by Guy Murchie
If you wonder where birdsong comes from, you would be interested in the recent research using apparatus for accurate sound analysis which shows that a nestling songbird, if reared out of hearing of any birdsong except his own, will develop singing ability as he grows up only in a rudimentary way and without the intervals and flourishes of his wild relatives. His limited song in fact may be taken to represent the part of his singing potential that he inherited through the egg.
If several young birds are confined together in a room, however, but prevented from hearing any outside birdsong, their singing efforts will stimulate each other enough to enrich their average song with a distinctive "group melody," even though this remains much simpler than the full natural melody (or melodies) learned and developed by similar birds allowed to hear their elders. And it turns out that there is a short and critical period (in some cases lasting barely a month) late in a bird's first year of life during which his song (whether learned or only inherited) is imprinted in his mind and so fixed that it remains essentially the same thereafter, only minor changes being possible for the rest of his days.
Birdsong of course can become very exuberant in the wild, including both antiphonal melody shared by several birds and four-note chordal harmony sung through the Y-shaped syrinx of a single bird. And it is a more specific language than you might suppose, including as it does the courting and mating songs that not only attract females, warn off competing males and delineate territory but that stimulate or regulate nest building. The Reverend James A. Mulligan, S.J., professor of biology at St. Louis University, indeed demonstrated the latter in 1968 by surgically deafening canary hens, which resulted in their taking an average of thirteen days to build their nests instead of the normal five days and, in a few cases, stopped them from building any nests at all.
Other research about the same time indicated that the male songbird, say a chaffinch, sings a staccato soprano note called a "chink" when courting a female, which both attracts her and is a sound of short enough wavelength to be deflected by small objects, enabling her to cock her head in different directions and locate him by the pattern of sound "shadows" cast by her head. The abrupt beginning and ending of the staccato note also reinforces her directional sense through the micro-interval between when each "chink" reaches one ear as opposed to the other.
On the other hand, when a hawk swoops overhead, the chaffinch has a distinctly different language problem. It then suddenly becomes vital for him and chaffinchery not only to warn his companions of the danger but to do so without revealing his own whereabouts to the hawk. This he accomplishes with one very special call word, which is pronounced something like "seees." The essence of this call is that, although it is enunciated loud and clear, it begins and ends so gradually the hawk cannot time it with his ears to ascertain its direction. Also the pitch of "seees" is precisely attuned by evolutionary feedback to the hawk's head, its wavelength so nearly equal to the distance between his ears that there is no "shadow" to betray the source.
HUMAN-ANIMAL COMMUNICATION
For millenniums man has been trying to communicate with animals. And he succeeded fairly well a long time ago with wolves, dogs and later draft animals, a good example of human receptivity being the account I heard recently of an Eskimo who remarked to a visiting anthropologist that a man with a dog sledge had been approaching his village for three days and would arrive that night.
Asked how he knew, the Eskimo said, "The wolves told us." For it is true that the tone and quality of wolf howling varies subtly but explicity with their mood, which naturally responds more to a man with a sledge and dogs than to a man on foot alone. The wolves speak a little more gently also about a woman or a child, and differently about more than one person. And the tempo and excitement of their voices inevitably rise (as in the language of the bees) in ratio to the nearness of whatever stimulates it.
Modern studies of the languages of animals, including the partly ultrasonic utterances of dolphins and whales, suggest further that most of them have recognizable vocabularies of from roughly a dozen to a score of "words" that, on land, are almost as likely to be expressed by behavior or smell as by "speech." The dog, man's most sociable animal companion, is exceptional in his variability of expressions that include barking, baying, growling, courting, mating, sniffing, tail wagging, baring of teeth, fighting, baiting, leg lifting, panting, scratching, tracking, hounding, killing, mothering, playing, etc., which, with their nuances, add up to the largest known natural animal vocabulary of some 50 words. Indeed the only larger animal vocabularies appear to be those of a few man-trained primates, particularly chimpanzees.
The chimp might possibly acquire this larger vocabulary without human training if his larynx were like a man's, for he seems mentally capable of it but evidently doesn't have the voice to express more than a few babyish sounds. Which explains why psychological and lingual researchers in recent years have been laboriously teaching chimps to express themselves by gesticulating like deaf and dumb people or, in a few cases, by pushing buttons in special communication computers. And I think it worth mentioning that one of the most remarkable cases so far, to my knowledge, is that of a female chimp named Sarah who, by the age of seven, had a working vocabulary of 128 "words," which enabled her to converse with her trainer, psychologist David Premack of the University of California, in a large number of simple four-word sentences, not only comprehending his ideas but responding with original sentences of her own.
The "words" used took the form of symbols cut out of plastic and mounted on metal bases so Sarah could easily "write" them on a magnetized board. After months of painstaking practice, she thus learned that a blue triangle meant an apple, a red square a banana, while other symbols stood for various people, colors and familiar objects. Then she began to learn syntax: verbs, prepositions and eventually how they could be combined into sentences she could understand, as proven by her response, at an accuracy rate of about 85 percent. In one test she was handed an apple and asked to choose symbols, red or green, round or square, to describe it. She immediately picked the correct ones: red and round. Even when the apple was replaced next day with its symbol, the blue triangle, she confidently "described" it as red and round, demonstrating that her animal mind was capable of at least this much abstract thought.
On another occasion Sarah invented a sentence-completion game and taught it to her human pupil. She began a sentence: "Apple is on..." and arranged several possible completions, only one of which she regarded correct: "Apple is on banana." Then she induced her pupil to try her completions one after the other until, by elimination accompanied by "deep" suspense (which delighted her), he discovered the right one.
Meanwhile, at Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, researchers have been teaching another female chimp named Lana a somewhat different language called Yerkish, using nine simple geometric figures that can be superimposed on each other to form hundreds of "words," each of which (unlike those in most languages) has only one meaning. Lana is already fluent enough in Yerkish to ask for things she wants, to express thanks when she gets them, apologize for misbehavior, talk to herself and, as soon as another chimp learns Yerkish, to confer with one of her own kind, which may go down in history as the first time two animals ever had a conversation in a man-made language! When that happens, perhaps we will learn, direct from nonhuman minds, something new about the potentiality of the mind in general.
The next step in mental evolution, I suppose, is man's communication with himself, which undoubtedly amounts to the most sophisticated expression of mind on planet Earth to date. We will get into that in Chapter II, but first let us take a look at the brain, how it evolves and even probe as best we can into its mysterious interconnection with thought.
Chapter 10
The Body-Mind Relation
* * *
IF THERE REALLY IS such a thing as a noosphere, it seems to me that, as it is composed of many minds, its relation to the Earth with her many bodies must
be closely analogous to the general relation between mind and body. And this being so, the body-mind relation is a key question for any student of life and the universe - something he must deal with in reconciling the worlds of the concrete and the abstract, the seen and the unseen.
With this thought then we come to take a close look at the brain, the mind's most accepted tool, which, being the body end of the bodymind connection, seems the obvious place to begin this chapter. The brain of course is the exchange center of the nervous system, the place where sensations generate ideas and ideas are expressed in action. Its importance to the body is suggested by the fact that, while it has only 2 percent of the body's weight, its operation uses 20 percent of the body's oxygen and blood. Its form, curiously enough, is like that of a resting bird with folded wings, for its hundreds of billions of cells correspond to the barbs, barbules and microscopic barbicels of feathers which, like neurons, fit together exactly, compactly, and so intimately coordinated as to make the whole thing workable in shape and size. Perhaps that is why brain tissue is wrinkled and dense like a walnut or a bowl of spaghetti. And also why one must visualize the wings outspread if one is even to begin to understand the complexity and potentiality involved, a complexity that in a single human brain is comparable to all the telephone switchboards, exchanges and wiring patterns of computers, radio, TV and other electric equipment on Earth.
It used to be thought that the intelligence of animals was proportional to the size or weight of their brains. This would make the sperm whale with his twenty-pound brain the most intelligent of earthly creatures, with no real rival on land but the elephant with his thirteen-pound brain. So someone proposed a new criterion: not brain weight alone but brain weight as a percentage of total body weight, which had the effect of promoting the marmoset and other small monkeys to the top in intelligence with the genus Homo only a bright second.
However, further research, you may be relieved to know, has indicated that neither the relative weight nor size of the brain is a reliable clue to intelligence, nor even the size of the cells, but rather it turns out to be the number of cells that counts. A critical experiment in this field was performed at Princeton University in 1955 in which normal salamanders (called diploid because they have two sets of chromosomes in each cell) were pitted against triploid salamanders (with three sets per cell) to see which could learn to thread a maze the faster. The two types of salamander are the same size despite the fact that triploid cells are proportionately larger, because triploid salamanders for some reason compensate by producing fewer cells (including brain cells) in the same ratio. So evidently it must have been their advantage in cell numbers that enabled the diploid salamanders to master the maze in less than a third the average number of trials required by the triploid ones. Not that this should surprise anyone though, since the same principle clearly holds for telephone exchanges and computers, whose potency or value derives not from their size but almost solely from the number and interconnectability of their units.
EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN
A good way to get to know the brain's intricacies is to review its evolution. That means starting with an invisible nerve junction in whatever tiny primeval worm or arthropod may be presumed to be the common ancestor of more complex creatures, and it includes some sort of acknowledgment of feeling and thought from there. Since brains, like hearts, lungs, livers and other organs, are not vital to all life, the earliest nerve systems did not have them, and even some human nerves still work independently of brains. If you touch a sea anemone, it will instantly collapse like a pricked balloon because its sense cells connect directly with its muscles in a simple reflex action similar to the human knee jerk and involving neither brain nor thought. But such an automatic nervous response, while fast, is also crude and, in situations requiring discrimination, apt to be detrimental to the animal involved. That, evidently, is why the internuncial cell (from "internuncio," an envoy of the Pope) evolved between the sense cell and the muscle cell to add a little leeway or flexibility to the system, a beginning of subtlety, the look before the leap - eventually a choice between right and wrong.
And from there, by trial and error in a long series of additions, the brain evolved. Significantly, however, the primordial worm's nerve junction still exists at the base of our skull, but with internuncial cells and other complexities all around it, something like the oldest growth ring of a tree, which, in the tree's old age, remains hidden in its inmost heart. And each subsequent major evolutionary improvement has annexed a layer or appendage to it, creating a kind of irregular, lumpy onion that houses the brain's main centers.
The medulla oblongata is the most ancient and primitive of these, presumably evolved almost directly out of the original nerve junction, which itself seems to have been accidental or a mutation although, to
students of deeper meaning, it must inevitably have had some mystic relation to the overall plan of Earth, to say nothing of the universe. The medulla oblongata is specifically the oblong terminus of the spinal cord and it regulates the venerably vital automatic functions like breathing and heart pumping. The cerebellum or "little brain," next oldest brain center, looks like a ball of yarn just above it and is well developed in most of the larger animals, coordinating voluntary muscles and enabling one to keep one's posture and balance. And the cerebrum is the big new brain center that fills man's whole upper skull, actually the most sensitive and advanced part of the most complex organ yet evolved on Earth, and the place generally regarded as the seat of consciousness and mind.
The cerebrum has evolved to its present maturity only in the human species but its specialized response to the conscious use of body parts is extraordinary. The brain area devoted to control of fingers and hands, for example, is much more discriminating and therefore obviously larger than that assigned to toes and feet. And the tongue and mouth section exceeds by a hundred times that of the stomach and intestines. In a hound almost half the brain may be geared to the perception of smells. In a hawk the eyes and visual cortex can actually be bigger than all the rest of the brain. And a giant dinosaur dug up in Wyoming a century ago was found to have a brain the size of a hen's egg in its modest skull, but another "nerve center" ten times bigger near its gargantuan hips which required elaborate coordination and prompted my old paper, the Chicago Tribune, to comment that:
You will observe by these remains The creature had two sets of brains ... If something slipped his forward mind, 'Twas rescued by the one behind.
It would be a mistake to think of the human brain, or even an animal cerebrum, as an organ fully created at birth, for, like life itself, the brain is a growing, flowing thing. It first becomes discernible (by microscope) in the human embryo about two weeks after conception from when, it is calculated, every second of its early rapid growth in the womb retraces more than a century of its ancestors' long-drawnout evolution. Starting as a tiny flat plate on the flea-sized creature, a groove appears across the center line which steadily deepens, cleaving it into two hemisectors, while the plate's edges curl upward like petals until they touch and fuse into a closed tube that is the beginning of a central nerve. A few days later a thin, gray film of cortex starts to spread across its upper surface, crinkling as it grows into the cerebrum, luxuriating like a tree until, at birth, the baby is about one third head and literally top-heavy with brains.
At that point the infant brain is still only a kind of overgrown seed, however, weighing but 25 percent of what it will attain after its long ripening as its nerves lengthen, strengthen, branch and insulate themselves with fatty glial cells. Both neurons and glial cells, by the way, are amazingly active, especially the neurons whose nuclei have been observed (for unknown reasons) to rotate, sometimes as fast as 30 revolutions a minute, which rather justifies the common saying (of thought) that "the wheels are grinding." Another observation repeatedly made is that the growing nerve cells behave like colonies of bees, vibrating and buzzing as they spin, the while shooting out jets of protoplasm and probi
ng their companions, which seems to help them learn how to transmit messages and convey meanings. For just as muscles grow with exercise, so does the brain with its uncountable parts and pathways. And its structure is created in elaborate detail by the mental experiences being lived by the growing child, mainly in preschool years, yet continuing in lesser and lesser degree the rest of his life. In this way something like half of anyone's brain is genetically inherited while much of the other half is culturally inherited (by teaching and example) and only the relatively small remainder is what the possessor of the brain creates individually by living his own unique life. Thus does the living brain day by day shape itself biologically as a physical organ through all the language, images and ideas that reach it. Thus is something obviously concrete and finite created continuously by something so abstract that it may be infinite.
BRAIN FUNCTION
If you wonder now what factor determines which images and ideas will reach the brain and which will be screened out and kept away, the answer is that it is a very sensitive and complex matter involving both conscious and subconscious censorship as well as physiological filtering in sense organs. Tests have shown, for instance, that a dog who learns to expect 10 flashes of light per second may still see 10 flashes after the experimenter has slowed the light to 5 flashes. And a man made to wear glasses that make everything look upside down will suddenly a few days later see things right side up through the same glasses, because the pattern of images coded and conveyed by his optic nerves, then decoded in his brain, has somehow been redecoded for reality in the visual center of his cortex.
It is well known that the cerebral cortex or its underlying cerebrum is composed of two hemispheres connected by an isthmus of nerve tissue, but less known that each hemisphere specializes in its own function: the left one in expression and the right one in perception. A dramatic demonstration of this was made a few years ago in which the word HEART was flashed before several subjects but partitioned so that their left eyes could see HE and their right eyes could see ART. Asked what word they saw, all of them replied ART, presumably because this portion of HEART was read by the right eye, which connects directly with the left hemisphere which controls speech. But when asked not to speak but instead point with their left hand to one of two cards, HE or ART, to identify the word they had seen, all of them pointed to HE, which had been read by the left eye connected to the right or perceptive hemisphere. This showed that each hemisphere had read and expressed itself according to its capacity. And, to go a step further, if you can take the word of a research psychologist named Robert Ornstein, the left side's rational, objective and analytical modes of thought generally tend to represent the scientific outlook in contrast with the right side's intuitive, subjective and holistic modes that lean more to the mystic view of life, each of which, for good reason as it now appears, regards the other as one-sided and narrow.