by Lewis Thomas
Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an inscrutable mystery, beyond human reach, the least human of all creatures and at the same time, as any cat owner will attest, the most intelligent. In 1979, a paper was published in Science by B. R. Moore and S. Stuttard entitled “Dr. Guthrie and Felis domesticus or: tripping over the cat,” a wonderful account of the kind of scientific mischief native to this species. Thirty-five years ago, E. R. Guthrie and G. P. Horton described an experiment in which cats were placed in a glass-fronted puzzle box and trained to find their way out by jostling a slender vertical rod at the front of the box, thereby causing a door to open. What interested these investigators was not so much that the cats could learn to bump into the vertical rod, but that before doing so each animal performed a long ritual of highly stereotyped movements, rubbing their heads and backs against the front of the box, turning in circles, and finally touching the rod. The experiment has ranked as something of a classic in experimental psychology, even raising in some minds the notion of a ceremony of superstition on the part of cats: before the rod will open the door, it is necessary to go through a magical sequence of motions.
Moore and Stuttard repeated the Guthrie experiment, observed the same complex “learning” behavior, but then discovered that it occurred only when a human being was visible to the cat. If no one was in the room with the box, the cat did nothing but take naps. The sight of a human being was all that was needed to launch the animal on the series of sinuous movements, rod or no rod, door or no door. It was not a learned pattern of behavior, it was a cat greeting a person.
The French investigator R. Chauvin was once engaged in a field study of the boundaries of ant colonies and enlisted the help of some enthusiastic physicists equipped with radioactive compounds and Geiger counters. The ants of one anthill were labeled and then tracked to learn whether they entered the territory of a neighboring hill. In the middle of the work the physicists suddenly began leaping like ballet dancers, terminating the experiment, while hundreds of ants from both colonies swarmed over their shoes and up inside their pants. To Chauvin’s ethological eye it looked like purposeful behavior on both sides.
Bees are filled with astonishments, confounding anyone who studies them, producing volumes of anecdotes. A lady of our acquaintance visited her sister, who raised honeybees in northern California. They left their car on a side road, suited up in protective gear, and walked across the fields to have a look at the hives. For reasons unknown, the bees were in a furious mood that afternoon, attacking in platoons, settling on them from all sides. Let us walk away slowly, advised the beekeeper sister, they’ll give it up sooner or later. They walked until bee-free, then circled the fields and went back to the car, and found the bees there, waiting for them.
There is a new bee anecdote for everyone to wonder about. It was reported from Brazil that male bees of the plant-pollinating euglossine species are addicted to DDT. Houses that had been sprayed for mosquito control in the Amazonas region were promptly invaded by thousands of bees that gathered on the walls, collected the DDT in pouches on their hind legs, and flew off with it. Most of the houses were virtually stripped of DDT during the summer months, and the residents in the area complained bitterly of the noise. There is as yet no explanation for this behavior. They are not harmed by the substance; while a honeybee is quickly killed by as little as six micrograms of DDT, these bees can cart away two thousand micrograms without being discommoded. Possibly the euglossine bees like the taste of DDT or its smell, or maybe they are determined to protect other insect cousins. Nothing about bees, or other animals, seems beyond imagining.
ON SMELL
The vacuum cleaner turned on in the apartment’s back bedroom emits a high-pitched lament indistinguishable from the steam alarm on the teakettle in the kitchen, and the only way of judging whether to run to the stove is to consult one’s watch: there is a time of day for the vacuum cleaner, another time for the teakettle. The telephone in the guest bedroom sounds like the back-door bell, so you wait for the second or third ring before moving. There is a random crunching sound in the vicinity of the front door, resembling an assemblage of people excitedly taking off galoshes, but when listened to carefully it is recognizable as a negligible sound, needing no response, made by the ancient elevator machinery in the wall alongside the door. So it goes. We learn these things from day to day, no trick to it. Sometimes the sounds around our lives become novel confusions, harder to sort out: the family was once given a talking crow named Byron for Christmas, and this animal imitated every nearby sound with such accuracy that the household was kept constantly on the fly, answering doors and telephones, oiling hinges, looking out the window for falling bodies, glancing into empty bathrooms for the sources of flushing.
We are not so easily misled by vision. Most of the things before our eyes are plainly there, not mistakable for other things except for the illusions created for pay by professional magicians and, sometimes, the look of the lights of downtown New York against a sky so black as to make it seem a near view of eternity. Our eyes are not easy to fool.
Smelling is another matter. I should think we might fairly gauge the future of biological science, centuries ahead, by estimating the time it will take to reach a complete, comprehensive understanding of odor. It may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries. Smoke: tobacco burning, coal smoke, wood-fire smoke, leaf smoke. Most of all, leaf smoke. This is the only odor I can will back to consciousness just by thinking about it. I can sit in a chair, thinking, and call up clearly to mind the smell of burning autumn leaves, coded and stored away somewhere in a temporal lobe, firing off explosive signals into every part of my right hemisphere. But nothing else: if I try to recall the thick smell of Edinburgh in winter, or the accidental burning of a plastic comb, or a rose, or a glass of wine, I cannot do this; I can get a clear picture of any face I feel like remembering, and I can hear whatever Beethoven quartet I want to recall, but except for the leaf bonfire I cannot really remember a smell in its absence. To be sure, I know the odor of cinnamon or juniper and can name such things with accuracy when they turn up in front of my nose, but I cannot imagine them into existence.
The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself. Immediately, at the very moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertoires throughout the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, old memories, connections. This is as it should be, I suppose, since the cells that do the smelling are themselves proper brain cells, the only neurones whose axones carry information picked up at first hand in the outside world. Instead of dendrites they have cilia, equipped with receptors for all sorts of chemical stimuli, and they are in some respects as mysterious as lymphocytes. There are reasons to believe that each of these neurones has its own specific class of receptors; like lymphocytes, each cell knows in advance what it is looking for; there are responder and nonresponder cells for different classes of odorant. And they are also the only brain neurones that replicate themselves; the olfactory receptor cells of mice turn over about once every twenty-eight days. There may be room for a modified version of the clonal-selection theory to explain olfactory learning and adaptation. The olfactory receptors of mice can smell the difference between self and nonself, a discriminating gift coded by the same H-2 gene locus governing homograft rejection. One wonders whether lymphocytes in the mucosa may be carrying along this kind of genetic information to donate to new generations of olfactory receptor cells as they emerge from basal cells.
The most medically wonderful of all things about these brain cells is that they do not become infected, not very often anyway, despite their exposure to all the microorganisms in the world of the nose. There must exist, in the mucus secretions bathing this surfac
e of the brain, the most extraordinary antibiotics, including eclectic antiviral substances of some sort.
If you are looking about for things to even out the disparity between the brains of ordinary animals and the great minds of ourselves, the superprimate humans, this apparatus is a good one to reflect on in humility. Compared to the common dog, or any rodent in the field, we are primitive, insensitive creatures, biological failures. Heaven knows how much of the world we are missing.
I suppose if we tried we could improve ourselves. There are, after all, some among our species with special gifts for smelling—perfume makers, tea tasters, whiskey blenders—and it is said that these people can train themselves to higher and higher skills by practicing. Perhaps, instead of spending the resources of our huge cosmetic industry on chemicals for the disguising or outright destruction of odors we should be studying ways to enhance the smell of nature, facing up to the world.
In the meantime, we should be hanging on to some of the few great smells left to us, and I would vote for the preservation of leaf bonfires, by law if necessary. This one is pure pleasure, fetched like music intact out of numberless modular columns of neurones filled chockablock with all the natural details of childhood, firing off memories in every corner of the brain. An autumn curbside bonfire has everything needed for education: danger, surprise (you know in advance that if you poke the right part of the base of leaves with the right kind of stick, a blinding flare of heat and fragrance will follow instantly, but it is still an astonishment when it happens), risk, and victory over odds (if you jump across at precisely the right moment the flare and sparks will miss your pants), and above all the aroma of comradeship (if you smell that odor in the distance you know that there are friends somewhere in the next block, jumping and exulting in their leaves, maybe catching fire).
It was a mistake to change this, smoke or no smoke, carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect or whatever; it was a loss to give up the burning of autumn leaves. Now, in our haste to protect the environment (which is us, when you get down to it), we rake them up and cram them into great black plastic bags, set out at the curb like wrapped corpses, carted away by the garbage truck to be buried somewhere or dumped in the sea or made into fuel or alcohol or whatever it is they do with autumn leaves these days. We should be giving them back to the children to burn.
MY MAGICAL METRONOME
I woke up, late one Friday night, feeling like the Long Island Railroad thumping at top speed over a patch of bad roadbed. Doctor-fashion, I took my pulse and found it too fast to count accurately. I heaved out of bed and sat in a chair, gloomy, wondering what next. A while later the train slowed down, nearly stopped, and my pulse rate had suddenly dropped to 35. I decided to do some telephoning.
Next thing I knew, I was abed in the intensive care unit of the hospital down the street, intravenous tubes in place, wires leading from several places on my chest and from electrodes on my arms and legs, lights flashing from the monitor behind my bed. If I turned my head sharply I could see the bouncing lines of my electrocardiogram, a totally incomprehensible graffito, dropped beats, long stretches of nothing followed by what looked like exclamation points. The handwriting on the wall, I thought. And illiterate at that.
Now it was Sunday, late afternoon, the monitor still jumpy, alarm lights still signaling trouble, all the usual drugs for restoring cardiac rhythm having been tried, and handwriting still a scrawl. The cardiovascular surgeon at the foot of my bed was explaining that it would have to be a pacemaker, immediately, Sunday late afternoon. What did I think?
What I thought, and then said, was that this was one of the things about which a man is not entitled to his own opinion. Over to you, I said.
About an hour later I was back from the operating theater. Theater is right; the masked surgeon center stage, wonderfully lit, several colleagues as appreciative audience, me as the main prop. The denouement was that famous deus ex machina being inserted into the prop’s chest wall, my gadget now, my metronome. Best of all, my heart rate an absolutely regular, dependable, reliable 70, capable of speeding up on demand but inflexibly tuned to keep it from dropping below 70. The battery guaranteed to last seven years or thereabouts before needing changing. Plenty of time to worry about that, later on.
Home in a couple of days, up and around doing whatever I felt like, up and down stairs, even pushing furniture from one place to another, then back to work.
Afterthought:
A new, unwarranted but irrepressible kind of vanity. I had come into the presence of a technological marvel, namely me. To be sure, the pacemaker is a wonderful miniature piece of high technology, my friend the surgeon a skilled worker in high technology, but the greatest of wonders is my own pump, my myocardium, capable of accepting electronic instructions from that small black box and doing exactly what it is told. I am exceedingly pleased with my machine-tooled, obedient, responsive self. I would never have thought I had it in me, but now that I have it in me, ticking along soundlessly, flawlessly, I am subject to waves of pure vanity.
Another surprise:
I do not want to know very much about my new technology. I do not even want to have the reasons for needing it fully explained to me. As long as it works, and it does indeed, I prefer to be as mystified by it as I can. This is a surprise. I would have thought that as a reasonably intelligent doctor-patient I would be filled with intelligent, penetrating questions, insisting on comprehending each step in the procedure, making my own decisions, even calling the shots. Not a bit of it. I turn out to be the kind of patient who doesn’t want to have things explained, only to have things looked after by the real professionals. Just before I left the hospital, the cardiologist brought me a manila envelope filled with reprints, brochures, the pacemaker manufacturer’s instructions for physicians listing all the indications, warnings, the things that might go wrong. I have the envelope somewhere, on a closet shelf I think, unexamined. I haven’t, to be honest, the faintest idea how a pacemaker works, and I have even less curiosity.
This goes against the wisdom of the times, I know. These days one reads everywhere, especially in the popular magazines, that a patient should take more responsibility, be more assertive, insist on second and third opinions, and above all have everything fully explained by the doctor or, preferably, the doctors, before submitting to treatment. As a physician, I used to think this way myself, but now, as a successful patient, I feel different. Don’t explain it to me, I say, go ahead and fix it.
I suppose I should be feeling guilty about this. In a way I do, for I have written and lectured in the past about medicine’s excessive dependence on technology in general, and the resultant escalation in the cost of health care. I have been critical of what I called “halfway technologies,” designed to shore things up and keep flawed organs functioning beyond their appointed time. And here I am, enjoying precisely this sort of technology, eating my words.
Pacemakers have had a bad press recently, with stories about overutilization, kited prices, kickbacks to doctors and hospitals, a scandal. Probably the stories, some of them anyway, are true. But I rise to the defense of the gadget itself, in which I now have so personal a stake. If anyone had tried to tell me, long ago when I was a medical student, that the day would come when a device the size of a cigarette lighter could be implanted permanently over the heart, with wires extending to the interior of the ventricle, dominating the heart’s conduction system and regulating the rhythm with perfection, I would have laughed in his face. If then he had told me that this would happen one day to me, I would have gotten sore. But here it is, incomprehensible, and I rather like it.
ON SPEAKING OF SPEAKING
There is nothing at all wrong with the English language, so far as I can see, but that may only be because I cannot see ahead. If I were placed in charge of it, as chairman, say, of a National Academy for the Improvement of Language, I would not lay a finger on English. It suits every need that I can think of: flexibi
lity, clarity, subtlety of metaphor, ambiguity wherever ambiguity is needed (which is more often than is generally acknowledged), and most of all changeability. I like the notion of a changing language. As a meliorist, I am convinced that all past changes were for the better; I have no doubt that today’s English is a considerable improvement over Elizabethan or Chaucerian talk, and miles ahead of Old English. By now the language has reached its stage of ultimate perfection, and I’ll be satisfied to have it this way forever.
But I know I’m wrong about this. English is shifting and changing before our eyes and ears, beyond the control of all individuals, committees, academies, and governments. The speakers of earlier versions undoubtedly felt the same satisfaction with their speech in their time. Chaucer’s generation, and all the generations before, could not have been aware of any need to change or improve. Montaigne was entirely content with sixteenth-century French and obviously delighted by what he could do with it. Long, long ago, the furthermost ancestors of English speech must have got along nicely in Proto-Indo-European without a notion that their language would one day vanish.
“Vanish” is the wrong word anyway for what happened. The roots of several thousand Indo-European words are still alive and active, tucked up neatly like symbionts inside other words in Greek, Latin, and all the Germanic tongues, including English. Much of what we say to each other today, in English, could be interpreted as Greek with an Indo-European accent. Three or four centuries from now, it is probable that today’s English will be largely incomprehensible to everyone except the linguistic scholars and historians.
The ancient meanings of the Indo-European roots are sometimes twisted around, even distorted beyond recognition, but they are still there, resonating inside, reminding. The old root gheue, meaning simply to call, became gudam in Germanic and then “God” in English. Meug was a root signifying something damp and slippery, and thousands of years later it turned into “meek” in proper English and “mooch” in slang, also “schmuck.” Bha was the Indo-European word for speaking, becoming phanai in Greek with the same meaning, then used much later for our most fundamental word indicating the inability to speak: “infancy.” Ster was a root meaning to stiffen; it became sterban in Germanic and steorfan in Old English, meaning to die, and then turned into “starve” in our speech.