Years ago there was a craze for “magic eye pictures“. If you held up a piece of paper covered in apparently random squiggles, coughed, spat, turned around three times and squinted a 3D image would “magically” appear. I could not get it to work and concluded it was a con designed to see if you were stupid enough to pay for a poster covered in random computer noise. Other people, people I trust, claimed to be able to see what I could not.
I work with some extraordinarily clever people. That means that from time to time (in fact more often than I would care to admit) I find myself being slower to understand things than they are. What intrigues me is that sense of having reached your intellectual limit; of seeing something and just not getting it; of having to work hard at something to make it come into focus.
At school I was a decent student and I was ultimately competent enough to end up pursuing post-graduate studies and doing some Law tutoring at a number of universities. I don’t claim to be a dunce. However, I well remember being sat in Additional Mathemetics class in the fifth form at school and realising that as my teacher explained “integration” to me all I was hearing was radio static. For a bit I was able to perform the calculations by learning the stages by rote but shorn of the intellectual grasp of why the formulae worked it all just drifted away from me. It was like I had travelled to the edge of my brain’s cramped little universe and hit the wall of the crystal sphere.
Other things I could learn but would forget. I have learned to read music twice now and if I don’t do it daily it fades away to nothing. Others claim to be able to look at a score and hear the music in their heads. Even at my peak I could only guess the interval and hum one note at a time, one bar a minute.
As the years passed I found this intellect boundary began to trouble me more and more. I took an OU course on Astronomy and Planetary Physics with a view specifically to seeing if I could make myself understand the maths. It was hard work but I was pleased to make any progress. Then we reached the section on Cosmology. I was reading my textbook whilst on holiday and was lumbering through the chapter on the origins of the Universe. The model described involved the Universe inflating out from a tiny singularity. That I understood (at least in its basics). Then a question popped into my head: “why is there a universe at all”? On the surface this is a tired old question. When I have put it to others they think it’s a prelude to some theological debate. It isn’t. It just occurred to me in a flash that there universe need not have existed. What is it doing here? What’s its context? It’s not that I had not posed similiar questions to myself in the abstract before, it’s just that I just suddenly seemed to glimpse its substantive nature. It’s as if I suddenly saw the Magic Eye picture.
When I let that question play around my head it still flat out panics me. I get a feeling like a headache or a reaction to a loud noise. It’s like I nudged through the intellect boundary and found myself falling fast. Sickening and scary.
