Great minds think alike

Some are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them while straining on the lavatory. As the door bell rang and Tommy McHugh hastened to finish up, his forced bowel movement released a rush of blood into his head and, in due course, an outpouring of creativity from it. Tommy came home from hospital with 98 staples in his “noodle doodle” as he put it on Five’s fascinating My Brilliant Brain. Soon after the manic poetry writing started, followed by the obsessive painting. He was in artistic heaven and personal hell, unable to recognise his wife. In desperation he wrote to neurologists around the world: “My brain is split into a neuron war/ Wondering and arguing what to do/ Looking for a brain explorer. Is it you?”

Alice Flaherty, of the Harvard Medical School, thought it was. After the emotional trauma of a double miscarriage, she too had been gripped by a maniacal urge to write, posting notes in the middle of the night on her bedroom wall. When the Boston professor and the Liverpool ex-con met they recognised each other as victims of the same strange possession, a result, thought Flaherty, of cerebral events that had wrenched their frontal lobes, which generate ideas, out of balance with the temporal lobes, which control them.

Darold Treffert, of the University of Wisconsin, preferred to talk of a left-brain-right-brain split. He studies “prodigious savants”, the world’s 100 or so brain-damaged people with superpowers: memory men, human calculators, speed draughtsmen. Their brains’ creative right hemispheres have, he believes, been freed from the “tyranny” of their left. “We are a left-brain society. We do well with logical sequential thinking and language,” he explained, and then, lest he had offended anyone, added that he wasn’t picking on it.

In Sydney another scientist, Allan Snyder, was doing just that. His guinea-pig, Mike, had agreed to get the left side of his brain numbed by magnetic pulses. Afterwards, repeating tests he had previously failed, Mike found himself briefly able to count 100 dots on a screen in 1.5 seconds, read A BIRD IN THE/ THE HAND IS WORTH/ TWO IN THE BUSH without missing the repeat, and draw animated horses that would grace a caveman’s wall. Let’s invent a thinking cap, said Snyder, his credibility narrowly surviving a baseball cap worn so it covered only his right hemisphere. Yes, an electronic thinking cap! To release the creativity in each and every one of us! A thinking cap to thwart evolution!

This would have been treasonous talk to viewers of Fight for Life (BBC One). In a reverse of the tradition established by Your Life in Their Hands back in the 1950s, this medical series prefers to glorify the evolved body’s own restorative powers than surgical skills. With the aid of computer graphics that make Raquel Welch’s intravenous submarine outing in Fantastic Voyage look rather less fantastic, we saw cells race in to eat up and replace the crushed leg bones of 19-year-old Danny who had rashly made the decision to take a short cut from the balconyto a dancefloor. “Totally unnecessary,” agreed Danny in repose. But that’s teenagers for you. The bad news is their frontal lobes are still developing, the good that the body is never more resilient than in adolescence.

This series follows the body’s rear-guard battles to stay alive from birth to old age. It is brilliantly done and often moving, but, until now, I admit, I have avoided it, more or less for the reasons Jack Dee on Channel 4’s TV Heaven, Telly Hell last night damned BBC One’s City Hospital. What’s so entertaining about taking a camera into a hospital and watching sick people? Fight for Life’s first two episodes concerned sick babies and poorly infants and we weren’t talking about colic and conker injuries. I averted my critical gaze, mainly because I doubted if I would be able to hold it.

TV Heaven, Telly Hell provides a tonic; however, even after the heaviest night’s viewing. Dee and his host, Sean Lock, took City Hospital to bits but did not neglect to big up its already oversized presenter Brian Blessed. “I am coming nearer and nearer to Vera,” the thespy Honey Monster bellowed in a clip that showed him wobble towards a harmless OAP who had declared herself a fan. “I fancy you like mad!” Now there’s a fellow who needs his lobes examined.

Out of the box

— Poland’s brain drain is worse than I feared. Producers of the Polish Big Brother are holding auditions in Britain to help to fill their BB house. The theory is that the Polish expats are more dynamic and hipper than the Pole proles back home. So be nice to your plumber. He could be on the road to fame.

— I can hardly wait for ITV’s promised adaptation of the first of the slew of Jilly Cooper novels it has bought. Leafing through my yellowing copy of Octavia (published 1977), I notice the plot reaches a climax, as it were, with our heroine posing for a porn mag “in every conceivable position and garment, including a white fox fur with a string of pearls hanging over one breast”. Dialogue includes: “We’ll need the cold blower to stiffen her nipples.” No need, then, for adaptor Jonathan Harvey to go sexing things up.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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