Understand {novelette}

If your intelligence was exponentially enhanced, almost overnight, how would you feel, and what use would you make of your new abilities and awareness? Would you seek knowledge and understanding for its own sake, or would you save the world? Is intelligence a means, or an end in itself?


Leon recovers from near drowning and subsequent coma by being given the experimental Hormone K, which creates neural pathways to replace lost ones. More than he lost.

If Only

How many times have you wondered “If only I could do…”, but are hampered by lack of ability or knowledge, both of which are partly down to lack of time (cf Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule).


Leon’s superbrain learns phenomenally quickly and remembers faultlessly, so he show more can accomplish in hours what “normals” would struggle to achieve in weeks, months, or a lifetime. Everything is intuitive, without conscious learning, he’s never indecisive, and “No matter what I study, I see patterns”. It’s equivalent to time dilation.

When Leon realises his exceptional mind makes him of interest to others, he downplays his abilities in a test, just as gifted children often do. Selfish or self-preservation?

Mind, Body, Spirit

His powers are not purely intellectual - an aspect I hadn’t considered.

He doesn’t get physically stronger, but he is more co-ordinated and more aware and in control of his body - even heart rate, kidney function and nutrient absorption. His ability to read body language, tics, subtext, and pheromones seem telepathic. Observing strangers on the street, he notes, a young couple “the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other” and that “a woman wears a mantle of simulated sophistication, but it slips when it brushes past the genuine article”.

Leon’s quest is “enlightenment, not spiritual but rational”, and for understanding and self-awareness, he requires a new sort of language, written with ideograms. (It’s rather like semasiographic Heptapod B in The Story of Your Life aka Arrival, which I reviewed HERE.)

His emotions are more complex and multi-faceted and “I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive”. The downside is no subconscious, so “I witness my own delusions” rather than having dreams. There is no downtime.

(Anti) Climax

The weakest part was how he survived on the run, how he tried to evade and trick those who sought him, and a final confrontation. Too clichéd. Up till then, it was… mind-enhancing.


Related Media

The starting point of this neuro-psychological thriller from 1991 is remarkably similar to that of the 2011 film, Limitless (which I saw a few years ago), which is based on a 2001 novel, The Dark Fields, by Alan Glyn (which I have not read).

For a different story about the effects of sudden increase in intelligence, see Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which I reviewed HERE.

Image source for superbrain:
http://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-19/s150x150/13649353_509194325945458_1....

For other stories in the collection, Stories of Your Life, see my review HERE. show less

I am seriously in two minds about this novelette. I definitely enjoyed it and was absolutely willing to suspend belief until the end, which was just too much and too much of a mess for me to really appreciate it, and part of me couldn't help laughing at and being taken out of the internal logic of the story by the story.

Before The Dark Fields and Limitless, before Lucy, Chiang published Understand in Asimov magazine in 1991, a decade before the 'we only use 10% of our brain' craze, which this story manages to not posit. In a vague, relatively near future man effectively dies and experiences life-ending brain damage after drowning following some kind of accident. He is revived with sci-fi medicine that supercharges the neural pathways it show more fixes. This leads to him becoming addicted to becoming more bigger brained and going on the run. It culminates in a biggest brain off confrontation.

Something that struck me when reading this is that the protagonist becomes a solopsistic demigod a la Dr Manhattan, rather than the bougie neo liberal capitalist mogul and politician like the Limitless protagonist, so this is a much less depressing story.

Look, I love the ideas and the thought experiment nature of this stories and its ilk. It just didn't do as much for me as I wanted.

***Spoilers and possibly too pernickety criticism below***

I fucking hate CinemaSins and the MatPat school of interacting with art, so it is not my intention to do that, but if I am, I welcome to be called on this.

The story opens with our protagonist having a nightmare about the accident and drowning that lead to his injuries. I think it's really funny that noone ever considers this to be the result of anything, but neuron damage and repair. Does mental/ emotional trauma not exist in this world? #JustC-PTSDReaderThings

A minor nitpick is that there are some huge leaps of logic and unknown information about how the CIA works, before he does research that would make so much more sense with just an additional line. This really isn't a big deal.

When his stocks plummet and he realises there must be another big brain out there, he, and Chiang, never doubt for a single second that this other big brain boi could be anything other than a big brain boy. Feminism had been around for a while in 1991, Ursula K Le Guin had been publishing some of the finest sci-fi and fantasy for like 30 years at this point, Octavia E. Butler for about 20 years. It was another time, but, like, it really wasn't and that's no excuse.

The final confrontation is conceptually brilliant. But I found it an absolute mess and really boring. I describe it to my partner and they instantly responded by saying the protagonist loses the Game. Also, yes, brains are meat computers to a certain extent and I am happy to go with all sorts of whacky made up brain science. I'm even OK with the whole 'we only use 10% of our brains' as a fictional premise. I can get on board with sending brainwaves and signals to fuck up each other's brains like this is Scanners, but more nerdy. I can even get on board with the setting of restore points, parameters, and neural rebuilding because the brainpower is over 9000 or whatever. But the idea of running a sandboxed simulation of your mind over your mind, even though it is echoing the way the protagonist gets the doctor's password earlier in the story, was just too much for my autistic brain to handle. I can't stand the Big Bang Theory, but all I could picture was Sheldon and Leonard doing the Scanners thing at each other, while the meme equations played out over the screen. The end felt like the impression I have been given of Infinite Jest.

Look, I know that so many of my references and issues come from reading this story in 2023, being an SJW from the Alphabet Mafia, and being very autistic. I'm not saying this story I'd bad or wrong or stupid or whatever. It's kinda brilliant. Its flaws and my own issues with it just had too much of an effect on me to be able to truly enjoy this. And that's on me as much as Chiang. show less

I always find Ted Chiang's way of looking at things worth the effort. This was practically effortless and my only problem was that I understand things differently than he does, but that doesn't mean one of us would have to kill the other.

Too much like Flowers for Algernon. But the ending was totally satisfying! I just wish that one of the 'uplifted' had been a woman, because, why not? And then it would be different from the classic. I read the copy preserved on the wayback machine.

A story of intelligence enhancement far more frightening than Flowers for Algernon