The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  The relative sharpening of the distinction between life and death that marks our present attitude probably began in medieval times. Into Europe in the fourteenth century were crowded more disasters, plagues, wars, and pestilences than have ever been known at any other place or time. Bubonic plague swept across the Continent, bringing repulsive torment, delirium, and death to one fourth of the earth's population; famine strewed the roads with dead and forced those forgotten in prison dungeons to devour one another; the Tartars and the Crusaders ravaged communities already weakened by the epidemics, and fire, earthquakes, measles, smallpox, and the Inquisition took care of the rest. During that century the subject of death was central, vivid, intense, and all-pervading. Nobody could ignore death and its associated terrors, so the result was a macabre preoccupation with the subject. The only possible counter to the horror was an emotional response in which philosophers, artists, playwrights, poets, and ordinary people dramatized and personified death until they were totaLly familiar with the bleak figure. Painting, carving, caricature, and folklore all made death a commonplace concept and helped ease the burden. If death had been a topic that was socially taboo, the psychological strain on the individual would have been too much to bear, but as it was, he could look around him and see his own concern mirrored everywhere. Everyone was in the same terrible predicament.

  As the crisis passed, the preoccupation became less intense, but even today we are left with the heritage of a death concern. We tend still to see death in isolation as a phenomenon in its own right to be feared and postponed for as long as possible. In our society the fear of death can have little to do with personal experience. Most of us have never seen a dead body. We have divorced ourselves from death by handing responsibility for the whole dying-death sequence over to teams of licensed experts. We have insulated ourselves from contact with death by giving it a place of its own. There is a sense of discomfort, even sometimes a feeling of outrage, if someone dies in the wrong place or at the wrong time. More than any other society the world has ever known, we have tried to isolate death from our lives, but have succeeded only in building a life-view full of confused beliefs and half-acknowledged doubts.

  This confusion is evident in the way our media give emphasis and feature coverage to accidental deaths. Attention is focused on the vivid details of airplane crashes and fires and the figures for road deaths following holiday weekends. The implication is that death is something that happens "out there," something that lies in wait for us in other places, rather than something we carry within ourselves. We have been brought to believe that accidents are an important cause of mortality, but the truth is that even in the most mechanized countries, less than 5 per cent of deaths are accidental. This excessive concern with accidental death seems to mask an insufficient concern with natural death. We have conveniently overemphasized avoidable death somewhere else as a diversion from inevitable goth right here inside every one of us. In the United States in particular, death has come to be regarded almost as an infringement of every citizen's constitutional right to the preservation of life and the pursuit of happiness.

  In this social climate the beliefs of more "primitive" people in death as a transitional process are seen as quaint. Anyone here who believes that there is some kind of life in a clinically dead body is regarded with suspicion as a religious crank or as yet another foolish child taken in by some specious Eastern guru.

  So in this second section I will examine the question of survival of death, first by discussing the biological possibility and then by looking very closely at the evidence that might support such a phenomenon.

  PERSONALITY AND THE BODY

  Chapter Four: PERSONALITY and the body

  The evidence of biology, psychology, and anthropology points toward the conclusion that life and death exist alongside each other in a constantly changing dynamic relationship which ends only when the matter involved loses all trace of the order imposed on it during this association. I have called this point goth. The state that has been identified as clinical death is nothing more than a vernier that slides along this lifeline, progressing further and further toward the goth end of the scale. I believe that technology will eventually be able to push clinical death all the way to the end, until it is coincident with goth, and that many of our present contradictions will then automatically be resolved.

  In the meantime, let us look at that portion of the scale that still lies between clinical death and goth and assume, purely for the sake of argument, that life does persist in some form into this area. We are talking about the survival of clinical death.

  Nobody questions the fact that organic activities continue to take place in a body long after the doctor has signed the death certificate. Arguments revolve only around the significance of these activities to the individual that was identified with that body, to the entity called personality. Personality may be defined as that which tells what an individual will do when placed in a given situation. It is a function of the stimuli which that situation provides. The information coming in from any environment is received by the sense organs and conveyed to the brain of the individual, so the whole argument boils down to a question of whether or not a personal identity can exist without this feedback.

  Nocturnal mammals, such as cats and rodents, derive a large portion of their information about the environment from sensations picked up by their long sensory whiskers, each of which is attached to a finely divided group of muscles and nerve endings. If these whiskers are cut off, the animal is seriously disoriented and may even die. Curt Richter in Baltimore found that rats whose whiskers were trimmed with electric clippers often behaved very strangely. One "pushed its nose into the corners of the cage and into its food cup incessantly with a sort of cork-screwing motion. It was still doing this when we left the laboratory four hours later. The next morning it was dead and neither the cause nor the direct mechanism of death could be determined by careful autopsy." [226] The rat seemed to have died of shock induced by the experience of sensory deprivation following the loss of one of its most important sense organs.

  Studies of humans in conditions of sensory deprivation indicate that normal functioning of the brain depends on a continuous arousal of the cortex by signals from the brainstem. [114] This in turn depends on constant bombardment by information from the sense organs. It seems that quite apart from their normal specific function of providing information about sights, sounds, and smells going on outside, the eyes, ears, and nose also collect stimuli which have the general function of maintaining arousal in the brain. It does not matter what they provide, as long as they keep on sending some kind of signal. If the signals are too monotonous or cease altogether, the cortex shows signs of disorder and the brain begins to behave abnormally. Personality changes take place and the individual's perception becomes disturbed. The brain wave pattern changes, thinking is impaired, and hallucinations appear. After long hours on the road, truck drivers start to see apparitions such as giant red spiders on the windshield; airplane pilots have mystical visions of flights of angels; and prisoners in isolation develop acute paranoia. These symptoms become progressively worse when sensory stimulation is further reduced, and it is said that if all incoming information could be withheld, the brain would stop altogether. [282] It seems that a changing environment is essential for human survival. Christopher Burney ends his account of a long stay in solitary confinement with the comment that "variety is not the spice of life; it is the very stuff of it." [31]

 

  The process of dying, in which sensory stimuli are eliminated as disorder in the organism becomes more and more prevalent, is one of progressive sensory deprivation. We know that the elimination of even one sense system has a deleterious effect on an organism, so how far along this line of reduction can an individual progress before personality and identity become meaningless? In order to explore this question, we need first to know how much of personality is determined by physical factors, both exter
nal and internal.

  One of the problems that has always faced psychologists working on captive animals is the variability that exists between individuals in any population. The observed differences in behavior have been attributed to genetic alteration, experimental error, the temperature of the laboratory, and the phases of the moon. All these factors can and do influence the way in which an animal will respond to a given situation, but perhaps the greatest source of variation is the difference in past experience. Seymour Levine at Ohio State University began an investigation into the role of traumatic or painful experience in early life by rearing three groups of rats in different ways. [163] The first group were taken out of their nests at the same time each day and put into a cage where they received an electric shock. The second group were placed in a similar cage but given no shock, and the third group were left in the nest and never handled at all. Levine expected to find that the shocked rats would be affected by their experience, and he looked for signs of emotional disorder in them when they reached maturity. To his surprise he discovered that it was the third group, which had never been handled at all, that "behaved in a peculiar manner." The behavior of the shocked rats could not be distinguished in any way from the second group, which had also been handled but not shocked. Levine reports in some consternation that when the unhandled rats became adult, they were unhandleable. He says they "rank as the most excitable and vicious rats we have ever observed in the laboratory; it was not unusual for one of these animals to pursue us around the room, squealing and attacking our shoes and pants legs." [164]

  No biologist would describe this as "peculiar" behavior. It is a source of great delight to find at least one group of laboratory rats behaving like rats instead of like maze-made clockwork toys. However one interprets the results, the experiment shows quite clearly that environmental factors play a large part in determining behavior.

  There is an almost perfect human counterpart to this in a long-term study done in Massachusetts. In 1935 a survey was made of a large group of seven-year-old boys from similar poor urban backgrounds. The children were interviewed, physically examined, and psychologically tested. Counselors gathered information on their backgrounds from teachers, ministers, parents, and neighbors and visited their homes repeatedly. Twenty years later, Joan and William McCord tracked down 253 of these boys and examined their current status in the light of their early experience. [197] A number of the boys, now grown to be men, had been convicted at least once of a crime involving violence, theft, drunkenness, or sexual violations. When the backgrounds of all the men were classified from the early records, it was found that the patterns of family life played a large part in determining whether the child would later show antisocial or criminal tendencies. In the group of boys who were exposed to rigid discipline involving frequent parental physical punishment, 32 per cent were later convicted of crimes. Of those whose parents relied more on verbal disapproval or "love-oriented" discipline, 33 per cent had become criminal. A third group of boys, who were totally rejected by their parents and not disciplined in any way, proved to contain 69 per cent who had turned to crime. As with the rats, there was no distinction between the groups who had been handled, regardless of the way they were treated; but the group who had been ignored and neglected were distinctly different.

  The McCords were interested in testing the old adage "like father, like son" and found that even where the fathers were practicing criminals, the sons that had been disciplined tended to follow the expressed values, rather than the behavior of the parent. If we accept the definition of personality as "that which tells what an individual will do when placed in a given situation," it seems fair to conclude that early social experience has a profound effect on the way in which personality is expressed. Personality depends at least in part on external physical factors.

  It seems also to depend on chemical factors. Eugene Marais describes what happened to a colony of termites he was watching when their queen was disturbed. A piece of clay became detached from the roof of the queen's cell and fell on her. "The only effect which the shock had on the queen herself was that she began moving her head to and fro in a rhythmic fashion. The workers immediately ceased all work within the cell and wandered around in aimless groups. . . . Even in the farthest parts all work had ceased. The large soldiers and workers gathered in great excitement in different parts of the nest. There appeared to be a tendency to collect in groups. There was not the least doubt the shock to the queen was felt in the outermost parts of the termitary within a few minutes." [175] The behavior of the individuals in the colony was altered when a normal channel of communication was interrupted. This channel is now known to be a chemical one in which contact and a group identity are maintained by a social hormone excreted by the queen and carried to every individual in the colony by mouth-to-mouth contact. If workers from one nest stray into another colony, they are immediately attacked and killed, but if first their queen is destroyed, the termites of that nest stop work and move to a nearby colony where they are readily assimilated. Without the chemical reinforcement from their own queen, their unique identity is lost and they become anonymous subjects ready to swear allegiance to a new queen and a new chemical control.

  Organization in a beehive is maintained in the same way by a compound that is secreted by the queen and distributed democratically so that every bee's attention is focused on the proper sequence of instinctive drives to achieve the necessary results. This queen substance acts as a unifying agent in exactly the same way that tranquilizing drugs banish symptoms of mental illness, relieve anxiety, and allow a human patient to co-ordinate his actions to some constructive end. For hundreds of years an extract of the snakeroot plant, Rauwolfia serpentina, has been used in India for the treatment of a number of ills, including epilepsy and anxiety. In 1953 this substance was introduced to the West as the drug reserpine which acts as a tranquilizer by preventing the hypothalamus of the brain from producing excessive arousal. [119] Now it has been discovered that the queen substance has a chemical structure similar to this controlling agent. In the organism of the termite colony or beehive it is the queen that acts as a brain and, among many other roles, plays the part of the hypothalamus. She is apparently a separate individual, but she cannot exist on her own, and removing her from the colony is equivalent to a surgical operation in which the skin of the organism has to be cut to gain access to the internal organs. This group identity is directly analogous to the condition of the normal human body in which the hypothalamus controls emotion without outside help. There is little functional difference between external and internal factors controlling behavior. For our purposes it is sufficient to know that behavior, which is an expression of identity and personality, is very much dependent on the social, physical, and chemical circumstances in which a body finds itself.

  Hippocrates taught the first Greek medical students that temperament depended on the relative proportions of the four main body humors. [133] A predominance of black bile made a man melancholic , yellow bile made him choleric , phlegm made a man phlegmatic, and too much blood left him sanguine. In 1925 the German psychologist Ernest Kretschmer updated this notion by dividing people into frail asthenic , muscular athletic, plump pyknic, and inconsistent dysplastic types. [154] Like Hippocrates, he maintained that not only temperament but mental disorder depended on body type, and held that schizophrenics were apt to be asthenic, while manic-depressives were more likely to be pyknics. Fifteen years later, William Sheldon put the theory onto an embryological basis by abolishing dysplastics and describing three basic body shapes derived principally from the three main germ layers of an embryo. [245] He called the rounded one endomorph , the athletic type mesomorph, and the skinny shape ectomorph. Both Sheldon and Kretschmer equated the body shapes with special personality types. Round-bodied people were said to be extrovert and likely to enjoy full-bodied rococo architecture, opera and romantic fiction, and the colorful schools of art, whereas the lean-bodied introverts tended to be more in
terested in restrained classical architecture, ballet, formal literature, and the more obscure abstract art.

  There is something attractive about these correlations. We all know happy-go-lucky, fat, romantic Italians and austere, angular, forbidding Swedes. The trouble is that it is impossible to say how much these personalities owe to body shape and how much is determined by cultural and racial stereotypes. The expectations of others play a large part in determining our own self-images. Greek men are supposed to be passionate lovers, so they do their level best to live up to the legend.