Stephen Jay Gould

Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life's misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature.

We tend to understand how the physically handicapped cope, but we rarely consider the similar struggles of the mentally handicapped. We must all order the "buzzing and blooming" confusion of the external world — and if we can't understand stories, we have to find some other way. This young man has struggled all his life to find regularities that might anchor and make sense of the surrounding cacophony. Many of his efforts have been dead ends and wild goose chases.

Since he reads faces so poorly, he struggled for years to find an additional clue in the pitch or loudness of voices. Does high mean happy? Does loud mean angry? He would play the same record at different speeds, converting Paul Robeson at 33 rpm to the sound of a woman's voice at 78 rpm — always hoping (or so I inferred) to induce some rule, some guide to action. He has never found it, though he still tries. When he was quite young, he developed some mathematical skills, and he put them to immediate use. He would time all his 33 rpm records, trying to find some rule that would correlate the type of music with the length of the recording. He got nowhere and eventually gave up.

Finally, he found his workable key - chronology. If you cannot understand stories, what might work next best as a general organizer? The linear sequence of time! You may not know why, or how, or whether, or what, but at least you can order all the items in a temporal series without worrying about their causal connections — this came before that, that before the other, the other before this-thing-here. He had triumphed. This young man can tell you something that happened on every individual day for the last twenty years of his life. Since he does not judge importance as we do, the event that he remembers often seems trivial to us, so we do not recall and therefore cannot verify his accuracy — "On that day, Michael Ianuzzi said 'Wow.'" But when we can check, he is never wrong — "On July 4, 1981, we saw fireworks on the Charles River."

-Stephen Jay Gould, Five Weeks