I’m on my way out of the office today to visit a Dr. Wills at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, which is part of the sprawling complex of medical institutions around Great Ormond Street. Dr. Wills works with the National Prion Clinic and is part of a research group at University College’s Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, which is a long-winded way of saying that if anyone has spotted the spike and knows what’s going on, Dr. Wills is probably your man. (Or woman, because all it says in our contact database is “Dr. F. P. Wills, UCLH, MRC Prion Research Unit—cleared per OSA(3).”)

This person is our go-to expert on Krantzberg syndrome and I don’t even get a recognition mugshot or a potted biography? Great.

• • •

LET ME TELL YOU A BIT MORE ABOUT K SYNDROME: BECAUSE everything is better with early-onset dementia.

Magic—the collection of practices that enable us to mess around with the computational ultrastructure of reality—has been around for thousands of years. We’re not entirely sure how it works. One theory holds that computational processes involving observers can influence quantum systems up to the macroscopic level via entanglement. Or, from another angle, we reach out into an infinity of parallel universes and pull rabbits out of the hat—rabbits with too many tentacles, that do what we tell them to. Either way, thinking or cogitating or reasoning or singing or just plain looking at stuff the wrong way can make things happen in the physical universe.

So, yes, magic works—although the do-it-in-your-head variety is notoriously hard to master, like solving three-dimensional cryptic crosswords in multiple languages. But if magic has always worked, why are successful magicians so rare in the historical record? It turns out that the limiting factor is not just the difficulty of the job: it’s the medical side effects.

Now for a brief diversion:

In the 1950s, Australian medics in Papua New Guinea discovered a perplexing new disease among the women and children of the Fore tribe. The victims would be overtaken by a sudden weakness and muscle pains: they’d succumb to violent shivering, lose the ability to stand up, and eventually die. The disease, known as Kuru, was infectious, although no actual agent was detected until the 1980s. The Fore practiced cannibalism as part of the funeral rites: the bereaved would consume parts of the body of the deceased to return their life force to the community. Men took the choice cuts, muscle from arms and legs: they mostly dodged the bullet. But the women and children ate the leftovers . . . including the brain. If you examined the brain of a Kuru victim with a microscope, you would see odd spongy holes scattered throughout the cerebral cortex; hence the term spongiform encephalopathy.