Voices
A medical student popped his head around the door and looked over the people sat in rows in the over-heated waiting room in the surgery, of the pretty village on the A47, five miles from Acle in Norfolk, as if he was picking out the best prospect for an interesting disease.
‘Mr Sinclair?’ he enquired, with the air of someone who could not believe that the appointment system had brought together the right patient with the right doctor at the right place and at the right time.
‘Excellent, please follow me,’ he said as he saw a man stand up. He marched down the corridor to room six at the end. ‘Come in, come in,’ he invited briskly. ‘Please sit down. How can I help you today?’
Clive realised that this was indeed a doctor sitting at the desk, he looked young only because he himself was getting older and that the doctor was waiting for him to tell him all about his potentially embarrassing problem.
‘First of all, I would like to assure you that I am not mad, doctor.’ The doctor nodded reassuringly, he had heard this preamble many times before. He edged closer to the desk so that he could reach the telephone quickly, if necessary. He switched on his false, bedside smile, which he had practiced at home in front of his bathroom mirror.
‘Of course you’re not. Why have you come to see me today?’
‘Err, well, err, it’s because I hear voices in my head.’ There he had said it. He expected a posse of white coated musclemen to burst through the door, strap him into the canvas jacket one of them carried, before marching him out backwards to a waiting ambulance to be driven off, never to be seen in polite society again. He would then be incarcerated in an old stately home that had recently fitted bars over all the windows and high end locks on the solid doors. It would be called something that sounded pleasantly rural like, The Willows to hide its true purpose. It wouldn’t do to call it Bedlam No. 5 would it?
No one rushed through the door. The doctor looked at him with an encouraging smile. ‘How long has this been going on. Tell me more about the voices and what they want you to do.’ “Just another poor wage slave pushed beyond his coping limits into psychosis,” he thought. “Schizophrenia probably,” he diagnosed to himself against all his mental health training. “ A standard issue nutcase. I must check the valium stocks with the pharmacy.”
‘Well, they don’t want me to do anything. They don’t talk to me directly. It is more as if I am listening in on other people’s conversation. They vary during the day with different people but they are usually similar at the same times of day. They aren’t aloud, just in my head. I have tried wearing headphones and they make no difference.’
‘Do you recognise any of the voices?’ asked Dr O’Neill
‘Oh yes, they are usually radio programme presenters. I often hear John Humphries, for example.’ Sean was now getting interested. This was not the common, run of the mill nutcase, as the medical profession was wont to call them between themselves when they thought no patients were listening. They used longer, often latin, names in front of the patients. They didn’t want the patients to know as much as they did as that was often very little and seldom enough to cure the disease. It was also bad for the patients morale.
‘I suppose John Humphries is better than Napoleon,’ said Sean. ‘That was a joke by the way. To help me with the diagnosis, I would like you to keep a diary of the voices for a month. Note down the day, time and the identity if you know it of anyone who is speaking. I’m sure this something we can easily sort out for you.’
‘Thank you doctor,’ said Clive, as he got up from the chair to leave. After he had left and the door was tightly closed, Sean brought up Clive’s medical notes on the screen. There was no history of mental illness, stress or anything obvious that could lead to hearing voices. He typed in a few notes on their conversation and finished them off with a “NFN?” ( Normal for Norfolk ) He had come across several people, during his time at the practice, with webs between their fingers, for example, so the variations in the make up of the human body in this part of the country no longer surprised him.
*****
Clive edged nervously into the reception area of the surgery. He checked in with the hatchet - faced receptionist who looked as if she would only allow a set number of patients to be ill each week. What happened if the quota was reached before you phoned up for an appointment? Were you just expected to get better on your own or perhaps go and find a deep ditch somewhere and quietly expire with no fuss?
He passed that first hurdle and was ordered to take a seat. He did think of enquiring where he should take the seat and was it far but, probably wisely, decided to say nothing except a meek ‘Thank you.’
The same procedure as last time followed so he was soon sitting at the side of Dr O’Neill’s desk. He had a spreadsheet of the voice times on a spreadsheet - Clive was good with spreadsheets - covering the complete month. Every day was shown from eight o’clock in the morning until ten at night. Sean could see that Clive had done little else over the month except to populate the spreadsheet.
The list of names struck a chord with Sean. Where would you come across the voices of John Humphries, Sarah Montague, Melvin Bragg, Laura Kuensberg, Dara O’Braine, Prof. Brian Cox…Suddenly he had it! They were all presenters on BBC Radio 4. He picked up the phone on his desk and demanded of the receptionist that she get him a copy of last week’s Radio Times or one of last week’s Sunday papers. ‘When Dr ?’ she asked.
‘Any time within the next five minutes,’ demanded Sean in as commanding a tone he could muster without his voice ‘morphing into a shriek.
The harridan on reception was shocked into action. Dr O’Neill had never acted like this before so it must indeed be an emergency. ‘Should I send for an ambulance doctor?, she asked nervously.
‘Of course not, just run up to Mr Patel’s on the corner and bring me back the paper as soon as you can.’
‘Poor Dr Sean must have gone mad,’ she decided, but cantered off the the shop on the corner as that seemed to be the safest thing to do. She returned after about five minutes and knocked on Dr O’Neill’s door. She was commanded to enter by the good doctor and she handed him a copy of the Radio Times before backing out of his consulting room and hurrying back to the safety of her normal working location at her command post. She felt a lot better and more in control there.
Sean opened the magazine at random and compared the day’s predicted programmes on Radio 4 with the same date page on Clive’s spreadsheet. They matched exactly. What was going on? Sean asked Clive to come back and see him in a week’s time. That would give him an opportunity to investigate further and, hopefully, come up with some sort of answer for the worried Clive. He was not just worried about the voice of Kirsty Young in his head introducing that week’s castaway, his major concern was escaping the surgery without being captured and interrogated by Miss Hagan from her control centre.
Sean wandered into the Mucky Duck, an ancient but scruffy pub which he had adopted as his local. It had its name changed from the Wensum Arms to the White Swan a few years before by some marketing genius at the head office of the owners, Pink King Brewery in Acle. It was now known by the locals as the Mucky Duck, much to the owners chagrin. In the corner, near the fireplace he spotted his colleague from the practice, Doctor Roger Price. He wandered over to the bar to collect a couple of pints of the famous Acle beer, ‘Old Mouldy’ and took them over to Roger and sipped a welcome mouthful before greeting him.
‘Kill any of your patients today, Rog?’ he casually asked as a way of getting a conversation going.
‘Not as far as I know, Sean. How about you? Any interesting diseases today?’ As was obvious by now, they were friends as well as colleagues and were far too used to the everyday little problems of their patients so it was good news for them when a patient wandered in with an interesting problem. Not so good for the patient tho’. They used the pub as a place to meet and discuss any problems they had with patients so Sean soon got around to talking about Clive and his voices. As Sean explained the problems that Clive had, he could see Roger’s growing interest.
‘I had a patient last month that had a similar sort of delusion. He reckoned he could see things in a different way, much like bees could see flowers for example. He had researched this and done some experiments and eventually decided that he could see ultra violet light. He had got one of those UV torches that they use to check markings on valuables that fluoresce when exposed to UV light and he could see the light from it. He went out in the country one night when there was no moon or starlight because of the clouds and he could see his way by using the UV, ‘dark light’ torch. I tested him of course in the surgery with the curtains closed and the light off and found that he could read a newspaper by using the torch. I had to agree with him that he wasn’t mad or deluded but that his vision system - eyes and brain had changed to extend his view of the electromagnetic spectrum into the ultra violet. Do you think something similar is happening to your patient Sean?’
‘Possibly, but it would have to be a totally different method of detecting the radio frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum as he appears to be receiving radio waves and they are a longer wavelength than infra red at the opposite end of the visible spectrum. He is not receiving the signals via his eyes so he must have developed a different receiving system.’
‘Doesn’t radio four transmit on VHF FM?’
‘Yes, I looked it up. It transmits on 92 - 95 megahertz but it also transmits on DAB using COFDM technology - can you tell I looked it up? This transmits on one of a number of multiplex’s between 217.5 and 239 MHz. I think it is more likely that he is receiving somehow on DAB because how would a biological organism be able to decode FM?’
‘I know a guy who is an expert o radio physics. Why don’t I contact him and you two can have a chat about it?’
‘Yeah, OK, what’s to lose? I might learn something.’
*****
Professor James Maxwell strode over to the ginger figure hunched over his pint and writing furiously in a notebook on the table. He guessed, correctly, that this was the man he had come to meet, Dr Sean O’Neill.
‘You must be Sean,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Sean, ‘would you like a beer?’
‘No, just a small glass of Merlot please.’
Sean came back to the table with the glass of wine for James and a refilled pint glass of Old Mouldy for him.
‘So James, you are an expert on the electromagnetic spectrum?’ asked Sean
‘Not really an expert but I have been studying it for some thirty seven years so I do know a little about it. Call me Jim by the way, everyone does.’
OK Jim. Well, I’m sure Roger has a told you a little about my patient? I can’t tell you his name due to doctor / patient confidentiality of course.’
‘That’s no problem, just tell me what is happening to him.’
Sean went through the whole Colin saga and as he talked, he could see Jim get more and more interested.
‘If what you say is true, do you understand the implications of this, Sean?’
‘Do you mean for the health of my patient or wider implications?’
‘I mean both. I am sure you can help your patient with, for example Cognitive Behavioural Therapy so helping him to tune out the voices when he needs to. That will put him back in control of his mental health. The other implication is that, if indeed he is hearing Radio Four in his head, then he must have a centre in his brain that is receiving and decoding their DAB or FM transmissions. The most likely is Digital Audio Broadcasting as I cannot see how an organism could possibly decode Frequency Modulation. This we can easily prove by screening out each system in turn to see which he is receiving. I have heard rumours of this happening before but not of a provable event. Do you think he will be agreeable to come and do some research work in our labs with us once you have taught him how to switch off his voices when he needs to and reassured him that he is not mad?’
‘Yes, I think so. He is an intelligent man, just worried that he is going round the bend. That is a technical term we doctors use by the way. Thanks for all your help, Jim. I’ll send you an e mail once he is sorted out and if he is willing to work with you on this to look further into his amazing ability.’
‘OK, I’ll wait to hear from you once you have got his Maxwell demons out of his head. See you then.’
‘I like that. Do you ever get called Clarke?’
‘Frequently, I just try to ignore it. Do you ever get asked where you have parked your C5?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ They both laughed and walked out of the pub together.
*****
It was a year later, Jim had invited Sean to his lab to talk about the progress they had made with subject ‘C’.
‘Well Sean, I have to thank you for passing your patient on to me. We taught him how to deal with his stress and the voices by the use of CBT. He responded well to that and, once he accepted that they weren’t the voice of the devil and he wasn’t nuts he was cured of all his angst. I suppose you could say that we did your work for you but I am still glad you referred him to us because we have had an amazing year and have come up with a major discovery.
‘Well, if you have done my job for me I suppose you don’t want any more referrals like Colin?’
‘Why, have you come across any more patients with the same problem?’
‘Not quite, no more who can hear Radio 4 but I now have a couple who can tune in to Classic FM. The good thing for them is that they didn’t need CBT as they can control the phenomenon. They had a sort of neural volume control in their head so, once I reassured them that they were ‘normal’, they didn’t need any further treatment. Should I send them along to you to have their heads examined, Jim?’
‘Yes, I would love to see them, it would make a change to hear some decent music instead of some idiot called Melvin wittering on about ancient Roman painters or some such rubbish. In the meantime, shall I bring you up to date with where we are so far?’
‘Yes, ok Jim, my life has been too exciting recently, I could do with a dose of boredom,’ smiled Sean
‘I can certainly manage that,’ said Jim. ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll start from where we had completed training Clive in CBT techniques. We then wired him up to an encephalograph to monitor his brainwaves to see if we could see which part of his brain was receiving the signals and which part was decoding them. It turns out that it was being received in the left side of the brain, near the surface in the Auditory cortex for the right ear. When he allowed himself to hear the voices, he was a little deaf in the right ear. It makes sense that the signal was being received in this part of the brain as it is near the surface and our measurements showed that radio signal of that frequency are severely attenuated by passing through the skull and brain matter. The received signals are then passed to the General Interpretive Centre which is also located on the left side of the brain responsible for language and mathematical calculation and is close to the receiving Auditory cortex.
This all makes sense. We now had to establish how Colin’s brain came to be receiving these signals.
Our first hypothesis was that a part of his skull was acting as a rectifier and so decoding the signals just as some people have been known to do by the mercury amalgam in their teeth in the early twentieth century. The sound was then transported via bone conduction through the skull to the auditory processes in the ears. We soon discounted this theory as Colin had no fillings in his teeth and any fillings would not work on the new DAB system.
We then carried out an MRI scan on Colin’s head and found something remarkable. His auditory cortex was about 12% larger than normal. We the set up a DAB low power transmitter with Colin in Faraday cage so that he was isolated from all electromagnetic fields except those being transmitted from the DAB transmitter. We found that Colin could ‘hear’ radio Four frequencies very well but also other stations using the DAB system if the transmitter power was increased by about 50%.
I think, if we carry out MRI scans on your ‘Classic FM’ patients we will find that their Auditory cortexes are also of an unusually large size.
Our current findings suggest that human brains are responding to being soaked in the radio and maybe ultraviolet and infra red, frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum during the twentieth and early twenty first centuries by creating a capacity to respond to these signals. This fits well with the research in neuroscience over the last decade or so that shows the remarkable ability of the brain to modify and rewire itself - the emerging science of brain plasticity.
It also shows the possible way forward to research the clinical uses of this remarkable response in the fields of recovery from stroke, parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis etc.’
‘Wow,’ said Sean.’All this from Colin hearing voices.’
‘Yes, this is the first confirmation we have had that the human race is still evolving and will eventually be a new species. We have provisionally called this new species Homo Radiolarensis. We are looking forward to the day when we find not only a receiver, like Colin but a transmitter. That will be a major leap forward in communication. It will be very close to the telepathy that has been the stuff of science fiction for a couple of hundred years.
We will have to change Descartes’ saying from ‘I think therefore I am’ to ‘Think and the world thinks with you.’
