by Lyall Watson
One theory of dreaming suggests that it might help assimilate the events of the day by rerunning some of them and comparing these with previous experience before filing the whole lot away in the memory banks. The buildup of dream debt is nicely accounted for in this theory as an accumulation of unsorted experience in the cortex. We certainly have two types of memory: a short-term pattern that makes it possible to hold a telephone number in your head long enough to dial it, and long-term memory that is capable of fixing it there permanently. Suspicion is growing that the hippocampus -- an antler-like protrusion beneath the brain -- is the area involved in transferring relevant parts of recent experience from temporary holding areas to wherever it is that we house our long-term stores. This structure functions all the time, but it produces a particularly strong beat in juvenile mammals and in all individuals during dreaming.
There was an elegant little experiment done some years ago with hamsters, which demonstrates the fact that a certain period of time is necessary for fixing memories. [90] Hamsters were run daily through a complex maze and given an electric shock afterward. When the shock was given four hours or more after the run, it had no effect on the learning curve. A shock one hour after the run impaired learning a little, and a shock one minute after the test destroyed long-term learning completely. Hamsters shocked too soon after their lesson had to start each day in the maze from scratch. The short-term memory pattern seems to be an electrical one that can be destroyed by another electrical stimulus so that it is never converted into a long-term form; but the long-term memory is almost impossible to disturb in any way. Alcoholics often cannot remember what they were doing two hours ago, but are ever ready to regale a captive audience with the most detailed accounts of things that happened in their childhood. Similarly, if hamsters that have learned the maze are chilled until all electrical activity in the brain has disappeared, and then allowed to recover, they remember every twist and turn. After freezing for surgical purposes, human memory is similarly unimpaired, but if the hippocampus is damaged, no new long-term memories will be formed.
Epileptic patients are sometimes treated by surgically removing the entire temporal lobe. [214] After the operation (which destroys the hippocampus), their IQ levels remain the same, they remember their past, their profession, and their relatives, but they cannot hold new information for more than a short while. Articles are read and understood, then completely forgotten; the death of a relative causes grief, but an hour later the news is lost altogether. Without a hippocampus there are no fits, it is true, but neither are there any new memories nor any dreams. Once again we find a connection between the brainstorms of epilepsy and dreaming, and this time there seems to be a clear functional relationship. We need now to know only one thing more -- and that is where memory storage takes place.
Theories about memory are polarized like the philosopher's question about rivers. "Is a river the water flowing in it, or the channel cut by the water?" The fact that activity in the brain can be brought to a standstill without affecting the memory suggests that the river can dry up without losing its identity and that those who favor the channel theory might be closer to the truth. Muscle fibers react to exercise by becoming darker, but there is no visible change in nerve or brain cells following activity. Changes in the structure and distribution of nucleic acids in nerve cells following learning have been reported in flatworms [196] and in rats. [127] Injection of these altered molecules into other naïve animals is even said to transfer this learning, but arguments still rage about the validity of these experiments and it seems unlikely that memory can be stored on a long-term basis by means of chemical changes like these. [6] One of the main stumbling blocks to any theory that relies only on a static change in a particular nerve cell is the difficulty of explaining why this localized memory is not altered by extensive brain damage.
When the exposed brain of a person undergoing surgery with a local anesthetic is stimulated electrically, various specific things happen, but all are related to immediate responses and none have anything to do with past experience or memory. Huge sections of the brain can be destroyed without the loss of any particular memories. There are records of brains extensively damaged by trauma, by tumors, by loss of circulation, by injury, and by old age. They may lose the ability to make judgments or learn new things, they may lose physical sensation or become profoundly psychologically disturbed, but the memory of past experience usually remains intact. Prefrontal leucotomy, which involves separating the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain, helps obsessive or delusional patients relax but has no effect on their memories. Anterior cingulectomy, the removal of parts of the cortex, makes neurotics less inhibited without altering their recall of the past. There seems to be absolutely no evidence to suggest that memories are stored in any special part of the brain -- or anywhere else in the body.
This leaves us in the following position: We know that personality grows from a biological base but depends on individual experience. We know that this experience is stored as memory and can be drawn on in dreaming to allow the personality full and independent expression. We know that all mammals are capable of this kind of expression, but in none of them can we find any physical trace of such a memory bank. Therefore, there is at the moment no valid biological objection to the suggestion that personality, in the form of an individual set of memories, could survive beyond the point of clinical death.
This suggestion, and at the moment it is only that, makes it necessary to assume some kind of dualism. We can make sense of the idea of survival only if we presume that every organism capable of survival after death is an intimate compound of at least two separate constituents, one being the ordinary everyday body and the others something of a very different kind, not normally open to ordinary observation. This is by no means a new idea. In the fourth century B.C., Plato held that all matter had its corresponding form in the world of ideas. [78] René Descartes, two thousand years later, looked at dreams and concluded that "the same thing, perhaps, might occur, if I had not a body at all." [62] He nevertheless felt that there was some connection and suggested that the soul was situated on the pineal body, that tiny protrusion from the brain that has evolved from a primitive third eye.
The assumption of a second system intimately associated with the normal body does provide answers for all kinds of problems that we have left hanging without solution. The organizer that produces the directional patterns of life and death, and separates these from goth, could be located here. Information acquired by the physical body or the somatic system could be stored as integral parts of this organizer and provide a base for memory and recall. If such a fellow traveler does exist, I think it is necessary to assume that it does have some physical reality and is not unlocated like some cosmic vapor. To be at all useful as an answer to biological problems, it would need to be a sort of "ghost in the machine" which is so closely associated with the normal somatic system that any change in one would more or less immediately be mirrored in the other. It need not follow the shape and pattern of the body in detail, but might bear the same relationship to it that an electromagnetic field does to the conductor that lies at its center.
The complexity of dream experience suggests that the second system is capable of creating a personality complete with traces of experience, habits, and skills, organized in a way that is typical of that individual; but we have no grounds to assume at this stage that it can do this without a body. To use another electrical analogy, music that has been transmitted from a radio station exists as patterns of modulation in the air, but these cannot be re-created without a receiver suitably tuned to the correct wavelength. When the transmitter is destroyed by saboteurs, the transmission continues to exist in space for a short while until it eventually attenuates and completely disappears. Our speculation about the survival of physiological sabotage in the form of clinical death centers on the duration of this period of disintegration. If there is a second system, and if it can survive without the first, I suspe
ct that it cannot do so indefinitely.
I have used the dream experience as an example of the way in which personality does seem to enjoy some kind of independence. The state of the body during dreaming is so strange and at such variance with all other normal experience that it could be associated in some way with the second system. The fact that dreaming fills most of a baby's time, and that it occupies an even greater percentage of the sleep of a premature baby suggests that it might be the paramount activity of a child still in the womb. This flurry of dream activity during the most critical stages of the development of the brain could be the mechanism that first forges the bond between the two systems. It might even create the second system. Dreaming in later life could be the expression of a need to maintain the connection between the systems. The fact that dream deprivation causes dissociation and loss of memory and can even precipitate epileptic convulsions is a measure of the strength of this need.
At this stage, all such suggestions are purely speculative. All we have established so far is that there are good reasons to presume that an alternative or supplement to our somatic system could serve a useful evolutionary purpose, and that there is nothing in biology to suggest that such a system would be impossible, or does not exist.
Chapter Five: ENLIGHTENMENT as a biological process
You can break the sound barrier without even moving your feet. It works like this, in three stages. First you breathe in quickly; then you hold the air for a moment while you raise your tongue to block the mouth so that pressure builds up in the lungs, until it is released suddenly and explosively in a two-level blast that initially bypasses the barrier by rushing out through the nasopharynx, then forces the tongue down to shoot out through the mouth. Each stage has a characteristic sound, and together the ah , the tish, and the shoo make up one sneeze. In the tish stage, air and suspended droplets are expelled through the nose at supersonic speeds of almost 1500 feet per second. Any internal attempt to stifle this violent rush can damage the nasal membranes so badly that they bleed, but every day we run this risk, apparently merely for the sake of politeness.
There is more to the sneeze than meets the ear. Our custom of holding a hand or a handkerchief to to the face while sneezing obviously has survival value -- it limits the spread of influenza, measles, and the common cold -- but why should each sneeze be followed by an automatic chorus of ritual social blessings? Our conditioned reflex could date back to the time of the great plagues, when a sneeze was often the first sign of imminent death, but the custom of making some talismanic comment about each little personal explosion goes back farther than that. There is an almost worldwide belief that a sneeze either bares the soul or that it actually involves the loss of part of the soul matter.
This kind of concern can grow in the way that many superstitions do, by the accidental association of two totally unrelated circumstances. The behaviorist B. F. Skinner once wrote an erudite little paper on superstition in the pigeon. [251] In it he describes an experiment in which pigeons were placed in a cage and presented with food at predetermined intervals. It was left entirely to chance to determine what particular activity was in progress when the food appeared. One bird happened to turn its head counterclockwise at the crucial moment and another happened to peck at a certain spot on the wall. These responses were reinforced by the arrival of the food and were later repeated more often than other random responses, which of course ensured that they would be more often rewarded. So a rapid spiral of association between the circumstances arose and led to the development of a ritual dance and an equally formalized tattoo in the two pigeons, each behaving as though there were a direct causal connection between its behavior and the presentation of the food.
Accidental connections of this kind do sometimes lead to strange human beliefs, such as that of the child who continues to touch trees in the park in a certain special sequence because the first time he did so he found a silver coin, but these are seldom long-lasting. When there is no further reinforcement, a response decreases in frequency and eventually becomes extinct. The association of the sneeze with the soul is in a different category. The sneeze can be compared with the behavior of the pigeon, but what corresponds to the arrival of the food? A belief that something else has happened is not a sufficiently strong reinforcement to account for the survival of this superstition for so long. There must be another circumstance, something that actually does happened when we sneeze.
Sneezing can occur as a symptom of an infection or when the membranes in the nose are irritated by cold, dust, or an allergic reaction, but there is one situation in which the response is triggered in a more indirect way. An enormous number of people sneeze violently when exposed to bright light. Eyes water in the light and tears flow down into the nasal cavity and could cause sneezing, but the response to light is too rapid for this to be the explanation. The African Azande people believe that a random sneeze means that someone is speaking well of them, but two in succession mean that something evil has been said. [72] Now that Douglas Dean has shown that there are measurable physiological changes taking place in the body of someone who is being thought about, even at a distance, the old wives' tales about ears "burning" at these times no longer sound quite so ridiculous. [59] It might not be true that "left it's your lover and right it's your mother" thinking about you, but there is every reason to believe that there are direct physical accompaniments to certain mental processes. [111] The Azande may well be right in thinking that the strongly aggressive thought makes them sneeze more often than the mellow kind one.
The connection between sneezing and both light and emotion is a tenuous one, but it suggests that the phenomenon may be governed by the only part of the brain that deals in both these commodities. This is the pineal body.
Descartes was not the first to pick this spot as the site of the soul. Thirty-five hundred years ago, when Vedic literature first appeared, it contained the suggestion that the highest source of power in the body lay in the space between the eyebrows. [4] The ancient Hindus based this belief on a fact that Western anatomists only discovered for themselves in 1886. In that year two independent monographs appeared, one in German and the other in English, each pointing out that the pineal body was in reality a third eye, and had evolved from the central light-sensitive spot that can still be seen in primitive reptiles such as the famous tuatara of New Zealand. [274] In this lizard-like animal the pineal apparatus consists of a small cavity, the outer layer of which has become a lens, and the inner layer a retina connected by nerves to the brain through a gap in the skull. The skin covering the area in which it lies is thin and translucent. In the tuatara and many fish, birds, and small mammals, the pineal sits on top of the head; but in higher primates and humans the cerebrum has grown over the brain and the pineal body now lies half-concealed in the center of the skull. If we still retained the layer of translucent skin, it would appear a little above and between our eyes -- right where the Eye of Enlightenment is shown in Hindu art.
Until about fifteen years ago, our pineal was thought to be a useless vestigial appendage, something left over from reptilian times. Then in 1959, Aaron Lerner, of Yale University, discovered that it produced a hormone which he called melatonin, and the pineal changed its image from degenerate body to renascent gland. [162] Interest in the pineal revived and a year later it became clear that melatonin was manufactured from serotonin, a very strange substance that occurs in the most unlikely places. [5] It is found in dates and bananas and plums, but nowhere is it more common than in a species of wild fig that grows in the tropics into huge sprawling trees with hanging roots which prop their branches up in beautiful shady colonnades. In Africa these banyan trees are sacred to many people and are very seldom cut. In India they are known as bo, and it is said that it was beneath one of these trees that the prince Siddhartha sat (eating the figs?) when he suddenly understood the causes of human suffering. It was this enlightenment that led to his being called the Buddha.
The molecule of serotoni
n is remarkably similar to that of a substance first extracted from rye grain infected with the parasitic ergot fungus and now synthesized as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Despite the mass of work done on this famous substance, we still have no clear idea of how it works on the brain. The most likely hypothesis is that LSD is antagonistic to serotonin and alters its concentration in certain brain cells and that it is this change that produces dramatic alterations in perception and understanding. LSD is often totally unpredictable in that, as Aldous Huxley pointed out, it can be either heaven or hell depending on the circumstances. The drug seems to have few direct effects of its own, but it triggers a mental explosion, and the direction of the blast is determined by other factors. It can undoubtedly produce visionary states as real and as productive as those enjoyed by any great mystic. Huxley said it would be senseless "for an aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation" when he could "turn for technical help to the specialists." [126] Perhaps all enlightenment depends on the activity of serotonin and the pineal gland, and the combination of factors providing the correct stimulus to this system can be discovered in any of a number of ways.
The word "enlightenment" is an interesting one in this respect, because light seems to play a large part in transcendence. Visual hallucinations are the most characteristic aspect of the LSD state, and in several studies it has been discovered that the retinal cells are reacting entirely on their own. [50] Without the stimulus of special light waves, they send signals off to the brain about a whole galaxy of wavelengths and frequencies that apparently do not exist at that time and place at all. The brain "sees" these lights and colors in the same way that it produces images in a dream; in the absence of incoming stimuli it feeds itself with information. In experiences induced by faith or fasting or any other method of producing enlightenment, the effects are the same. [118] They are called visionary states because the sense of sight is paramount. Common to nearly all of the experiences is the sensation of a sudden, dazzling, brilliant light, an unearthly radiance. It happened to the prophet Ezekiel, and to Paul on the road to Damascus, and it forms the basis of the ecstatic state of kundalini yoga in which the light is described as "lustrous as ten million suns." [21]