Against Authority

A little boy in a room of mirrors

Both dogs and humans know when we’ve been caged. We sense instinctually when some other person—or an institution—has the power to direct or control our lives. And our first awareness of this reality occurs at an early age. The older kids on the schoolyard are bigger and stronger. They have the power to knock us down and tell us what to do.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, I was quite aware of my own powerlessness. I couldn’t tell anyone what to do—not even a first grader. Although my brain was crammed with a great many words, I had a terrible stutter and couldn’t get the words out. Everyone in my elementary school class laughed when I struggled to speak, and sometimes even my teacher had to conceal her smile.

By the time I was eight years old, I started to believe that a demon with a perverse sense of humor was in charge of my lips and tongue. On some days, he was a lazy demon, and I could talk on the phone or answer questions in class. Then the demon would get annoyed with me and I would spit and sputter over every word.

On Sundays my family attended a Scotch Presbyterian church headed by a conservative pastor who preached about infant damnation. I was confused about the power of baptism, but I definitely understood the concept of hell. I was damned forever through no fault of my own. People were going to mock and tease me for the rest of my life.

My parents wanted me to be happy, but it was clear that they couldn’t solve this problem. My mother was a transplanted Southern girl with chestnut brown hair that touched her shoulders. She sang along with the radio and placed maple syrup smiles on my pancakes. Whenever I stuttered, she would touch me on the back of the neck as if an infusion of maternal love could help me speak. My father was good at fixing things and made most of our furniture in a basement workshop. But I was a broken mechanism that couldn’t be repaired. If I jammed up and struggled to say my name, he would stare at me with a puzzled expression on his face.

I assumed that I would never be able to speak correctly, and then my elementary school received a letter from a university in a nearby city. It announced that a team of neurologists was beginning a study of children with speech problems. Testing and weekly speech therapy would be given to all participants at no charge.

My parents discussed the letter after dinner, and a few weeks later my mother drove me to the university’s research lab. She signed a permission form, and then a young man wearing a white lab coat escorted me upstairs to a large room on the third floor. Half of the room was an office cluster with chairs, desks, and file cabinets. The other side had a padded examination table placed next to a stainless-steel machine about the size of kitchen sink. I could see that the machine had eight small pens that touched a spool of paper.

It was only much later in my life that I saw a photograph in a textbook and realized that I had encountered one of the first modern electroencephalogram machines. Human brain waves had first been recorded in 1924, but this particular EEG machine was an Offner Dynograph with a piezoelectric ink system that had been invented after World War II by a professor of biophysics named Franklin Offner. Without surgery, it could record the brain’s electrical activity over a short period of time.

The young man wearing the lab coat told me to lie on the table and began tapping electrodes to my head. No one explained what was going to happen. A few weeks earlier, I had seen the movie Frankenstein at a Saturday matinee, so I assumed that electricity was about to be shot into my skull.

The dynograph was switched on and the spool of unraveling paper made a humming sound. First the technician asked me to raise my right hand and then my left. Then I had to count backward and say the names of the farm animals shown on flash cards. Halfway through this recitation, I heard the words that you never want to hear during a neurological procedure.

Oh . . .

And then:

Uh-oh.

And finally:

"Dr. Naylor, you need to take a look at this right now."

Dr. Naylor, a short bald man with a nose like a puffin’s beak, hurried over to the EEG machine with another scientist who had a bushy mustache. They whispered to each other while the pens scratched their wavering lines. Dr. Naylor asked me to say my name and count backward. When the paper ran out, he ordered the technician to put on another spool, and the three men continued their conversation. No one told me what was going on, but I enjoyed being the center of attention.

Dr. Naylor and Dr. Mustache (I never learned his name) watched the machine run through four more spools of paper, and then Dr. Naylor ordered the technician to run downstairs and find my mother.

When my mother arrived, I could see that she was impressed—and a little intimidated—by the serious-looking men wearing lab coats. Scientists had gained a great deal of prestige during World War II, and doctors sold cigarettes on television. The way that she answered their questions showed me that she had accepted Dr. Naylor’s authority. His expertise and position gave him the right to make decisions about her son.

As I lay on the table, still attached to the EEG machine, Dr. Naylor explained that every human brain has two hemispheres that communicate with each other through a band of nerves. Usually, the right side of the brain controls the left side of our body and the other hemisphere controls the right side. For most people, one of the two hemispheres is dominant during certain activities.

For some reason, I lacked a dominant hemisphere. My left hemisphere showed activity when I was speaking and then my brain decided, Well, that’s enough of this nonsense and the right hemisphere took over. The switching also took place while I was reciting numbers or looking at flash cards.

What about the stutter? my mother asked. Can you fix it?

Dr. Naylor smiled. We’ll try our best, but it won’t happen overnight.

Dr. Naylor said that my mother had to sign some more permission forms and he escorted her to another room. I have no idea what he told her at that moment, but his subsequent experiments focused on the switching mechanism in my brain. In the 1950s, scientists had no idea why right-handed people preferred one hemisphere while the left-handed minority used the other. Was a person’s dominant brain hemisphere determined by genetics? Or could a brilliant scientist rewire the brain like a fuse box? Dr. Naylor was an ambitious man, and it’s possible that he swaggered out of his lab that evening wondering whether a stuttering eight-year-old boy was his key to a Nobel Prize.

During the first few months of the research project, I enjoyed my weekly visits to the university. Every Wednesday afternoon, the other kids in my class had to remain at their desks as I walked out to the parking lot and jumped into our Country Squire station wagon. Usually, my mother waited in the university’s graduate student lounge while I climbed upstairs to the lab. I felt grown-up and important—and ready for the electrodes to be taped to my head.

Eventually the young technician disappeared and Dr. Naylor assigned me to a graduate student named Carla. Beneath her lab coat, Carla wore skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars. She had short brown hair and pale skin, and wore flared-frame Harlequin eyeglasses that gave her face a pointy, aggressive appearance.

Carla and I rarely spoke to each other, and she never explained what theory she was trying to prove. Once I lay down on the table, she would attach the electrodes to my skull. During the first few weeks of her experiment, she placed a bandage over my left or right eye, but that didn’t influence my choice of brain hemispheres. Deciding on a more direct approach, she began to tape one side of my body to the table.

Don’t move, she whispered. Don’t move. . . . Then she would shine a flashlight into one of my eyes or jab my free arm with a freshly sharpened pencil.

I had assumed that Dr. Naylor was going to rewire my brain in some way so that my stuttering would disappear. Gradually, I realized that I wasn’t going to be cured at all. Once a week I was going to be given an odd sort of brain test, and I had no control over delivering the right answer. I wanted to be praised, but the angry expression on Carla’s face told me that I had failed once again. On a bad day, she glared at me and jabbed the pencil with extra force.

One of the pleasures of writing novels is that my characters usually do something. But in real life we often stay locked in a situation that we know is painful or wrong. Now that I’m older, I can understand Carla’s desire to have a successful experiment. But it’s taken me a long time to figure out why