“You said his synapses had all been redirected to a specific part of his brain. Is it a part that… I don’t know, controls his vision… or his motor skills. ?”
“We are talking about the most sophisticated computer ever created here, Mister Raine. The human brain isn’t conveniently compartmentalised and labelled with ‘eyes’ ‘ears’ ‘mouth’ and ‘nose’. The whole thing works together, ja? However, it can be loosely separated into several parts: the cerebellum which controls things like balance, reflexes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” There was something almost flippant about the neurologist, Raine decided. It was as though he knew his subject matter inside out and didn’t like wasting his time having to explain it to the less scientifically minded.
“The Primary Motor Cortex controls movement,” he continued. “The Temporal Lobe is responsible for hearing, memory formation, recognition, that sort of thing. The Occipital Lobe contains the visual cortex and essentially controls the information gathered from the eyes. The Frontal Lobe governs things like consciousness, habits, motor skills, personality, etcetera. My personal favourite is the Limbic System. This is the primal part of the brain responsible for emotions… and sexual arousal.”
Raine noted the doctor’s eyes flick over to take in Nadia’s lithe form before concluding. “Last but not least is the Parietal Lobe.” He tapped one of the monitors which displayed the electroencephalogram, or EEG scan, which monitored the electrical activity of King’s brain. “It is the Parietal Lobe, or more precisely, the right-hand hemisphere of the Parietal Lobe, that all the electrical synapses in Doctor King’s brain are being diverted to.”
Nadia studied the scan closely, her attractive face grim. “That is also the general area of the skull where I detected the anomalies in Kha’um and Pryce’s remains, most likely caused by a tumour.” She heard Sid catch her breath and turned to her friend. “Both Kha’um and Pryce were exposed to the tachyon radiation over an extended period,” she tried to reassure her but Raine read the unspoken truth. King’s exposure may have been brief, but with three pieces of the mask, it was intense.
He tried to shift the conversation away from that delicacy and asked the doctor, “What does the Parental Lobe control?”
“Parietal,” Heinrich corrected gruffly. “Put simply, it controls the sensory information.” At Raine’s blank stare, he continued with a huff. “Basically, it ‘sifts’ through all the information which your sensors — your eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin — have already fed to other parts of your brain and forms a single concept. A piece of art, for instance. It is here, in the Parietal Lobe, that your appreciation for a painting will be determined, or a member of the opposite sex for that matter.” Again his eyes drifted to Nadia.
“Why would his brain be rewiring itself to give him a greater appreciation of art?” Gibbs demanded.
“Maybe our next destination is the Louvre,” Raine replied lightly. No one seemed to appreciate his attempt at levity.
“It is not just art,” the doctor glowered. “It is any sensory input, ja? Or many. What is interesting is that the increased neural activity is only being focussed on the right-hand hemisphere of the lobe.”
“Why’s that interesting?” Raine asked. He had slipped into command of the discussion easily, taking over from Gibbs without either man realising it.
“A few years ago, a group of American scientists conducted a study on both male and female volunteers, subjecting them to a variety of different stimuli. On the public face of it, their premise was to either prove or disprove the old ‘battle of the sexes’ when, one: a man accuses a woman of being a poor map reader, bad with directions and navigation, and, two: a woman accusing a man of not being able to see something right under his nose, ja? The car keys, for instance.”
He paused and looked at each person gathered in the room before continuing. “What they discovered was that both statements were entirely justified. The study found that both hemispheres of the Parietal Lobe became active in women, creating a tighter, closer spatial awareness. So, for instance, while searching for those lost keys, while the man would take in the entire room, the woman’s attention would be focussed bit at a time on far smaller areas — the coffee table, beneath the sofa, etcetera, often finding them where the man had already looked. The team linked this back to woman-kind’s prehistoric ancestors who spent their days close to their caves or camps foraging for fruits, roots, berries, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
“Alternatively,” he went on without a pause, “man-kind’s ancestors travelled and hunted far from their settlements and therefore developed the ability to ‘look at the larger picture’ I suppose you could say. He had had to learn to notice landmarks, often in the far distance. He had to learn to navigate, to give and to follow directions and to be aware, not of fallen berries right under his nose, but of herds of… mammoths, for example, in the distance. This wider, broader sense of spatial awareness is triggered in males by neural activity on only the right hemisphere of the Parietal Lobe.”
“This is all very interesting, Doctor,” Gibbs snapped, “but unless you’re telling me that King is about to jump out of bed and go off hunting a sabre-toothed tiger, then I don’t see how it helps us.”
“It helps us to understand that this is the area of Doctor King’s brain where all his neural synapses are being redirected to,” Heinrich replied irritably. He didn’t suffer fools gladly.
“So,” Raine cut in before Gibbs degenerated the discussion into chaos, “the right hemisphere allows us to become sensitive to our surroundings?”
“Ja.”
“And if all of Benny’s neural synapses or whatever they’re called are focussing on that one area of his brain, then we could conclude that he’s becoming ultra-sensitive to his surroundings?”
The doctor wasn’t too sure where Raine’s train of thought was leading and answered with a cautious “Jaaa…”
“Last night,” Sid inputted into the conversation for the first time since it began, ignoring an unhappy huff from Nadia. “Ben was suggesting that the mask produced some sort of ESP ability in people who wore it.”
“ESP?” Heinrich repeated with a frown. “Extra Sensory Perception?”
Raine cut in before either he or Nadia could voice their objections. “You said this lobe thing regulates sensory input: all of it for close up work, just the right hand side for a broader spectrum. Well, I’m a soldier, and what is a soldier if not a hunter? Ja?” he added with a smirk. “Forget about whether you’re hunting a mammoth with a spear or a terrorist with a machine gun, at the core of it it’s the same thing. The instincts are all the same. You’ve got to be totally in-tune with your surroundings, totally aware of everything around you. Your senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, touch — are all in overdrive. Your body is in a heightened state of alert. Every noise: the flutter of a bird’s wing, the chirp of insects, the sound of a twig cracking. Every sight: a flash of sunlight, the shift of shadow. Every smell and taste: the acrid scent of the other man’s B.O., the taste of blood on the air. Every touch: a leaf slapping your thigh, a breeze kissing your cheek, a footfall vibrating through the sole of your boot.”
He looked at each person in turn to make sure they were following him. “Every sense is in overdrive, coming together in your mind all at once and sometimes, in that split second before you’re ambushed, they all alert you to the danger just in time. A kind of ‘sixth sense’. Now, I don’t know what the little electric pathways in my head looked like in those moments, but I’d say they were pretty excitable. Just like Ben’s is now, only his is so hypersensitive that his body literally can’t function anymore. Isn’t it possible that with such hypersensitivity he’s receiving sensory input, extra sensory input, from some other source, from some other sense? A sixth sense.”