memories of pre-merge events, but memories created post-merge too. If we each recalled a fact, such as the value of pi, then the memories were identical. But if we witnessed an event that could be interpreted in many different ways, such as a social interaction, then we each colored it by our perceptions at the time. For example, if we saw one of the bullies we were scared of talking to a pretty girl, when one of us later described his memory he might describe how big and scary the bully was because that's what he was thinking at the time. Another of us, who might have been hornier than the first mind at the time (yes, that's possible, as horniness is at least as much mental as physical), and therefore more focused on the girl, might've perceived the bully as being less intimidating, and girl's skirt as shorter, neckline lower, etc. His descriptions would be different from the first. Same event but different memories. With four minds such differences happened noticeably more often than it had with two.

We didn't argue as much as you might expect when we disagreed about something we remembered. We knew each other to be telling the truth as he knew it, that the differences were only in perception, and that no one of us was intrinsically more right than the others. Back when we had two minds, if a memory difference was important, which it rarely was, we either compromised or just picked one. Having four now gave us an additional option of voting on which memory was the most accurate, but it was rarely important enough to worry about.

While on the topic of memory, we never noticed any memory capacity problems, even though we were 'recording' four times as much of it now. Maybe we'd run out of 'storage space' in a few years, but there was no sign of that yet.

We did start using a nice little memory trick to make our life easier. So much of schoolwork is memorization. If we were given a whole bunch of stuff to memorize, we just divided it into quarters and we each memorized our share. You might think that got the job done in a quarter of the time, but it was much faster than that because it gets increasingly harder and slower to memorize more and more facts. Time yourself memorizing a 20-digit number, then time memorizing a 5-digit one. I bet the second time is far less than a quarter of the first, and more accurate too.

Later, when we needed to recall one of the facts, it was simply a matter of, <Which one of you geniuses knows what date the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima?> More often than not the possessor of this fact would see the need coming and just volunteer the knowledge at the right time, slotting it neatly in to the flow of whatever we were doing at the time: writing homework, answering a question in class, or whatever. We got so slick at it that there was no discernible pause.

Speaking of being geniuses, we'd expected our IQ to rise. I'm talking about our real IQ, not the result of any school IQ test - not that we were going to do another one of those! After our first merge we had the impression that we'd probably gotten smarter, and we'd guessed it'd been by about 5%, although that was a difficult thing to measure. We were hoping for at least another 5% from the last merge, or to be even more hopeful, maybe even a 10% gain as twice as many of us had arrived. To our considerable disappointment we couldn't 'feel' any improvement at all. We couldn't decide whether we'd gotten smarter but weren't able to detect it, or we hadn't gotten smarter. Now there was even more doubt about whether we'd gotten smarter last time or we'd only thought so because having two minds made us seem so much smarter that we fooled not only everyone else, but ourselves as well.

A week after the merge, #1 did an online IQ test, with the other minds not participating. They even refused to read the questions. He scored a disappointing 108. IQ tests produce erratic results, so his IQ might've been 105 (our original IQ) or possibly even 110 (what we thought the first merge might have done), although the upper guess was getting unlikely as the site said that variations of plus or minus 5 points were possible. One thing was for sure, we didn't have IQs of 120 the way we'd been hoping.

Bandwidth and structure became concepts that we thought about a great deal. [[I've inserted the word "bandwidth" into the text here. I didn't understand this term at the time, instead using a long-winded phrase when I thought about it. I'll assume you either understand the word, or will quickly come to understand it from the context below.]]

A teacher standing in front of the class verbally introducing new material did not offer much opportunity for me to excel. It took me somewhat less time to comprehend the new material than most students took because when the first of my minds 'got it', it could teach it to the other minds much faster than the teacher could, as my first mind understood the other minds so knew how best to explain the point. Generally, we were probably about twice as fast as the average student, which was disappointingly slow considering how much mind-power we had.

Compare this to working my way through a whole lot of homework questions. For those, I could simply allocate one question per mind and just record the answers as they came back, again depending on the output bandwidth required by the answers, e.g., too much writing slowed me down, although I was very good at writing with both hands simultaneously when alone in my room. Assuming I wasn't constrained by my writing bandwidth, then I was up to four times faster at homework.

Plus there were some tasks in which four minds got the job done considerably faster than by just a factor of four. It all depended on the structures and bandwidths involved, such as memorization being so greatly improved by the Divide and Conquer tactic, as already mentioned. Creativity was another area we got better at because my minds could give each other ideas.

We sought ways of improving on whatever our limits were. One thing I have long been aware of is that we tend to consciously think at the same speed at which we talk. I have always thought that was very ineffective, and even stupid. Talking, being a very crude, mechanical process, is naturally limited in what speeds it can achieve (bandwidth again). Listening is also mechanically constrained. I've listened to sped-up tapes of people talking, and it doesn't take much of an increase in tape speed before the recorded speech becomes unintelligible. A factor of two is difficult to make out, a factor of three is on the very edge of comprehensibility. We can't speak or listen much faster than the normal rate.

I don't know whether evolution has constrained our listening speed to our speaking speed, or vice versa. They seem a fairly well-matched pair, and evolution hasn't seen it desirable to improve them. But surely we should be able to think faster than that. Why should thinking speed be constrained by the crude mechanical limits of speech and hearing?

Maybe subconscious thinking is faster. Ideas do pop up out of nowhere, so maybe there is some very quick thinking going on underneath. But I can't tell, as it's subconscious. All I know is that conscious thinking is slower than it could be, and that it would be very advantageous to be able to think faster. So we tried to improve our thinking speed, figuring that if anyone on the planet could do so, surely it was us.

We managed to get some speed improvement when recalling some memories. If one of us had listened to a conversation and wanted to replay it later for the others (listening, like seeing, is as much dependent on paying attention as the physical processes involved), we learned how to sort of dump the whole conversation out of memory into consciousness, rather than replaying it at verbal speeds. It was more of a very fast playback than an instant dump, but the important aspect was that it was much faster. We also slowly but steadily got faster at talking to each other, so we internally gabbled. But other than those rather disappointingly small-scale improvements, we were stuck.

I remember reading a sci-fi book, whose name I've long forgotten, where creatures didn't speak, but instead had a color screen on their chests. They had evolved from a fish species that had light-emitting cells, as many deep-water fish do. They could flash pictures very, very rapidly. The pictures were seen by eyes, which are also high-speed devices, so the fictitious creatures had a very high communication bandwidth; far faster than human speech. It was limited by line-of-sight, but otherwise quite incredible. That's the sort of speed we thought we should be able to get.

Voices, ears, eyes, fishy color cells, etc., are all just devices to get thoughts from one mind into another. A thought gets composed into words, is spoken, gets heard, gets interpreted, and the thought is now in the receiving mind. When my minds communicate together they don't use any external medium - sound waves or photons - because we communicate internally, therefore we should be able to do so incredibly rapidly. But we tried and couldn't make it happen. Maybe, like the flashing fishes, we need to evolve? Which would be a pity since our having multiple minds wasn't genetic, so wasn't going to be inheritable. Our not having a girlfriend wasn't helping evolution along either.

Unlike internal communication speed, one thing that I did get much better at was eating. My immediately post-merge hunger was obviously to fill the vacuum created by my body expelling everything in its entire digestive tract, but even after that'd been refilled, and the results were coming out of the other end normally, I was still eating much more than usual. My food consumption increased something like 25%, without my putting on any extra weight. I'd had a small appetite increase after the first merge, but we'd just put that down to replacing blood then to normal adolescence. This increase was more substantial, and its also coinciding with the second merge made it obviously a related effect.

We decided that we were probably burning more energy from the four minds' worth of thinking that was going on. An MRI of our brain would probably blow its dials! We remembered hearing somewhere that the brain uses about 20% of the body's energy. Judging by how much food I was eating now - about 25% more than normal - it appeared that each additional mind beyond the first required 8% more food.

If one mind used 20% of the total food, and we were now eating 8% more food per mind, that meant 40% of the energy needed for the brain was needed to support a mind's thinking, thus only 60% required to support the physical matter of the brain, which seemed too little to us. Thinking might have needed 5%, or maybe 10%, of the brain's energy, but 40% was huge. Surely thinking isn't so difficult that it needed so much energy, otherwise people would get hungry after some thinking just like happens after physical work. On the other hand, we couldn't argue with the fact that we needed to eat 25% more food than previously.

Mom had already been lightheartedly grumbling about three teenage kids eating her out of house and home, and my 25% increase was not welcomed as it increased Mom's weekly grocery bill noticeably. I had to suffer the indignity of eating a worm tablet in case I had worms, but it had no affect on my hunger. I wasn't getting fat so Mom had to accept that I needed the extra food. She grumbled, but she kept more snacks in the kitchen and increased my meal sizes. She even bought me a larger plate to have my meals on, perhaps in an attempt to shame me into cutting back. If so, it didn't work, just making it easier for me to load up my plate with more food. When I was hungry, shame had no chance of ruining my appetite, and I got VERY hungry these days.

Going from one to two minds had been a big emotional transition; it had turned me from being suicidal into enjoying myself. I hadn't enjoyed my life, but I had enjoyed myself, which was a significant change. Compared to that transition, going from two to four minds was emotionally easy, so we adapted to it sooner than we'd expected.

We started getting quite well known. Mostly for being awesomely smart because we started screaming through the school syllabi. One mind would listen to the teacher, while three minds worked on something else. I could get a great deal of work done in a class, and even more in the privacy of my bedroom.

We also got a reputation for being somewhat weird. Sometimes, for example, we would suddenly laugh for no apparent reason. Of course it was because one of the minds shared something funny and we couldn't help ourselves reacting to it (we agreed that all four of us had unusually good senses of humor). When that happened I'd quite honestly explain to whoever was looking at me strangely, "Sorry, I just thought of something funny."

Another effect of multiple minds was contradicting myself. I'd say or do something, and then another of my minds would provide a reason why the just-said or -done thing was wrong, so I'd take it back and then say or do something else.

I also became verbose in a disjointed way. If a teacher asked me a question I'd sometimes answer it with a whole bunch of different points that had no logical progression because they'd been suggested by different minds thinking independently.

Incidents like these - and there were quite a few of them - gave me a reputation for being somewhat of a weird genius.

Bullying didn't get any worse, fortunately. If anything, it became somewhat less of a problem. I had filled out a little over the previous months and had grown an inch or so, which made some of the smaller bullies more cautious. More importantly, I was getting even more physically coordinated. I could now run away pretty fast, which was often helpful.

When I was jostled in the hallways - a VERY frequent occurrence - I hardly ever fell over anymore as I had developed quite superb agility. Often I could 'dance around' the jostling. Sometimes so well that the bully-du-jour would stumble when he tried to put too much of his weight onto me, only to find that I wasn't there anymore. Of course, as is the nature of bullies, they often got angry at that. Being light on my feet was no use when two slabs of muscle picked me up and hung me from some coat hooks, or whatever else they wanted to do to me. There were still many occasions when I had no choice but to suffer whatever was inflicted on me, but the number of such incidents reduced somewhat.

My soccer prowess improved markedly after doubling the population of my head. After my first merge, I'd suspected my loss of clumsiness had been due to the merge, but my latest sudden and dramatic improvement in athleticism was far beyond a loss of clumsiness aided by my being more aware of the ball and player positions. My feet were fully ambidextrous, I could dribble very fast, had superb ball control, could change directions on a dime, could do some very athletic leaps to get my head to the ball first, and other soccer related skills, all done to a superb degree. People started commenting on it.

I'd hoped for some athleticism improvement, but it was far more than I'd dreamed of. After the first merge it'd taken many weeks for my body to gain coordination, so I'd expected slow improvement this time too, but my new skills arrived quickly. But the most surprising aspect was how much skill arrived. The first merge had removed my clumsiness, whereas I was now VERY skillful. Gaining that much skill had to be more difficult as diminishing returns must've set in. An inexperienced weightlifter can probably be trained to increase his maximum lift by 10% quite easily, but adding successive improvements of the same amount must get increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible. Removing my clumsiness I was prepared to accept as a fairly easy development, but I now had a very high degree of athletic skill; far more than I thought doubling my number of minds should've produced because of the difficulty in achieving so much skill. But I couldn't argue with reality.

In total, I became a somewhat weird genius who was also graceful. It's not a combination you hear of very often.

Clearly when merging added more minds, it wasn't just adding the conscious minds, but also memories (that was obvious), subconsciouses, and - it appeared - those parts of our mind that dealt with body coordination. I hadn't expected adding two more minds to make much difference to that, but it made a huge amount. I guess that my having only one body meant it was getting four times the normal amount of coordination. The thought occurred to me that if those body controls didn't cooperate as well as they clearly did, then I might've turned into a constantly twitching spastic. It was VERY good that the reverse was happening!

I also guessed that's why I needed so much extra food (+8% per mind), not just to fuel the conscious thinking, but all the processes going on underneath. [I later found that the mathematics behind my food consumption was more complicated than "+8% per mind", but that explanation is best later.]

^

My conclusion that my body control had increased significantly was confirmed a couple of weeks after the second merge, when I was talking to a guy in the schoolyard one morning before classes started.

Adam suddenly told me, "Dude, your eyes are weird."

"What do you mean?"

"They're moving around in different directions. It's weirding me out."

#2: <I was watching Debbie Kneedmire arrive. She walked behind Adam from left to right, and I think I was keeping track of her using just one of our eyes.>

Debbie Kneedmire was well worth keeping track of. I would normally have happily used all my eyes to watch her, but I'd also been interested in my conversation with Adam, so I'd apparently kept track of both events.

I asked Adam, "What did my eyes do?"

"Dude, you were looking at me normally, then your left eye wandered across me while your other eye kept looking straight ahead. I've never seen anything like that before, it was wild. How did you do that? It was way stranger than going cross-eyed."

"I was watching Debbie Kneedmire arrive. She walked across the drive behind you."

"Okay, I understand looking at Debbie; I do a lot of that myself. But the eye thing, dude, just too weird for words. You should go on Letterman or something."

I didn't want to go on "Letterman or something", and was saved from having to respond by the bell. I was very interested though.

I had five minutes to get to my first class, but instead I made a beeline for the nearest bathroom, stood in front of a mirror, looked straight at myself, then one of my minds swiveled one eyeball to the side. Adam was right, it did look very "weird, dude."

Some quick experiments soon showed me that different minds could independently control each eyeball. The great thing was that all four of us could see whatever the eyes were looking at, not just the mind that was controlling them. That may sound obvious, but it was well worth confirming and was good news. If the left eye was hard left, and the right eye hard right, that could be useful on the soccer field, although I'd presumably lose depth of field accuracy in the areas that were only being observed by one eye, and it risked "weirding out" any dudes that saw it.

I nearly missed the start of the class because I was too busy making my eyeballs do little synchronized dances, but one of the advantages of four minds is that I usually don't miss things, as one or other of them won't be sufficiently distracted and will remind us. I went to class wondering what possible use I could get out of independently controllable eyeballs. Even with my ambidextrous feet and juggling, I doubted I was cool enough yet to score with any of the girls in my class.

One of the very first things I did in class was repeat an experiment I'd failed at a while ago. I put two open books side by side, and asked #3 to read the left book with the left eye and #4 to read the right book with the right eye.

And they could! It was as easy for them as reading had ever been. They even each controlled the hand on the same side as 'their' eye to turn the pages of their book, so both books could now be read fully independently. This was an EXCEPTIONALLY useful new technique. There's a great deal of reading to do in school, and now I could do it in half the time.

We already knew that back when we'd had 'only' two minds, if one of our minds got distracted and lost attention when we were reading a book, then it failed to absorb that text, even though our eyes had been pointing at it and the other mind had carried on reading normally. Just the same as if you daydream while reading, having the book open in front of you doesn't get any meaning into your head unless you're concentrating on it. It was the same with two books. #3 was concentrating on reading the left book so he didn't know what #4 was reading, and vice versa. Whatever each mind was reading got fed into his own conscious mind, then his own memory, but not into anyone else's consciousness or memory. Even though #1 and #2 were seeing the pages because my eyeballs were pointing at them, unless each of us consciously read the pages, we absorbed nothing. Nor could #1 or #2 usefully read both books at the same time. They could physically see them, just like you could physically see two windows on your computer screen if you put them side by side, but understanding both stories when the eyeballs were scanning it a line at a time was too difficult. #1 and #2 had to pick which eyeball's image to concentrate on.

The new technique was useful, as it gave us choices. If memory and accuracy were important, all four minds would read the one source. If we preferred speed (e.g., to read a newspaper), then we'd create two teams of an eye and mind each (perhaps for the facing pages of the paper), and the two spare minds could do whatever they wanted, either reading one of the two sources or anything else that didn't need an eyeball. If either reading mind saw anything useful he could share it, either getting everyone to read the words again, or just 'tell' us the key points. In the case of a picture or graph, for example, it would be quicker if we all 'read' it again rather than have it described to us.