Dr. Cray looked impatient. She pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket and said, “Just a while ago, you said that the laser recorded more detail than the ear could hear.”
“Yes. I stand by that.”
“I know. One of my colleagues read an interview with you in the December 2000 issue of High Fidelity magazine, in which you said that. That’s what attracted our attention. The ear can’t get the laser detail, but the eye can, you see. It’s the flickering light that alters the brain pattern to the norm, not the wavering sound. The sound alone will do nothing. It will, however, reinforce the effect when the light is working.”
“You can’t complain about that.”
“We can. The reinforcement isn’t good enough. The gentle, delicate, almost infinitely complex variations produced in the sound by laser recording is lost on the ear. Too much is present and it drowns out the portion that is reinforcing.”
“What makes you think that a reinforcing portion is there?”
“Because occasionally, more or less by accident, we can produce something that seems to work better than the entire brain wave, but we don’t see why. We need a musician. Maybe you. If you listen to both sets of brain waves, perhaps you can figure out by some insight a beat that will fit the normal set better than the abnormal one. Then that could reinforce the light, you see, and improve the effectiveness of the therapy.”
“Hey,” said Bishop in alarm, “that’s putting a lot of responsibility on me. When I write music, I’m just caressing the ear and making the muscles jump. I’m not trying to cure an ailing brain.”
“All we ask is that you caress the ears and make the muscles jump, but do it so that it fits the normal music of the brain waves. . . . And I assure you that you need fear no responsibility, Mr. Bishop. It is quite unlikely that your music would do harm, and it might do so much good. And you’ll be paid, Mr. Bishop, win or lose.”
Bishop said, “Well, I’ll try, though I don’t promise a thing.”
He was back in two days. Dr. Cray was pulled out of conference to see him. She looked at him out of tired, narrowed eyes.
“Do you have something?”
“I have something. It may work. “
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I just have the feel of it. . . . Look, I listened to the laser tapes you gave me; the brain-wave music as it came from the patient in depression and the brain-wave music as you’ve modified it to normal. And you’re right; without the flickering light it didn’t affect me either way. Anyway, I subtracted the second from the first to see what the difference was.”
“You have a computer?” Dr. Cray said, wondering.
“No, a computer wouldn’t have helped. It would give me too much. You take one complicated laser-wave pattern and subtract another complicated laser-wave pattern and you’re left with what is still a pretty complicated laser-wave pattern. No, I subtracted it in my mind to see what kind of beat was left. . . . That would be the abnormal beat that I would have to cancel out with a counter-beat.”
“How can you subtract in your head?”
Bishop looked impatient. “I don’t know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain’s a pretty good computer, too, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is.” She subsided. “Do you have the counterbeat there?”
“I think so. I have it here on an ordinary tape recording because it doesn’t need anything more. It goes something like—dihdihdihDAH—dihdihdihDAH—dihdihdihDAHDAHDAHdihDAH—and so on. I added a tune to it and you can put it through the earphones while she’s watching the flickering light that’s matched to the normal brain- wave pattern. If I’m right, it will reinforce the living daylights out of it.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I were sure, you wouldn’t have to try it, would you, Doc?”
Dr. Cray was thoughtful for a moment. “I’ll make an appointment with the patient. I’d like you to be here.”
“If you want me. It’s part of the consultation job, I suppose.”
“You won’t be able to be in the treatment room, you understand, but I’d want you out here.”
“Anything you say.”
The patient looked careworn when she arrived. Her eyelids drooped and her voice was low and she mumbled.
Bishop’s glance was casual as he sat quietly, unnoticed, in the corner. He saw her enter the treatment room and waited patiently, thinking: What if it works? Why not package brainwave lights with appropriate sound accompaniment to combat the blues—to increase energy—to heighten love? Not just for sick people but for normal people, who could find a substitute for all the pounding they’d ever taken with alcohol or drugs in an effort to adjust their emotions—an utterly safe substitute based on the brain waves themselves. . . . And finally, after forty-five minutes, she came out.
She was placid now, and the lines had somehow washed out of her face.
“I feel better, Dr. Cray,” she said, smiling. “I feel much better.”
“You usually do,” said Dr. Cray quietly.
“Not this way,” said the woman. “Not this way. This time it’s different. The other times, even when I thought I felt good, I could sense that awful depression in the back of my head just waiting to come back the minute I relaxed. Now—it’s just gone.”
Dr. Cray said, “We can’t be sure it will always be gone. We’ll make an appointment for, say, two weeks from now but you’ll call me before then if anything goes wrong, won’t you? Did anything seem different in the treatment?”
The woman thought a bit. “No,” she said hesitantly. Then: “The flickering light, though. That might have been different. Clearer and sharper somehow.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Was I supposed to?”
Dr. Cray rose. “Very well. Remember to make that appointment with my secretary.”
The woman stopped at the door, turned, and said, “It’s a happy feeling to feel happy,” and left.
Dr. Cray said, “She didn’t hear anything, Mr. Bishop. I suppose that your counter-beat reinforced the normal brainwave pattern so naturally that the sound was, so to speak, lost in the light . . . And it may have worked, too.”
She turned to Bishop, looking him full in the face. “Mr. Bishop, will you consult with us on other cases? We’ll pay you as much as we can, and if this turns out to be an effective therapy for mental disease, we’ll see that you get all the credit due you.”
Bishop said, “I’ll be glad to help out, Doctor, but it won’t be as hard as you may think. The work is already done.”
“Already done?”
“We’ve had musicians for centuries. Maybe they didn’t know about brain waves, but they did their best to get the melodies and beats that would affect people, get their toes tapping, get their muscles twitching, get their faces smiling, get their tear ducts pumping, get their hearts pounding. Those tunes are waiting. Once you get the counter-beat, you pick the tune to fit.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Sure. What can snap you out of depression like a revival hymn? It’s what they’re meant to do. The beat gets you out of yourself. It exalts you. Maybe it doesn’t last long by itself, but if you use it to reinforce the normal brain-wave pattern, it ought to pound it in.”
“A revival hymn?” Dr. Cray stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Sure. What I used in this case was the best of them all. I gave her ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ ”
He sang it softly, finger-snapping the beat, and by the third bar, Dr. Cray’s toes were tapping.
