Chapter 4: Our First Day at School as an "Our"

Friday, November 21, 2003

Other than tending my wounds and dressing to ensure they wouldn't be exposed, it started just like any other school day.

When I got to school, I took Mom's note to the office. They told me that I was required to study in the library during PE periods, which I thought was an excellent alternative. I'd never been beaten up in the library.

I found Brent in the usual place with the usual crowd, and handed his class notes back to him.

The guys asked me where I'd been.

"Fell, landed badly and hurt my arms. I couldn't write so I stayed home for a couple of days. Besides, I had a good book to read. It's by..." We talked about the usual stuff until we had to go to class.

The first class was somewhat tedious; the teacher being slower and more pedantically repetitious than he usually was. I didn't bother writing as much as I usually do because it was easy.

The second class was boring too, for the same reason.

Not long in to the third, I could tell it was going to be the same. That was too coincidental; this wasn't about the classes, but me! It wasn't a large effect, but it was definitely noticeable and very interesting.

I started deliberately observing my classmates, seeing that they were behaving normally. From what I could see, they didn't find the material to be any easier than normal. They were asking the usual number of questions, some of the questions were dumb, they sometimes struggled to answer the teacher's questions, etc.

By the time I'd finished my third class, it was official: I could absorb the class material faster than I used to be able to. Much of that came from being my own study group because we could internally discuss what the teachers were saying and work out where they were heading before they got there. Even when we weren't helping each other understand the material, we thought we were comprehending it faster than normal.

The effect wasn't anywhere near large enough for my having become suddenly hugely intelligent, but I did seem a little smarter. Other than the very useful "study group" effect, at a guess I might have been 5% smarter. I was eager to try to measure my improvement.

The most obvious hypothesis that having twice as many minds made me twice as smart was clearly not the case. In some areas I was barely smarter at all, such as at performing calculations. My raw computational power had not changed. The best way I had to improve my performance was by using two methods at the same time. For example, doing 98 times 220. One mind would do the task as written, and the other would try to think of an alternative, such as doing 100 times 200, minus 2 times 200, then +10%. One mind would finish before the other, giving me a 50% chance of being slightly faster than I'd have gotten the answer pre-merge. Actually, it wasn't even as good as that, as it took time for us to decide which of us used what methods.

We were usually about twice as quick at tasks that involved spotting patterns, relationships, etc. With two minds, we could think of twice as many possibilities in the same time, could generate even more ideas when we discussed the task with each other, and could quickly iterating to a good answer.

Pure memory recall, of which there's a great deal at school, was usually unimproved. If we both knew the required fact - and if one of us did, then nearly always both of us did - then it didn't matter who retrieved it. Often we had semi-forgot something, and if left to ourselves we might have been reluctant to use what we semi-remembered, but when we both semi-remembered the same thing then it was usually correct, which helped me seem smarter.

I never managed to achieve the six-fold improvement I had with the cards yesterday afternoon, but that was probably a unique sort of task. I often did no better at all because both minds attacked a problem in exactly the same way. That was a frequent event because we couldn't tell what each other was thinking and we tended to think the same way. #2 was usually the one that 'drove' the body so was the most involved in the immediate decisions, so we made #1 our 'mental supervisor'. When we had a large mental task to do, he was in charge of who did what as a way of making sure we didn't waste effort doing the same thing twice. That usually meant telling #1 to do the task in the most obvious way because that didn't need much explanation, leaving #2 to attempt the task in an unusual way.

After further thought, the two of me decided that the above new ways of thinking weren't really an IQ improvement, but simply an advantage from having new methods available to us.

#2 took our body to lunch with the usual bunch of guys, in the usual place and with the usual conversation. I certainly wasn't going to make it unusual by describing my recent thoughts.

Rather than having both minds duplicate their focus on the conversation - which, quite frankly, didn't even justify one mind focusing on it - we deliberately tried to keep our attention on different things. #2 participated in the conversation, while #1 looked around, thinking about what he noticed. Several times #1 drew #2's attention to some of the social interactions going on around them. #2 was quite impressed by the effectiveness of #1's observation. I observed several things he normally wouldn't have noticed:

• Two guys who appeared to be greater friends than I had thought.

• Guys saying things that seemed to be lies, that other people didn't seem to notice so the pre-merge version of me probably wouldn't have either.

• In general, I saw dozens of interactions that I never would've noticed without having two concentrations. The vast majority of which had no special meaning, for example, one of the guys turning to look at a pretty girl; a VERY normal reaction, but one I wouldn't have noticed before.

It was astonishing how much #1 could observe and draw #2's attention to, when #1 wasn't bothering to follow the conversation. I observed WAY more than the double you'd expect by my having two minds. To put some unmeasured but reasonably accurate numbers on it, when we used to be involved in conversations, maybe only 10% of our attention had been on observing the social dynamics going on around us. With my second mind mostly ignoring the conversation (say giving it 20% of its attention) my total social awareness increased from 10% to 90% (#2's 10%, plus #1's 80%), so I was nine times more observant, which had a huge affect on how much I noticed.

We had PE in the afternoon, which meant that I went to the library. I'd been given a little homework in one of my earlier classes, much of which I had already done during the next class. That'd earned me some sharp questions from the teacher, but I'd proved I was paying attention by knowing the answers to the teacher's questions. That was easy, as only one of me had been doing the previous class's homework, with the other mind listening to the current class's teacher. What little homework I had left after that class, I quickly finished off in the library.

My favorite subject is Mathematics. It wasn't on my schedule today so I didn't have my textbook with me, but there were copies in the library. I grabbed one, found the class's place in it, and started reading ahead. In thirty minutes I covered what I guessed would take the class the next two to three weeks. It wasn't effortless as I did have to think, sometimes quite hard, but it was relentless and far faster than the class would go.

I re-read pieces out of other subjects' textbooks. Sometimes there was some improvement in my understanding; sometimes there was not. No subject had a performance gain as much as I'd achieved in Mathematics.

I thought to test a learning problem I'd had recently. I'd been getting low grades in my least favorite subject: English. I'd had an assignment to analyze a short story a few weeks ago that I'd gotten a terrible grade for. According to the teacher's comments written on my assignment, I'd completely missed the point of the story. Hardly surprising, as it was an airy-fairy 'clever' story, deliberately written to be as abstruse as possible, thereby proving what a self-important jerk-off the author was; in my humble opinion, and as proved by my English teacher thinking he was a great author. I located the story in the library and reread it, curious to see how much my understanding had improved.