by Guy Murchie
There is a case on record in which a man's right brain began a violent hatred of his wife. His left hand would repeatedly make obscene gestures at her and once tried to strangle her. On that occasion in fact it was only by using his reasonable right hand to pull off his emotional left that the man saved her. More recently, cerebral polarity was tested by cutting a brain's isthmus so as to completely block all nerve messages between the hemispheres, thereby demonstrating that the separated halves of the brain may take on two distinct consciousnesses, each independently capable of sophisticated thought. And when a similar operation was performed on a monkey's brain and the brain's halves deliberately given contradictory conditioning that would produce one kind of response in the left hemisphere, another in the right, the result was severe hesitancy followed by reluctant performance of both responses, one after the other.
Brains can't be expected to take kindly to being thus divided, however, for, in many ways still not understood, they depend on their wholeness and, when naturally interconnected as in a normal human cerebrum, the hemispheres are known to hold a kind of consultation in which the left one is given to articulation and talk and the right one to listening and perceiving things, including melodies, which it conveys mainly by nonverbal signs. This goes more than a little way to explain the difficulty one sometimes has in making a decision, when debate in the congress of one's mind, like that in a beehive, seems to lean 55 percent toward approval of an impending move only to encounter an unexpected 15 percent opinion shift to a 6o percent majority in the opposite direction. When a hemisphere has to be removed from a human brain, as when it is racked with cancer, the patient does not usually survive long enough to enable the other half to learn how to take over the missing functions. But occasionally the brain somehow works it out and I know of a strongly right-handed man whose dominant left hemisphere was removed in 1965 and who made a seemingly miraculous recovery despite his forty-seven years, not only becoming very dexterous with his left hand and arm (controlled by his right hemisphere) but having his remaining half brain compensate by learning to move his right limbs enough so he could walk with a cane, not to mention whistle a tune and even speak intelligible short sentences. With children it is easier, and the most successful therapy so far for the young, after removal of brain tissue, is to use a regimen of precise muscle manipulation to pattern-train the brain remnants with the motions and functions of the missing brain parts they will be substituting for, for the rest of a lifetime.
As this suggests, brain tissue is more adaptable than has been generally realized. In fact it will grow in a test tube, sprouting its intercellular connections and spontaneously generating its normal bioelectrical current. And researchers have taken brain matter from an unborn mouse, coaxed the cells apart with the help of enzymes and mixed them separately into a growth-sustaining solution, whereupon, like a sponge whose cells were separated by forcing it through a sieve (page 509), the brain neurons almost magically rearranged themselves, reorganized and reassembled into a reconstituted brain that was indistinguishable from the original one. It is as if an unseen director were telling each cell where to go, or an abstract mind in some infinitude beyond space-time materializing a concrete, finite brain to enable it to think here and now.
Although brain transplants must still be a long way off for humans, they are already beginning to be experimented with in animals and most successfully in very small embryos. At Yale University as long ago as 1958, for example, parts of the brains of chicks were transplanted inside the egg after 35 hours of incubation, in a few cases producing birds that hatched and lived for more than two months with normal responses, one of them even learning to answer a dinner whistle, which many birds never learn.
Soviet researchers meanwhile have kept grown dogs' heads and brains alive for days by attaching them to the necks and bloodstreams of other dogs, although without the dogs' nerves being joined. For splicing the living nerves of two animals together so they will mesh and function has not yet been achieved, nor even the regeneration of a single spinal cord in the same individual - at least not to the satisfaction of the medical profession. Yet work in smaller nerve generation and regeneration goes on advancing, so that completely severed human hands and even whole arms have recently been rejoined to their owners and made functional. And most nerves have at least the theoretical potential of adapting to new functions such as "hearing" through eyes and the optic nerve, as Beethoven obviously did when he read musical notation after he turned deaf, or "seeing" through ears and the aural nerve, as bats and certain other creatures have been doing for millions of years. One authority in this field, Dr. Wilson P. Tanner, director of the sensory intelligence laboratory at the University of Michigan, went so far as to speculate that a baby born with crossed nerves - his optic nerve connected with his cochlea and his aural nerve attached to his retina - might hear and see as well as a normal child because it could be presumed from present knowledge that the parts of his cortex receiving the sense signals would naturally develop the appropriate interpretations of them.
Returning to brain transplantation, however, the difficulty of course is that the brain is only half the nervous system, to the rest of which it is attached principally by the spinal cord. Until the art of splicing the spinal cord has been learned (including splicing the cords of two individuals into one), transplanting a separate mature brain would be roughly equivalent to transplanting a tree after cutting it through its main trunk and leaving all its roots behind. And no one seems to have seriously faced the intriguing question (in the event that brains become transplantable) of who is the real survivor of the operation: the donor or the recipient?
NERVE MESSAGES
It has been said that nerve messages are analogous to telephone conversations transmitted in one or two directions through wires while hormone signals are more like radio broadcasts transmitted in all directions through space. This view is of course a great advance over the ancient Greek concept of the nervous and glandular systems as a network of tubes conducting "animal spirits" or even of the nineteenth-century notion that nerves transmit hormones. For now we know there are not only two distinct systems, one sending electrochemical waves through the neurons and the other sending hormone secretions through the blood and lymph channels, but that they are interrelated and interdependent in marvelously intricate psychosomatic ways that influence (and are influenced by) everything from the growth of the body to the peace of the mind.
In this connection I can't resist mentioning a small-scale but significant case that was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 concerning thirteen children whose growth had been abnormally slow. When investigators found that all of them were emotionally upset by their respective parents, who in every instance were notoriously quarrelsome, often to the point of violence, the children were placed in a convalescent hospital, where within a few weeks their growth rates accelerated spectacularly. But several months later, after they were discharged from the hospital as normal and returned home, their growth rates all slowed down again to about where they had been originally - which, follow-up tests revealed was accompanied in every case by diminished activity of their pituitary glands a symptom almost certainly attributable to the renewed emotional strain of living in a chaotic household.
As the pituitary or growth gland is only one among many suborgans of the brain, it may be appropriate here to mention some of the others, like the thalamus (pain center and relay station), hypothalamus (vital sign monitor), hippocampus (memory implanter), amygdala (regulator of instinctive behavior) and the reticular activating system (of sleep, wakefulness, etc.), all of which, plus the lesser ones, are constantly influencing the still unfathomed workings of the mind. And it is just these mysterious doings of the mind that, in turn, lead us to such age-old fundamental questions as what is the essential nature of thought, of consciousness, of memory? Exactly how do these functions relate to the brain or other parts of the body? Is there any sort of boundary or dimension between
body and mind? Do nerve cells individually think or remember? Or is each one something like a cog in a machine or a note in a tune, of minor significance in its individual self but of major meaning when combined with others to compose a chord or, when extended through time, a melody of thought and action?
These are tough questions that for millenniums have engaged the greatest philosophers of East and West. Anyone may of course compare a thought to a bird that alights in the tree of the mind, but it takes more than a poetic analogy to make a useful measure of the relation. For the body-mind interface, if any, is far from simple. Certainly the mind is not the only factor that organizes, unites or directs the body. The body manifests perfection at its conception and in the days thereafter when it is still a microscopic embryo that could hardly be said to possess a mind, Its developing blood and immune systems also react directly and independently to throw off poisons or' diseases without any knowledge or known mental influence. Even blood from a stranger, freshly transfused, will serve the body perfectly without direction from the nervous system. And unknown food automatically digests itself without the slightest thought.
If the body then does not depend for many of its vital functions upon the mind, why should the mind depend absolutely and forever upon the body? I suspect that the two are capable of somewhat separate existences and I have found no evidence under science or philosophy to persuade me otherwise. By separate existences I mean of course separate in the way the earth's north pole is separate from her south pole. This is the polarity principle (Chapter 18) that says the two are different only to the degree of being opposite aspects of the same thing.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Increasing numbers of researchers in recent decades have investigated the mind and its relation to the body, some measuring brain waves through electro-encephalography, others doing things like implanting hair-fine wires into muscles all over the body and interconnecting them with supersensitive galvanometers, after which it was found impossible for the subject (no matter how relaxed) to think of moving any part of his body without the thought registering in measurable electric current. J. B. S. Haldane, the English biochemist, experimented far enough to conclude that the average thought or mental "event" interrelates with about seven square centimeters of brain surface, lasts almost a second and consumes an unimaginably tiny amount of energy: 6 x 1027 ergs. Someone else discovered that a man may see as few as one or two photons of light under favorable conditions, a threshold now believed to be the minimal visual "event." But naturally such and larger "events," including nonvisual ones, continually overlap and interrelate in the mind, a fact that enjoyed a rare confirmation recently when a researcher, measuring the electrical response to a flashing light in the visual area of a hungry cat's cortex, noticed that the response decreased when the cat smelled fish.
Can a single cell think? Can a subdivision of a cell experience a mental event? No one has proved it can or cannot. But there is a good deal of advanced opinion holding to the concept of the nonexistence of any lower (or upper) limit to consciousness, which, incidentally, seems to have as many definitions as life itself, a few of them going so far as to suggest that consciousness and life are synonymous.
Some pioneers in the field speak of the consciousness of crystals and molecules, whose pristine awareness, they deduce, exists only in individual pulses of less than a thousandth of a second's duration. Human consciousness in turn may arise through the integration of the pulses of trillions of molecules into a patterned weave of memory, a synthesis of innumerable threads into a mother rug of ultradimensional apperception. Even the atom may know a beginning of primeval consciousness with its electrons or its undiscovered quarks choosing their own paths under the law of indeterminism. Indeed the very universe may integrate its component consciousnesses into the sublimely all-inclusive megaconsciousness we commonly attribute to God.
One definition has it that consciousness is merely awareness of oneself. Another, that it is awareness of awareness. Still another, that it is awareness of the relations between oneself and one's environment, a concept that may be extended to families, tribes and nations as they gradually become aware of their dealings with other creatures and peoples and consciously draft these relations into history. If there is truth in this idea, perhaps it would throw some light on consciousness to suggest that the siege of Troy marked the primal awakening of the ancient Greeks, who had lately begun the process of rousing themselves up from tribal oblivion into a great people via an imaginative movement that succeeded largely through Homer's work in dramatizing their story and inspiring them with a collective spiritual consciousness.
This idea of course supports the related notion that the first essential for consciousness is change, particularly noncyclic, irregular or startling change. And such a concept explains why mere knowledge, which is generally static even when not instinctive or inherited, is seldom very conscious (depending on your definition) while learning, which always involves change, is much more likely to be conscious (by any definition).
The factor of relativity likewise comes into considerations of consciousness because there are many types, degrees and states of consciousness which may be symmetrical, if not complementary. And physiologists have recently determined that, whether the brain entertains rational or irrational thoughts, it consumes oxygen from the blood at the same rate. In other words sanity is not physically measurable. Indeed there seems to be a mystic polarity between states of mind, which was beautifully expressed by old Chuang-tzu in the fourth century B.C. when he dreamed he was a butterfly. "I was conscious only of fluttering hither and thither," he wrote, "following my fancies as a butterfly. I was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Then suddenly I awoke. So here I lie, myself again. But now how can I know for sure whether I have just wakened from being a real man asleep, dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am instead really a butterfly who has just fallen asleep, dreaming I am a man?"
The ghosty, illusory quality of the mind must surely be attributable in some degree to the indirectness with which material things impinge on it, for apparently they can only reach it through sensory nerves which in turn send coded messages to the brain, where they undergo a mysterious decoding process describable as mental interpretation. Thus, as Bertrand Russell once wrote, it is really prejudice that tells you you see the same table in your neighbor's dining room every time you go there. For actually the table may have been replaced by a duplicate more than once. Indeed you have not experienced the table so much as prejudiced it. The problem, however, goes deeper than prejudice. Conscious thinking, you see, takes in information bit by bit, one thing at a time. But this method of linear scanning is not very efficient for learning in our nonlinear world where everything happens everywhere at once. Besides, the appearance, sound and feel of a thing, particularly when it is moving, are all profoundly deceptive - because the successve "orbits" of subatomic particles in the atom, of atoms in the molecule and of molecules in larger structures have a way of blending like movie frames into multisensuous continuity.
This realization of course does not bridge the gap between matter and mind but rather exposes the abstraction and mystery of matter. Yet the exposure seems to be at least a step into the matter-mind problem which many thinkers think of as primarily an energy question, energy being probably the most widely postulated medium of liaison between mind and mind if not between matter and mind.
THE BODY-MIND QUESTION
A way of considering the matter-mind relation is to observe its influence on the intense competition between human beings that is revealed in sports, both physical and mental. For almost all top athletes recognize the factor of mood or state of mind in winning a race or game. A good example is Parry O'Brien, former world champion shot-putter, who used "positive thought" to tap the last reserves of his inner strength by playing tape recordings of his own voice exhorting himself to victory: "Keep low, keep back, keep your movement fast across the circle. Fast now! Fast! Fast! And beat them! Beat them all
!!"
Olympic weight lifters depend even more on a similar kind of selfhypnotism, concentrating for many seconds before each lift in a kind of prayer for faith, each in himself and his body - in the ascendancy of mind over matter - ascendancy to the supreme level of victory over his unrelenting opponent, the weight. And the reverse is probably as true for mental competitors like Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, who, in their famous chess match in 1972, made such a point of playing tennis or badminton, swimming and doing calisthenics to keep in top physical condition for their nerve-racking bouts at the board.
Although recognition of the polar relationship between body and mind has been slowly diffusing for millenniums in the consciousness of man, it seems to have been only recently that anyone realized that such a polarity logically implies that these opposites are diametric aspects of the same thing. For William James appears to have been the first philosopher to deny that there is any real line or interface between body and mind, and I wonder if it could be said that he intuitively anticipated Einstein and the mass-energy equation E=mc2 when he theorized that thoughts are made of the same fundamental stuff as material things. In any case Sir Charles Sherrington went on from there to declare of body and mind that "it is artificial to separate them. To separate the one as 'action,' the other as 'thought,' the one as physical the other as mental, is artificial because they both are of one integrated individual, which is psycho-physical throughout." He thought of the mind as a natural outgrowth of Earth and inherent in it. "If the vertebrates be a product of the planet, our mind is a product of the planet. It senses each and all gear into the ways and means of our planet, which is its planet ... The dry land created the feet that walk it. Our situation has created the mind that deals with it. It is an earthly situation. If the agent is terrestrial and the reaction is terrestrial, is not the medium of the reaction terrestrial? The medium is the mind."