Chapter 240: The Rest of Exam Week

Tuesday, June 14 to Friday, June 17, 2005

I'd reached the end of my college Algebra the previous evening, and for the lack of anything better to do, had resumed studying Calculus 252 with six minds, and had started "General Physics with Calculus" (Physics 211) with one mind. I carried on with those this morning.

With my reading seven screens now, I could have read enough of Calc 252 to enable me to take its exam. Counting from when I'd first started my college studies, it'd taken me four weeks to finish Algebra and Calc 251. That meant four weeks per course per screen. I'd improved that speed in several ways since the beginning, plus sleeping 1.5 hours less per morning would help too, so I figured I could sustain a rate of about three weeks per course per screen. With my allocating six minds to work on Calc 252's independent chunks, it'd take me just over half a week to finish ("just over" because the independent chunks weren't evenly sized). I could have taken the exam but Prof had advised against it as the lecturer knew I'd barely started it before our kidnapping. That would look a little strange, and there was no need to do so as I could easily take the exam next academic year.

My preference for my future studying is to study seven courses at once (or eight, if I can manage that), with one mind per course, starting at the beginning of each and working sequentially through it. That'd be much simpler to manage than juggling independent chunks of widely variable sizes, and it'd save having to get the lecturers to identify the chunks too, especially because some courses may not have them. Thus every three weeks I'd be starting seven or eight new courses. The start dates would be ragged, but that wouldn't matter.

Prof had recently arranged for my computer account to have access to every course in the Math faculty, rather than just the ones I was formally enrolled in. Theoretically I could've started studying seven courses right now, except for one problem: Calculus 252 was a prerequisite course which was needed for several later courses. That's why I was concentrating six minds on it now, both to get past it quickly, and because those minds didn't have anything else they could do. There weren't many such prerequisites so it wasn't a significant problem, and it'd be much less of one when I was enrolled in the Business Administration degree because I'd only be trying to do four courses in each degree at the same time, and I'd be able to allocate any 'blocked' minds to the other degree until the blocking prerequisite was completed.

I practiced Active Centering, but the new and interesting material caused me to lose center about every ten or fifteen minutes, which was annoyingly often. I could have gotten all of my minds to Actively Center, which would've reduced the frequency of sight blob cancellations, but I thought the annoyance worthwhile to help train each of my minds into improving their active centering skill. All of my minds doing Active Centering at the same time is much effective than it might seem, as follows: One mind was losing center every ten to fifteen minutes (call it ten minutes, or 600 seconds), and it took him less than a second to get it back, so the odds of him being out of center is about 1-in-1000. If we all Active Centered, the chance of us all being out of center is NOT (1/1000)^8, which would take so long our Sun would blow up first. The problem is that if one mind lost center, he wouldn't know he had, because if he's distracted from maintaining center then he's also distracted from noticing that he's not centered. It might be several minutes before he realizes that he's been distracted. It was much better for us to train ourselves individually.

I stopped studying about 3am, so I could again try to find a solution to the superimposition problem.

I played around with that for half an hour, achieving exactly zero progress at handling superimposition.

Which forced me back to the idea of trying to 'display' the two images side by side in my brain. That required the image from my eyes to be moved sideways, with the image from the sight blob moved sideways the other way, to occupy the other half of my brain's internal 'screen'. After another half an hour I'd achieved exactly twice as much progress as for the previous attempt, in that both sideways compactions had achieved zero progress.

I stopped to try to think of a better approach.

I realized that my two eyes should theoretically produce two images that superimposed. They obviously don't, so there must be a brain mechanism that merges the two images together. I got momentarily excited, until I realized that whatever the brain did to solve that problem almost certainly did so using the fact that the eyes were in the same fixed positions all the time, which would make combining the two images together very simple. That mechanism wouldn't provide a solution for eyesight and a free-moving, nausea-producing, sight blob.

It did give me the idea of permanently stationing a sight blob in a fixed location, and living through the chaos until my brain got used to it. Ideally the blob would be looking backward, if only so I wouldn't get 'accidentally' hit by any more footballs thrown by asshole jocks. The non-overlapping fields of view of my eyes and the backward sight blob would produce the maximum possible chaos, but I remembered seeing somewhere that some birds had fields of views for their eyes which were much more to either side than for humans, giving 360 degree vision with almost no overlap. If a bird's brain could handle that, my brain should be able to.

[[Predators (e.g., cats, hawks, and in evolutionarily terms, humans) have narrower fields of view to get plenty of binocular overlap, the better to catch their prey. Prey animals (e.g., horses and herbivorous birds) have wide fields of view because they'd very much prefer to get warning of a predator's attack. A few of the prey animals that spend most of their life with their head down (e.g., probing mud with their bills) even have their eyes slightly more to the rear of their head than the front. Having their eyes to either side, and with little or no overlap, most prey animals can control their eyeballs independently, much as I could now, although I only had 160 degrees of vision because of my eyes being recessed into my skull.]]

I created a sight blob at the very back of my skull, looking straight back. Whoa! What a mess! I got up and walked around very cautiously. It only took a few seconds for me to give up on this idea. Birds that had 360-degree vision can't have the two images superimpose the way mine was now. They must have a 'screen' in their brain with the left and right sides being for each eye, with almost no overlap in the middle, if any; whereas I have almost a 100% overlap and superimposition. It was bad news to try to work with.

What I needed was a larger 'screen' in my head. I heard somewhere that the visual processing area of human brains was quite large, so I'd have to grow a sizable lump on my skull to accommodate all the extra brain matter, which wouldn't be an attractive look! I decided that being able to see backward wasn't worth destroying my sex-life. If I wouldn't (more likely couldn't) grow an extra visual processing center, then I needed to compact more information onto the existing one, which took me back to today's square one.

I shut my eyes and created two sight blobs, to see if I could compact one sight mechanism (just blobs) easier than two (a blob and an eye or two). I created the blobs where my eyes were, just a fraction forward so their front surfaces weren't buried. It created an image in my brain that was no different from that of my real eyes, which surprised me, as I'd expected two overlapping superimposed images.

I wondered whether that meant the input from the light blobs was being sent to my optic nerves in some way, so the brain thought it was coming from the eyeballs in the usual way. I can block pain, which travels down nerves, so maybe I could block sight from my real eyes by blocking the optic nerve. That'd let me see nothing with them, even when they were open, so I wouldn't have to worry about people seeing me shut my eyes when I used a sight blob.

I canceled the sight blobs and reopened my real eyes. Then I simply ordered them to see nothing, in the same way as I simply ordered myself not to feel pain. Everything went black, which immediately made me realize that I should've thought about the danger of not being able to turn them back on again. I ordered them back on, and was quite pleased that they did!

I went blind again, then created a sight blob. Proximity told me that it created all right, but I couldn't see anything with it. I ordered one of my real eyes to see again, which gave me both the eye's and the blob's vision. I couldn't use the "Go Blind" command to keep my eyes open while using a sight blob because it made the sight blobs blind too, but this experiment had provided me with a little more information about how this stuff worked. I couldn't think of a use for it, but it still felt good to learn anything about this stuff.

I had the idea of checking whether a sight blob could have a wider field of view than my eyes did. I knew of no reason why a sight blob couldn't see in every direction at once (admittedly, I didn't know how they saw at all). My immediate thought was that seeing in a sphere would be impossibly confusing, and that too many things would become too small to see clearly because all the extra field of view would cause a great deal of compaction. But then I realized that we probably see nearly half a sphere already. A field of vision that was 180 degrees left to right, and top to bottom, would be half a sphere. We can't quite see 180 degrees horizontally and even less than that vertically, but the total field of view is easily more than a third of a sphere, so call it about 40% of a sphere. A compaction of 2.5-to-1 didn't seem like it would be too hard to get used to, provided I wasn't trying to identify something in the distance, which I usually wasn't. If I created a sight blob slightly larger than my head, with my head in the middle of it, then I should be able to see in every direction at once from a familiar perspective.

I was safely sitting down, so I gave it a go. I shut my eyes and created the sight blob.

It worked fine. The strangest thing about it was that it didn't seem strange. A very wide-angle lens on a camera produces a very weird and unrealistic looking image. This didn't have that extreme distortion, so it looked far more realistic. If I hadn't known the shape of the room I'd almost believe I was using my normal eyes in a room larger than this one (the door appeared smaller, which implied it was farther away, making the room seem larger). There were a few problems though, like my knees and feet looking too far away; my shoulders angling forward sharply on both sides, and my seeing four walls.

I got up and walked around. That was WEIRD! I turned my body 180 degrees according to my body, but my sight rotated only half as far. When I walked toward walls they 'came at me' nearly three times as fast as my instincts told me they should, which was scary and disorienting. It was not a comfortable experience, and I could easily imagine that it'd be very awkward in a moving, crowded environment like school. I had NO hope of playing soccer this way. However, I could imagine getting used to it. It would take at least several hours, and maybe even a few days, before I could operate comfortably, but I could imagine it happening. That was an improvement over superimposed images, because I didn't think I'd ever be able to function comfortably with them.

It definitely took some getting used to, because when I turned to walk back to my chair, I didn't turn enough. I'd seen the chair to my hard left; what appeared to be about 75 degrees left, but was actually almost directly behind me. I turned my body 75 degrees, but the chair wasn't where it instinctively should have been. I canceled the blob and opened my eyes, walking to the chair normally.

That'd been a digression, as I'd been intending to find a way of handling two simultaneous sources of sight. It was interesting, but I had no intention of doing anything about it. 360-degree vision was cool, but the adaptation period would be a bitch, everything appearing smaller would be a nuisance, and having to walk around in mirrored sunglasses all the time would be unfriendly and pretentious.

While I'm digressing, here's another one about absolute or relative positioning. Most of the time when I'm using my special ki-effects, I'm positioning them absolutely, in other words, not relative to my body. For example, when I am flying an item with NP, if I step forward all my NP-points don't 'step forward' with me, leaving the item to crash to the floor. Or if I'm flicking off a light switch with NP while I'm walking, I don't have to think about correcting for my walking speed. I simply send the fingertip to the light switch. But when I was walking around with a sight blob on my head, the sight blob stayed in fixed position relative to me, so constantly changed its absolute position. Neither absolute nor relative positioning required any conscious effort from me, not even to choose which one to use. The ki-effects automatically use whichever location system is most convenient, which is very helpful of them!

[[Our subconsciouses have both positioning routines very well developed. You can direct your hand to pick up something from a table as you walk past (absolute positioning of your hand) just as automatically and thoughtlessly as you can unbutton your shirt as you walk around (relative positioning of your hand). My subconsciouses knew how I wanted the ki-effects to behave, so they moved them appropriately. If I'd been a dentist, I also would've been able to use mirrored positioning too, as my brain would've developed those routines through so much dentistry practice.]]

I got back to my intended experiment, closing my eyes and creating two sight blobs where my eyes were. That gave me normal-seeming sight. Then I moved the blobs, which immediately looked decidedly un-normal and very disconcerting. I spent some time trying to get that to work comfortably. The main problem was that my brain insisted on 'projecting' the two images onto the same 'screen' with a great deal of overlap, even when they were looking in totally different directions. I'd never had that trouble when independently controlling my eyes to look hard left and hard right, but I was sure having it now. [[Independently controlling my eyeballs didn't change my field of view at all, it just meant that I was closely observing two different parts of it. What I was now finding disconcerting about the light blobs was that I had two fields of view that were changing independently, including moving differently.]]