I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Cortex Envy: Bringing Up Baby Einstein

2 6 5 Bringing Up Baby Einstein Cortex Envy cortex envy—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere , may be smarter than you are—was my birthright. When I was little, my mother (last seen protesting her high IQ to a gerontologist , just before Alzheimer’s hit the delete key on her mind) liked to tell me my Marvel Comics origin story: how she acquired target on my future father because she knew he was bright, she knew she was bright, and it only stood to reason, therefore, that do-it-yourself eugenics would produce a wunderkind. My parents divorced shortly after I was born, but what of it? Decades before the Nobel Prize sperm bank, my mother had genetically engineered a brainchild all her own, named (in what might charitably be called an excess of optimism) Mark Alexander, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great. Psychologically, the expectation that I would live up to my namesakes ’ reputations (world domination, a breezy way with the gnomic one-liner, burial in a solid-gold sarcophagus while legions wept) and that I would do so by dint of my supposedly prodigious intellect proved almost unbearable,saddling me with an anxiety so crushing it inspired suicidal ideation before I was out of short pants.(How many Baby Einsteins are dragging this cross, I wonder?) In The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, A. J. Jacobs confides: C O R T E X E N V Y 2 6 6 Growing up, I thought I was smart. Well, that wasn’t exactly the whole story. I didn’t just think I was smart. I thought I was really smart. I thought I was, in fact, the smartest boy in the world. I’m honestly not sure how this notion popped into my head.My mom probably had something to do with it,seeing as she was only slightly less enamored of me than I was of myself.1 A precocious reader, I was devouring comics before kindergarten; by grade school, I was reading voraciously, omnivorously, driven by the lash of great expectations. (“He isn’t living up to his potential” was a tongue-clucking refrain, in parent–teacher conferences; hadn’t Mozart written his first concerto by the age of four?) Undaunted by the illimitable vastness of things, I dreamed, half seriously, of knowing everything, cramming all the spiral galaxies and crab nebulae of human knowledge into my skull. I compiled lists of every jawbreakingly polysyllabic or vanishingly arcane word I encountered in my reading. What better way to prove you’re the Smartest Boy in the World—or a pluperfect little asshat—than to drop a vocabulary bomb like “ovine hebetude” in the lunchroom or, better yet, before an audience of overawed adults? I tossed off conversational non sequiturs like “E = MC2 ,” a cryptic incantation that meant nothing to me, beyond the all-important fact that it was Einstein ’s best-known one-liner,a spell that magically conferred the nimbus of genius on anyone who uttered it. I wanted to be Gary Mitchell when I grew up. Mitchell is the mutant helmsman in the Star Trek episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (1966) whose exposure to a “magnetic space storm” endows him with godlike psionic abilities, goth-tastic silver pupils, and, not incidentally, geometrically multiplying brainpower. Sucking information out of the starship’s memory banks faster than the computer can deliver it (an experience that practically gives the machine a microstroke),he’s the instant master of every thinker he encounters. Spinoza? “Once you get into him, he’s rather simple,” says Mitchell. “Childish, almost.”2 Meanwhile, in the parallel world of 1970s Earth, my stepdad and 2 6 7 C O R T E X E N V Y I were locked in the Freudian version of Ultimate Cage Fighting, a passive-aggressive slapfest that pitted my Oedipal desire to slay the father against his Cronus complex.3 Raging across indoor theaters of war, from the dinner table to the so-called family room (a shrine to the rabbit-eared god of domesticity,the TV),we reenacted the psionic beatdown from the final minutes of “Where No Man Has Gone Before,”when Mitchell and another mutant trade thunderbolts,pausing between rounds to give each other the shiny silver stinkeye. Our fraught psychodynamic...