To the Editor:

I am an engineer. In 2005 I was involved in a company designing high-speed computer networking hardware and systems. Coming down to the old “Dinky” train station in Princeton, I encountered John Nash. I had known his son John since he was 15. He asked me what I am doing. After telling him some of the challenges of doing high speed, he replied, “Have you thought of this?” What he described is now known as channel bonding, but after two years of working on this project we had not considered it. A beautiful mind indeed, that could come up with an instant answer in an impromptu meet-up.

Dr. Nash was quite sane and clear-minded at that time and remained so until his tragic death. He was not always so. For years I had seen him walking along Nassau Street slowly and laconically, often chain-smoking. Or he was in Firestone Library’s lobby sitting and staring. The scene was repetitive and boring. A day in the life of the real John Nash was not the material for an entertaining movie. But in our meeting, he also said, “You know my son John suffers from mental illness.” And he said it as if he had never been there and done that!

When the movie A Beautiful Mind was made, I signed on for a bit part, that of an academic. We were on the set 19 hours one day and got digitally multiplied to look like an auditorium full of 2500 people. The filming was done in the Newark Performing Arts Center, which was used to represent an auditorium in Scandinavia. After about a dozen hours of hurry-up-and-wait and only one meal, a lot of the extras were getting crotchety. For me, it helped having been a graduate student, since we had become immune to horribly long hours!

How did John, Sr. snap out of insanity and futility? He claims that he did not use drugs and I had good corroboration that that is true. In the movie, Nash says he knows he has a problem, but that he will solve it, because that is what he does. The psychiatrist replies, “You will not solve it because the problem is with your mind.” That was 1950s psychiatry. Today, thanks to tools we did not have in 1950 such as functional MRI, we know the brain is made of components. Some may be functioning well and others not. Nash used some functioning parts of his mind to test others. If he observed a situation, he asked several other persons what they perceived. If they agreed with what he saw, he said to himself, it is confirmed. If several agreed with each other but not with him, he said, I reject this. After a while, he snapped out of it. A “self-exorcism?’ Not many have the ability to do this, but in effect this seems to be what happened in the case of John Nash.

Arch Davis

Vandeventer Avenue