by Colin Wilson
Yet Myers had also glimpsed an answer when he made Jali reflect: 'Yes, one day he would be vigorous enough in breath and stride to capture the promise of the horizon.' He may not have believed it himself, but it was still the correct answer: vitality. In 1960, my conviction was confirmed by the work of an American professor of psychology, Abraham Maslow. Maslow said he had got tired of studying sick people because they never talked about anything but their illness; so he decided to study healthy people instead. He soon made an interesting discovery: that healthy people frequently had 'peak experiences'—flashes of immense happiness. For example, a young mother was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when a beam of sunlight came through the window. It suddenly struck her how lucky she was, and she went into the peak experience—the 'other mode'. Maslow made another interesting discovery. When he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began recollecting peak experiences which they had had, but which they had often overlooked at the time. Moreover, as soon as they began thinking about and discussing peak experiences, they began having them regularly. In other words: the peak experience, the moment when the near and the far seem to come together, is a product of vitality and optimism. But it can also be amplified or repeated through reflection, by turning the full attention upon it instead of allowing it merely to 'happen'.
The case of the young mother reinforces the point. She was happy as she watched her husband and children eating, but it was an unreflective happiness. The beam of sunlight made her feel: 'I am happy', and instantly intensified it. It is as though we possessed a kind of mirror inside us, a mirror which has the power to turn 'things that happen' into experience. It seems that thought itself has a power for which it has never been given credit.
This was a major discovery. It meant that—contrary to the belief of the romantics—the 'other mode' is within our control. Shelley asked the 'spirit of beauty':
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
The answer, in Shelley's case, was clearly that he went around with the assumption that human existence is a 'dim vast vale of tears', and regarded the peak experiences as visitations of 'the awful shadow of some unseen power'—instead of recognising that the unseen power lay within himself.
What we are speaking about is what Gottfried Benn called 'primal perception', that sudden sense of 'matchless clarity' that gives the world a 'new-minted' look. We find it in the sharp outlines of Japanese art, with its white mountain peaks and electric blue skies. T. E. Lawrence describes one in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: 'We started out on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired after the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves . . . '
Lawrence has also put his finger on the reason that we experience 'primal perception' so infrequently: the filter of thought, of the mind's expectations. It could also be described as the robot, the mechanical part of us. Our 'robot' is invaluable; it takes over difficult tasks—like driving the car or talking a foreign language—and does them far more easily and efficiently than when we are doing them consciously. But it also 'gets used' to spring mornings and Mozart symphonies, destroying 'the glory and the freshness' that makes the child's world so interesting. The robot may be essential to human life; but he makes it hardly worth living.
The robot seems to be located in the brain. This is clear from the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescalin, which apparently achieve their effect by paralysing certain 'chemical messengers' in the brain. The result is certainly a form of 'primal perception'—as Aldous Huxley noted when he took mescalin; he quoted Blake's statement: 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.' So cleansing the 'doors of perception' is basically a matter of brain physiology.
In the mid-sixties I began reading books on the brain; one result was a novel called The Philosopher's Stone, in which I suggest that the secret of primal perception may lie in the pre-frontal cortex. But it was more than ten years later that I came upon a crucial piece of research that threw a new light on the whole question. The result was revelatory.
THE LAUREL AND HARDY THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
From the magazine Second Look (edited by Robert Temple), October 1979
A couple of months ago, I found myself involved in the re-writing of a film script about that legendary hero Flash Gordon. In one of the scenes, Flash's old friend and ally, Professor Zarkov, is being held prisoner by the secret police of Ming the Merciless, who proceed to brain-wash him with a machine that is intended to turn him into a loyal servant of Ming. But ten minutes further on in the movie, Zarkov has to reveal that the brain-washing was unsuccessful. The reason given by the previous script writer was unconvincing, not to say absurd. I decided on something that sounds at least more technically convincing. The human brain has two halves that are almost identical, and the question of why this should be so is still unsolved by the science of brain physiology. We have, it seems, two separate memory systems, and to some extent, each half of the brain stores the same information. If Ming's secret police happened to be unaware of this because the inhabitants of the planet Mongo have 'single' brains—then they might well leave one of Zarkov's memory systems intact . . .
Which left me with an interesting question, to which I have since devoted some thought. What would a single brained being be like? How would he differ from us? Why, in fact, do we have two brains?
Since I am not a brain physiologist, or even a scientist, any answers I have to suggest will be by way of pure speculation. Still, even mistaken theories can be useful. One of the most stimulating books I have read in recent years is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of theBicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, in which he seriously suggests that our ancestors of a couple of thousand years B.C. lacked any kind of self-awareness—any sense of themselves as individual egos. I am certain that he is wrong; yet I've had more fun trying to work out why than in reading any number of more cautious and sober works of psychology. If my own suggestions can provide anything like the same stimulation, then the sufferings of Professor Zarkov will not have been in vain.
Let me begin by sketching the known facts. More than a century ago, the neurologist Hughlings Jackson noted that the left cerebral hemisphere seems to be concerned with expression—speech—while the right deals with recognition. The cerebral hemispheres—the top part of the brain—are the most specifically human part of us—our thinking apparatus. These hemispheres consist of two mirror-like halves, joined by a bridge called the commissure, the corpus callosum. But the purpose of this bridge is still obscure—Karl Lashley made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it was to stop the two halves of the brain from sagging. When the commissure is severed, as it sometimes is to prevent epileptic seizures, there is no obvious difference in the patient's behaviour. But in experiments with split-brain patients in Chicago in the early fifties, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga began to note some basic changes. Patients could not write meaningful sentences with the left hand—which is connected to the right side of the brain; neither could they read with the left eye. If the left eye (connected to the right brain) is shown an apple, and the right eye an orange, and the patient is asked what he has seen, he replies 'An orange.' Asked to write what he has seen with the left hand, he writes 'Apple.' But if he is not allowed to see what he has just written, but is asked to state it, he replies 'Orange.' If he is shown a picture of a nude woman—among a number of neutral images—he grins or giggles; asked why he is grinning, he replies 'I don't know'.
The 'I' who responds to questions clearly lives in the left half of the brain. The person who lives in the right hemisphere is by no means an idiot; he can, for example, make a more accurate sketch of a house—complete with perspective—th
an the left. (The left makes flat, two-dimensional representations.) But he is fundamentally silent. A person with left brain damageis unable to express himself verbally, but his pattern-recognition is unimpaired. A person with right brain damage sounds perfectly normal and intelligent: but he cannot copy even the simplest pattern—say, a four-pointed star.
More significant is an observation of what happens to the mathematical faculty in brain-damaged patients. They seem to be able to add and subtract as well as ever, but their ability to solve more interesting problems is reduced almost to nil. The left brain is analytical; but real problem solving requires an over-all grasp of the problem, which requires a creative approach.
Robert Ornstein, another investigator in this field, made a significant observation about ordinary (non split-brain) subjects. When they are engaged in doing boring calculations—adding up a grocery bill—the right brain shows alpha rhythms, as if it is asleep or idling.
Another interesting experiment showed the way in which the two hemispheres seem to react like two different people. If the left eye (connected to the right brain) is shown a series of flashing lights, either red or green, and the patient is asked to guess what colour he has just seen, the score ought to be precisely 50/50, since the left hemisphere has no idea of what its partner is seeing. In fact, it was far higher than that—and for an interesting reason. The patient would often make the wrong guess, then jump—as if someone had kicked him under the table—and change his guess. The 'silent' hemisphere had heard the wrong guess, and nudged him in the ribs.
These are the basic facts. And when I first came across the notion that our right and left hemispheres are separate personalities—in Ornstein's Psychology of Consciousness—they induced a state of considerable excitement. And I did what I always do—and what my more cautious friends (like Robert Temple) deplore: proceeded to extrapolate, and to spin interesting and totally unproven theories. Some of these I shall now proceed to outline.
My first thought was that this seems to offer a possible explanation of poltergeist activity. One of the oddest things about poltergeists (banging ghosts)—which, as we now know, are usually caused by emotionally disturbed adolescents—is that the person who is responsible for the disturbance is totally unaware of it. Hans Bender, one of the experts in this field of paranormal investigation, states in an article on poltergeists that the first rule is not to tell the child that he or she is causing it all. It scares hell out of them. And understandably. It is essential to our sanity to believe that we are 'individuals' (i.e., indivisible). Nothing could be more frightening than the idea that some Dr Hyde part of the personality could go off on its own and start throwing objects around and causing loud bangs and crashes.
If my guess (and it is no more than that) is correct, then the 'poltergeist' lives in the right half of the brain. And for some reason, highly disturbed adolescents proceed to function like split brain patients, in the sense that the two halves go their separate ways.
This, of course, still fails to explain how a poltergeist can cause objects to fly through the air or burst into flame: i.e., fails to explain (a) where the energy comes from, (b) how the 'other self' makes use of it. But if you would like my guess, which I will throw in for good measure, it is that the energy somehow comes from the earth. If my poltergeist theory is correct, then the right brain is responsible for such 'paranormal' effects as dowsing, which causes a twig or divining rod to twist violently in the hands. Any good dowser knows that this energy—whatever it is—can be so powerful that it can throw the dowser on his back, or send him into convulsions. It sounds as if it could be the same energy involved in poltergeist activity. And if the right brain is sensitive to it—can somehow 'pick it up'—then it is not too difficult to believe that it could also use it to make objects fly around. But that, I will concede, is one of my more way-out guesses. Let us return to less controversial matters.
It would seem more-or-less accurate to say that the left brain is a scientist, the right is an artist. It also seems probable, if my poltergeist speculation has any foundation, that the right braincould be regarded as the gateway to the unconscious mind. And here I feel I must hedge myself around with qualifications, since my old friend Stan Gooch has gone on record as believing that the actual seat of the unconscious mind is the cerebellum, the older part of the brain that lies below the cerebral cortex. He may well be right; yet it still seems to me arguable that the right cerebral hemisphere plays its own important role in our unconscious activities. The one thing that seems clear is that the conscious mind is hardly thicker than the icing on a large Christmas cake, while the unconscious mind has many layers. So while, in the rest of this article, I shall refer only to the right brain, let it be understood that I am keeping an open mind about the rest of the brain and its functions.
At the time I read Ornstein's book, I was working on a biography of Wilhelm Reich. I have always been vaguely anti-Freudian, feeling that Freud's insistence that sex is the basis of all neurosis is as preposterous as Marx's insistence that all human creative activity can be reduced to terms of economics. In studying the history of psychoanalysis, I became increasingly convinced that Freud's error lay in regarding the unconscious as some kind of monster. As is well known, Freud stumbled on the discovery of the unconscious as a result of working with Charcot in Paris. Charcot had restored hypnosis to respectability, and he noted the similarity between hypnosis and hysteria. A hysterical woman who believes she is paralyzed can actually become paralyzed. And hypnosis can produce exactly the same effect. Charcot thought that hypnosis is a form of hysteria. Freud saw deeper. He recognized that if there is a part of the mind that can cause paralysis, phantom pregnancies, and so on, then it must be far more powerful than the conscious mind. Both hypnosis and hysteria are effects produced upon this 'other' mind—the unconscious. So far so good. But Freud's next assumption was less reasonable: that if this unconscious mind is more powerful than the conscious mind, then we are all helpless puppets in the hands of this invisible monster. This is equivalent to saying that because a ship is far bigger and more powerful than the captain, the captain is not really in control—he only thinks he is.
It seemed to me that the relation between the conscious and the unconscious is more like the relation between Laurel and Hardy in the old movies. Ollie—consciousness—is basically the boss. Stan takes his cues from Ollie. If Ollie looks miserable, Stan is sunk in gloom. If Ollie looks cheerful, Stan is positively ecstatic. Stan always over-reacts.
So if we wake up on a rainy Monday morning, and think gloomily: 'How am I going to get through this boring day?', the unconscious mind begins to feel depressed. An hour later, we feel miserable and exhausted—because the unconscious mind controls our vital energies. This confirms our feeling that this is 'one of those days', so Stan becomes more depressed than ever . . . In short, there is a build-up of negative feedback. Consider, on the contrary, what happens to a child on Christmas day. He wakes up full of delightful anticipation: Stan takes the hint and sends up energy. And throughout the day, the mood of delight is reinforced by all the usual accompaniments to Christmas—carols on the radio, Christmas programmes on TV, fairy lights on the Christmas tree, and so on. By bed time, the child may feel that it has been one of those perfect days where everything has gone right. He thinks this is the 'Christmas spirit'; in fact, it is the close and friendly cooperation of Ollie and Stan.
I would suggest that this 'tennis playing' mechanism—the feedback between Ollie and Stan—explains neurosis far more convincingly than Freud's explanations about sexual hang-ups festering in the unconscious. We can all recognize the mechanism in ourselves—how pleasant anticipation revitalizes us; how self-pity and boredom deprive us of our natural powers. Norman Vincent Peak may not have been a great intellect, but he understood something about the human mind that Freud managed to overlook.
It was at this point—about the second chapter of my book on Reich—that it struck me that this theory of neurosis works just as wel
l if you substitute the right and left brain for Stan and Ollie. For example, as a writer, I am thoroughly familiar with the 'tennis playing' mechanism of positive and negative feedback. My instrument of communication is words—a leftbrain function. But what I write about are patterns, insights, intuitions—a right brain function. When I started to write, in my early teens, I used to find it hard and depressing work. The words were always killing the intuitions, squashing them flat. In fact, it seemed to me then that analysis is the enemy of insight. But as the years went by, I persevered, and gained a certain command over words. Sometimes, particular insights would defy me, and refuse to be turned into words. But then I learned to keep on trying—sometimes for months or years—until I saw how it could be done.
When I am writing well, there is an interesting balance between the intuitions and the words. And 'I' seem to somehow straddle the two, gently encouraging the intuitions, gently translating them into language and allowing them to flow on to the paper. If I get tired or frustrated, this balance is upset. I try too hard, the intuitions dwindle, and the words become clumsy and inappropriate. But some days, I am positively brilliant. I turn the intuitions into words so neatly that the right brain gets excited to see itself expressed so well; it shouts 'Yes, yes, that's it!', and sends up more intuitions. And my left brain, pleased to be praised, makes an even greater effort, and catches the intuitions as they come pouring out. And suddenly, the tennis match is worthy of Wimbledon, both sides playing with unaccustomed brilliance. This is the state called 'inspiration'.
All this makes it clear that our basic problem as human beings is, in effect, to get both players into a mood of warm cooperation. It would seem that our two aspects have two quite different functions. The left brain is the 'front man'; its job is to cope with practical problems, to stand on guard, prepared for emergencies. Its chief instrument is crude willpower. It always seems to be in a hurry. And if we allow it to get too dominant, we end in a state of permanent tension.