On a December day a few years ago, John Horton Conway settled in for an interview at the office of neuroscientist Sandra Witelson. Conway wasn’t there for an appointment proper, but rather to provide fodder for Witelson’s ongoing research on scientifically minded brains. All the same, he’d braced himself for an arsenal of standard neuropsychological assessments, and custom tests designed to capture his brain performing live during a functional MRI.
Witelson tried to reassure her subject, explaining what she was after with the tests. “With imaging, one can look at the microscopic anatomy of the brain, just through a picture,” she said. “So what I’m hoping is that these tests will get at different types of mathematics, and we will be able to see different parts of your brain light up when you’re thinking in different ways. We want to see which part of your brain is particularly active when you’re thinking some of your great mathematical thoughts.”
“Well, you know, I’m not sure that I can have great mathematical thoughts to order,” said Conway. “I can have lesser thoughts.”
“That’ll do,” said Witelson.
Witelson knows brains. But, as she’s noted, “It’s quite clear, people don’t know how they do their thinking.”
A professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Witelson is best known for her 1999 study, published in the Lancet, “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein,” which revealed unique anatomical features in the organ that gave us the General Theory of Relativity (this year celebrating its centenary). She is currently concluding further investigations into Einstein’s brain, on the microscopic level, but that’s all she’s willing to say about this work prior to publication.
Witelson is also known for her brain bank. It contains the brains of 125 cognitively “normal” Canadians. Broadly speaking, her work seeks to understand the relationship between brain structure and function, exploring the neuroanatomical and chemical underpinnings of cognition. She believes that the brains of people with extraordinary abilities can be telling, since they are many standard deviations away from the norm. Einstein was one such case. Another was the late Toronto classical geometer Donald Coxeter, whose brain Witelson also studied pre and post-mortem (like Einstein, he had an extra-large parietal lobe, the locus of spatial and visual reasoning). When she asked Coxeter, “Who thinks like you?” he told her: “Talk to John Horton Conway.”
And so it happened that Witelson began her study of the brain belonging to the creative genius Conway, Princeton’s promiscuous polymath—a magpie of all manner of nerdish delights, both trivial and deep—who is the subject of my new book (the late Coxeter was the subject of my first book). Working on this project I was forever answering the question of how one writes about a live subject. As Samuel Johnson said: “If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent.” I tried to heed the warning.
Having Conway looking over my shoulder inevitably made his vital signs a liability, mostly for him. I realized this over lunch at the Institute for Advanced Study with Heinrich von Staden, the resident authority on ancient science. He told me about the Greek and Roman tradition of vivisection, making public spectacle of strapping a live pig to a plank and cutting him open and observing the mechanics of his beating heart. A fitting metaphor, it seemed, for what this experience would become for Conway. And Conway’s visit with Witelson proved to be a fine example of this predicament.
Hailing originally from Cambridge, Conway became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981 (and thereupon his colleague Peter Johnstone pointed out the FRS initials also stood for “Filthy Rotten Swine,” which Conway happily repeated at every opportunity). He decamped for Princeton in 1986, but it was while at Cambridge that he enjoyed what he calls a remarkably productive annus mirabilis in 1970, when he invented the Game of Life, alighted upon the aptly named “surreal numbers,” and discovered the 24-dimensional Conway group in the sea of mathematical symmetry.
Above and beyond his great works, Conway is summed up by one of his Princeton colleagues as “the seducer,” for the infatuating way he explains his mathy passions and displays his collection of knowledge (he’s also a romantic charmer, having been thrice married, and all in all boasting more dalliances than he can count). To that end, he was, in a way, looking forward to getting his brain examined—he intended to add this Einsteinian encounter to his vast repertoire of stories. But he’d also been dreading it: To him it was a memento mori, a reminder of death.
As I, the chauffeur, waited for my charge at the airport in Toronto, I didn’t know quite what to expect, which state of mind would prevail. Peering through the arrivals gate, first I spotted Chris Noth, Mr. Big from Sex and the City, in all his glory. And then came Conway, sporting his usual day-to-day dishevelment, and not such a sight for sore eyes. He’s usually very hairy and bearded, appealingly Archimedean, but the day before he’d made his annual trip to the barber and been brutally shorn. Now he looked like a septuagenarian Dennis the Menace.
Before they got started substantively, Witelson, with her bouffant black hair and red lipstick, briefed Conway about her Einstein work. Conway had followed the saga of the great man’s brain (well-documented in the books Possessing Genius and Driving Dr. Albert). He recalled that Einstein’s noggin had a groove that was unusually deep. “It wasn’t deeper,” said Witelson. “It was in a different place. So his anatomy was unique, in a very precise sense. In Einstein’s brain we found a 15 percent expansion of the parietal lobe, in addition to the groove being in a different place, and one was the consequence of the other.”
“People ask me,” Witelson continued, “whether Einstein’s brain got to be that way because he did so much physics. I think it is the other way around. I think he did so much physics because his brain had a certain anatomy.”
“I am sort of rather opposed to that view,” said Conway. “I’m anti-elitist, though I have taught in elitist universities all my life. I tend to believe that anybody could do, roughly speaking, what I can do. It’s a very common opinion that special gifts come at birth or something. I don’t really want to believe it.”
“Why not?” asked Witelson. “Could everyone be a Mozart?”
“I believe that everybody, almost everybody, could do mathematics pretty damn well.”
“Clearly there are variations in ability. The differences can be qualified.”
“But they are not so great as people think. I believe that given the right education, the right upbringing, anybody could be pretty good at everything.”
The first day of testing Conway found bruising: “They’ve been putting me through a battery of tests, and I feel pretty battered.” The postdoctoral students administering the proceedings (via the Brain Sciences Research Program at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre) had also taken a beating—from Conway. He criticized and complained, zealously, that the tests were flawed in composition and methodology: “That’s not a square! That’s a rectangle! And I suppose that’s intended to be a circle?” He also questioned the degree of scientific control when he was rolled into the doughnut for the fMRI. “What’s preventing me from just thinking of sexual fantasies when I’m in the machine?”
This notion of sabotage arose again on day two, during the bespoke “the sum of squares” test—when a number flashed on the screen, Conway was instructed to pull the trigger when he’d worked out the answer (example: 13 = 22 + 32 ). To this setup Conway also took offense.
“Oh, you’re not listening to my answers, then?”
“This task is all in your head,” said the lead postdoc.
“Well, then, there is no incentive for me to get it right. You’re asking me to think REALLY hard,” he boomed, “and get it right, et cetera, and you’re not even listening. It’s bloody insulting.”
In the end, Conway refused to do the sum-of-squares. As for the wobbly he threw over the integrity of the tests, when I followed up with Witelson a while later, to see if she’d gathered enough data, she wasn’t worried (and ultimately, she’s waiting for Conway’s post-mortem brain to complete her study). “It didn’t really matter if he got the right answer,” she noted. “It was more about the process he was thinking through. But what John pointed out, which is a good point, is that his brain would be doing different things when he got the right answer versus the wrong answer.”
What really struck Witeslon, though, and stayed with her, was something else entirely. “The thing that I found about Conway is—and it sounds so sort of juvenile to say this—but his eyes were so electric, so magnetic. You know how they talk about Einstein’s eyes being so bright? With Conway, you’re just drawn to him. His eyes are like sponges, darting around, pulling everything in.”
The genius had charmed his neuroscientist.
Siobhan Roberts is a science writer based in Toronto. Her new book Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway, from which this adapted excerpt is drawn, was published this year by Bloomsbury. She is also the producer of “Memento Mori,” a mini-documentary about Conway directed by Andy Keen.
Cartoon at top by Simon J. Fraser. Used with permission.
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