Shufflebrain

by Paul Pietsch

  After reading all I could find in the scientific literature and conducting some preliminary experimentation to convince myself that normal camouflage reactions are visually elicited, I decided to look use test Cyclops for the reaction.[11]

  I had to have some way of judging when the grafted eyes were functional and, I realized, and therefore set up a group of controls called Orthoclops.

  Ortho means the same. In the Orthoclops, I removed and immediately replaced the natural eye. It took about a month for the Orthoclops to recovery the full range of camouflage reactions.

  Cyclops? My expectation was that, soon after the Orthoclopes showed me a viable camouflage reaction, the Cyclopes would too. That didn't happen. Cyclops darkened in white cups.

  Now if all the Cyclopes had simply acted like a typical eyeless animals, I might have been a little embarrassed, but I would have ruled the top-mounted eye incapable of carrying visually meaningful sense data and have written an article critical of our previous observations. And that would have been that.

  But Cyclops didn't fully darken like eyeless--not all of them, anyway. And many in the Cyclops group responded positively to vision function tests. I even shipped some off to Carl for light-shock testing. The Cyclops not only saw but the comparative scores were identical to what we'd observed years before. I had no choice but to keep on going with the camouflage reaction.

  What could the stimulus be? I wondered. I soon found (by placing normal animals in containers of different colors) that the animal was responding to its immediate background (to what was reflected from a distance of about 10 body lengths). How did the animal know the container it was in was a black pan, a brown oleo cup or a clear crystal bowl? If it's simply a matter of the intensity of light coming from the side, what if I put an animal into a clear bowl and set the bowl at the center of a circular fluorescent tube, which I did. No change! No matter how high I jacked up (or down) the intensity of light from the side, the animal retained the tan coloration it usually exhibited in a clear bowl. I even tried illumination simultaneously from the side and from above. These same animals that did not change their coloration during lateral illumination blanched within a few minutes after transfer to white cups; when they went into a black photographic dark pan, they darkened.

  Let's apply a little hologramic theory to the problem, I thought. Picture a normal animal in a white plastic cup. It's receiving light from above and reflections from the sides. The reflected and incident light are from the same source, but different directions. Although the two sets of waves don't have enough coherency to generate an interference pattern they, nevertheless, have some consistent phase relationships. The phase differential, I reasoned, informs the animal about the optical properties of the immediate background. The stimulus for camouflage reaction, I reasoned, was like the object and reference beams in a hologram. That's why such low levels (moonlight) of illumination worked in white cups.

  What about Cyclops, then, I wondered. With his eye aimed at the sky, he'd receive little if any reflection from the sides and thus couldn't register the posited phase differences. His vision wouldn't let him perceive his photic environment.

  Over the years, and for the sake of reproducibility, I'd perfected techniques for transplanting the eye in Cyclops so that it's visual axis was vertically aligned.[12] Suppose instead, I tilted the eye obliquely off the vertical axis? If I'm right, the Cyclops of the Second Kind ought to blanch in white cups about like One-Eye.

  The hypothesis worked. About a third of these Cyclops II as I identified them in a scientific article exhibited as intense a camouflage reaction as animals with a single natural eye[13]. Cyclops's abnormal psychology wasn't his intelligence. It was his geometric optics. He just didn't have a correct visual angle on the world to inform himself about what was out there. He wasn't any more stupid than you or I would be if we couldn't hold a page in front of our faces and were given an IQ test based on the contents of that page. Given half a chance (a cocked eye), Cyclops could see enough of his visual environment to execute the camouflage reactions.

  ***

  Does any of this relate to human intelligence? If the connections were obvious, I wouldn't have to pose the question. But take a look at a few active-negative events at work in people.

  Take so-called "functional" amblyopia, a condition in which an optically normal eye can go blind because of double vision. An ophthalmologist name L. J. Girard and his colleagues demonstrated that certain types of lenses can have dramatic effects on persons suffering from what is called "suppression amblyopia." Here are some samples from his and his co-author's tables of data. One little girl had entered Girard's clinic with a 20/80 eye; after four week of wearing his lenses, her amblyopic eye was up to 20/20. A forty-seven year old man with 20/200 vision--legally blind in some states--had his amblyopic eye improved to 20/20. A teen aged boy with 20/400 improved to 20/50.

  Just as with Triclops, human visual perception imposes minus signs and cancels information that doesn't work out to one-to-one vision. When a human eye sends confusion to the brain, the mind can compute the eye out of action, which seems to be what happened in many of Girard's patients.[14]

  We also find the active-negative mode in so-called cognitive dissonance, the theory Leon Festinger initiated in his investigations of the psychology of motivation. Festinger was trying to explain what occurs when we're forced to choose between conflicting opinions or to select among competing objects of desire. Festinger suggested the following little experiment to illustrate cognitive dissonance. Buy two similar but not identical presents for your wife, husband or sweet heart--things he or she would like about equally well. Let him or her examine the two items, rate both but keep only one. Take the reject back to the store (or at least hide it in the glove compartment). When you get back ask the recipient of the gift to reevaluate the two items. Festinger predicted that the chosen item's new rating would be even higher than it was the first time; that of the reject would go down. Indeed, numerous experiments vindicated Festinger's predictions and made cognitive dissonance popular in certain quarters. Today, advertising executives and politicians all know about cognitive dissonance.

  Of course, there are exceptions. We're complicated beings (like our live actors in the gorilla experiment). Thus while cognitive dissonance works, I'm sure the reader knows we're not all that wishy-washy. But cognitive dissonance theory takes this into account, too. Consider studies where volunteers were forced to tell lies about their initially held beliefs. When the issue wasn't serious, the subjects would often come to believe their lies (cream and crimson sweaters sure beat red and purple ones!). But when the issue seemed serious, when the experimental subjects told lies about what they believed were important maters (somebody getting seriously hurt or not), they didn't change their opinions. The dissonance (the conflict between the belief and reality) remained.

  ***

  Carl and I certainly didn't discover the active-negative mode. Inhibition is as much a part of brain physiology as excitation. Repression is a critical element in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Lorenz talked about inhibition of aggressive behavior. But Triclops and Cyclops show us, first of all, the active-negative mode lies at the basis of the one-to-one principle. Second, the one-to-one principle depends on an adequately informed mind, not a tabala raza.

  Is amblyopia an expression of one-to-one? Where's the one-to-one feature in reducing dissonance? If the connections were obvious, the experts would long since have belabored the subject into extinction.

  But look at amblyopia. Each eye focuses on an object. But there's a single target out there in the world. If the eyes don't aim so as to fuse the two images into a single view, it can hurt.[15] The mind will reduce, or eventually cancel, the input from one eye if the images don't fuse. Fusion is an attempt to make targets correspond one-to-one with percepts. A similar thing goes on with many of our quite normal sensory illusions-- optical, acoustical, tactile. To handle depth, we must synthesize several complex informational d
imensions into a composite scene--one whole scene to one whole perception of the scene. And we must add as well as subtract to work out the complicated algebra. If not, we'd fall down or go nuts.[16]

  Auditory illusions are particularly interesting. If somebody is clicking a ball-point pen while you're listening to an economics lecture, you'll miss a few phonemes here and there in the audible message. Yet your mind can cut out the clicks and insert the phonemes most likely to be there (by virtue of linguistic rules).[17] If we didn't have auditory illusions, (which the add-backs really are) we wouldn't be able to match a whole message with a whole memory and comprehend what we've just heard. (Imagine a conversation on a New York subway, otherwise?)

  Cognitive dissonance is our way of matching one opinion with one set of apparent realities. Those of us who can't change our minds on any subject may very well be unable to endure an unforgiving world of realities.

  Even in conscious reasoning, with mind working at the peak of pure intellect, the one-to-one principle shows up. Proceeding from the axioms of standard logic (there are nonstandard logics), the logician tells us that a valid proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time. If the proposition can be both true and false, we're in a heck of a philosophical pickle. Standard logic is linear: one logical relationship between valid premises has to yield one valid conclusion. If it were otherwise, if we really did invoke nonstandard forms, reason as we know it would falter. Or it would seem to falter. And we'd soon lose our faith in the intellect.

  Yet one-to-one doesn't always hold up, not even in exactingly controlled psychophysical experiments. At the lowest limits of delectability the relationship between stimulus and response appears nonlinear. At intolerable agony, there's no simple one-to-one relationship between the change in stimulus and the change in how the torture feels. When we are at our outer limits of terror, a little extra "boo!" can come across with the import of the growl of a famished werewolf looking into the kitchen window from the black of night. Reducing dissonance won't work at the extremes, either. If our analysis becomes abstract enough, standard logic also fails. But if we view one-to-one as an effect rather than a cause, then its failure at the limits makes sense. One-to-one is the mind's attempt to flatten out the world--even though the world is not flat, even though the universe is not linear, even though mind-brain is a curved, nonlinear continuum.

  To conceptualize the one-to-one principle, imagine that you're on an invisible but gently curved surface. You don't know you're on it, but below you is a visible flat map. Where your surface curves close to the map, your world and everything about it seems nice and flat and linear and--one-to-one! And the one-to-one is where you spend most of your time. Thus most of your experiences reinforce what the flat map indicates, namely that one-to-one is the governing principle of your world. But as you move off in the direction of your surface's extremes, and the map's boundaries, as you travel away from the zone where your surface and the map converge, your linear rules begin to fail.

  [18]

  Then when you try to gauge distances with the T-square or the straight ruler, things begin to seem screwy. At the limits error really counts. And if you move far enough out, everything goes haywire. For you haven't been on one-to-one surface, after all. You just didn't know it.

  ***

  What are we living creatures, then? A bunch of stupidos set loose like honey ants in delicate machinery to gum up the grand design of a logical universe? Is living intelligence some form of transcendental stupidity? Are we an insult to beloved Nature? Maybe. But let's consider the following argument before you make up your mind and I make up mine.

  The curvature of our Earth is very gentle over the distances even the largest living creature walks. A charging bull elephant runs across a perceptually flat surface. If he didn't treat the savanna top as linear, he'd fall on his tusks. And how could we treat time if we fused it into a four-dimensional continuum with space? We can't sit down and perform tensor calculus to tell how long to warm the baby's bottle. For us to deal in seconds, minutes, years...time must seem constant. Our time must seem constant in order for us to live in it. If one tick were not identical to the next, it wouldn't be our time anymore. Our time must be immutable. Our space must be Euclidean. Our coordinates must be Cartesian, or else linear transformations thereof. Our information must be in the form of linear bits. Our logic must be standard. Our world must be flat and straight. Our reality must be one-to-one or we would not survive it.

  No! I for one cannot pronounce the one-to-one principle unintelligent, in spite of the error. One-to-one is the automatic artist in each of us, the transformationist of our theory, the telescope and microscope to fit the world to us and us to our world. One-to-one is a by-product of a continuous, indeterminate--and living and delicate--intelligence, striving to exist. In the end, the survival of our species may be the only true measure of how smart we are (or were).

  ***

  From my office early one morning, I watched a winter day arrive while thinking about human capability. How could Riemann or Einstein embrace one-to-one, as persons, and at the same time unlimber imagination and intellect from innate constraints? What glory happens in Nature when we consider hologramic mind while savoring the virgin olive oil on a slice of pizza? I could feel an answer but not articulate it.

  Reflections from snow covering the trees and rooftops announced the sun a little ahead of schedule. Soon students would be crossing the white fields. Cars would be rolling tentatively along slippery streets. Human intelligence would begin another day. I turned for a look at Triclops's picture on my bulletin board. Then, I sat at my desk and tried to picture Carl at work in my inner sanctum on one of the rare occasions when he allowed me to watch.

  ***

  Illumination is just enough safe light to cast red-black shadowy hints of the work area. Salamanders wait unseen in solitary plastic dishes. In rows and columns, the dishes form the tiers of a cell block, where the lonely occupants await training as a convict waits for a tour in the yard--the only break in an otherwise amorphous daily routine. A dot of amber light indicates the location of the punishment switch. The oversized air conditioner hums a baritone background din. Carl's breathing is deep, controlled, regular. The stopwatch is set for ten seconds and cocked at zero.

  Starch in Carl's lab coat crackles the signal that he is about to begin a twenty-five round bout for an inmate of the plastic tiers. Soundless transfer of dish to work area. Isometric wavelets wash the animal aboard a body scoop miniaturized to the scale of all things here. The animal enters the training alley on an invisible cascade. Carl pauses while the salamander adjusts.

  Suddenly, without warning, like an unexpected slap in the face, on comes the spotlight. A lonely narrow shaft of white crosses our tiny universe, catching in transit random eddies of moonlike dust, and ending in a gold-fringed halo around the little salamander's head.

  The sweep second hand of the stopwatch is already fast at work, as though sprinting around the track toward the finish line and driven by a will against all that goes on in places such as this. How can a goddamn dumb salamander really learn anything, anyway? the anatomist wonders to himself.

  Carl's steady fingers now partially shade the amber indicator light and poise at the punishment switch. But the salamander swims forward and out of the light only a millifraction of a tick within the allotted ten seconds. He avoided the light and escaped the shock.

  The spotlight goes off. Carl's fingers withdraw into the black of space. There's a silent, indeterminate pause. Again without warning another trial begins. Again, light. Again micromoons in a minicosmos. Again, halo. Again, torture inflicted on a shaky faith by the relentless race of the stopwatch. But again, escape just before the sweep second hand devours the last precious measure of short-rationed time.

  It's like this throughout almost all the remaining trials. Only on the seventeenth round does the stopwatch win. At the end of the bout, the animal safely back in its dish, the steel spring in Carl's armle
ss swivel chair squeal out under the full welter of his suddenly relaxed weight. He laughs a long, high bar of F-sharp and, with the universal pride of proud coaches everywhere, proclaims, "The little shitasses! They really make you sweat out those last few seconds!" Then it's silent again. And the miracle repeats itself, full cycle.

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  Internet contact:pietsch@indiana.edu

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