Profitable Wonders
‘Toscanini knew every note of every instrument of 250 symphonic works’
It is impossible to fathom the depths of the human mind. The brain, it is estimated, can process a quadrillion computations per second. ‘We don’t just have the power of a single computer in our heads,’ observes communications wizard Charles Jonscher. ‘The true comparison would be a figure like 20 billion computers.’
Proposing, by analogy, what this might mean, psychology professor Paul Reber, writing in the Scientific American, suggests that, were the brain a digital video recorder, its information-processing capacity would be sufficient to hold three million hours’ worth of television programmes.
‘You would have to leave it running continuously for more than three hundred years to use up all that storage.’
And that is just for ordinary minds. The mental powers of the exceptionally brilliant and creative – Socrates, say, or Shakespeare, Newton or Einstein – lie far beyond the reaches of such calculations. Still, it is possible to glimpse what those powers might entail by comparison with those intellectual faculties with which we are familiar – such as mental arithmetic.
The realm of higher mathematics inhabited by ‘the greatest mathematician of his era’, Professor Alexander Aitken (1895-1967) – the solution of linear and polynomial equations, symmetric groups and computational algorithms – may be accessible to very few. But we can have some awed intuition of his mental prowess when learning that, challenged to multiply 987,654,321 by 123,956,789, he produced within 30 seconds the correct answer, which is (of course) 121,932,631,112,635,269.
The mastery of foreign languages provides a similar metric for recognising the unfathomable profundities of exceptional minds. Besides English, my father was fluent in French, German, Swahili, Serbo-croat and Greek – which, though certainly impressive, is probably not unusual.
Not so Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, born the son of a carpenter in Bologna in 1774. The librarian to the Vatican, he spoke 30 languages ‘with rare excellence’ (including, along with all the European ones, the more esoteric biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, ancient and modern Armenian, Coptic, Persian, Maltese and Romaic) while also possessing a basic knowledge of a couple of dozen more.
On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI arranged for an international group of seminarians to address him simultaneously, ‘each in his own tongue, with such abundance of words and volubility of tone, it was scarcely possible to distinguish them’. Cardinal Mezzofanti was unfazed and, ‘taking them up singly, replied to each in his own language’.
But it is the limitless capacity and retentiveness of exceptional minds that most strikingly demonstrates their transcendent superiority over the ordinary.
While, like many, I struggle to recall the contents of a conversation from a week ago, the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini knew by heart every note of every instrument of 250 symphonic works, the words and music of 100 operas, numerous chamber works, piano, cello and violin pieces.
His powers of retentiveness were fortified by his ability to hear a composition just by reading it. ‘He had but to glance casually at a page of complex music,’ his biographer records, ‘and he heard the page both horizontally and vertically in his imagination.’
Or, again, we can never hope to comprehend the fecundity of the teenage Mozart’s creative imagination that inspired him to write 27 symphonies in just three years, but it was predicated at least in part on the divine gift of an almost supernaturally retentive memory.
No one was permitted, ‘on pain of excommunication’, to copy Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere that was the exclusive property of the Vatican Choir. Mozart heard it once, returned home, made a faithful transcription, and his playing it later at a gathering was judged by the papal singer Christofori to be faultless.
There are, to be sure, similar instances intimating the seemingly supernatural prowess of exceptional minds, but one further must suffice. While serving as an infantryman in the trenches, the already encountered Alexander Aitken recalls in his autobiography how, on 14th July 1916, ‘Sleep proved impossible; each time I closed my eyes, I heard, as though it were in the dugout itself, the whistle of falling mortar bombs.’ And then, gradually, he became aware of a conversation in low tones nearby – the roll book of his platoon, urgently requested by headquarters, was nowhere to be found.
‘I had no difficulty in bringing that lost roll book before me almost as if it were floating,’ he writes. ‘Speaking from the matting on which I was lying, I offered to dictate the details: full names, regimental numbers, and the rest.’ The rapidity and precision of his effortless recall in such difficult circumstances defies all computation.