The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  While on this subject, I should explain that the reason castaways are warned against drinking saltwater is not to deny that the watery 96.5 percent of it may immediately relieve them but only to avoid the ultimate problem of getting rid of their lethal excess of salt. Most mammals, including man, cannot eliminate salt in urine at the rate of more than about 2 percent so, unless one can be sure of soon receiving enough fresh water to dilute one's urine that low, to drink seawater (averaging 3.5 percent salt) is to take a deadly chance.

  The most dramatic thing about thirst has to be the kind of death it brings when a man is lost, say, in a hot desert, a grim dissolution witnesses describe as unfolding in five fairly distinct stages. First comes the protesting phase of increasing discomfort and querulous disbelief (with 3 to 5 percent of body water lost). Second, the feeling of having a mouth "dry as cotton," tongue sticking to teeth, a lump in the throat that no amount of swallowing can dislodge, a face tight from shrinking skin (water loss 5 to 10 percent). Third is the burning agony of having the tongue shrivel into a knot, eyelids stiffen, eyes staring as the victim irrationally tears at his clothing or scalp, bites his arm for blood or even laps up his last drops of urine (10 to 20 percent). Fourth is the stage of the skin cracking apart (more than 20 percent of water gone or too much for any chance of recovery), lymph and blood oozing out, eyes weeping blood, arms digging aimlessly into the sand. And fifth, the final or living-death stage of gentle writhing on the ground and, often, calm acceptance awaiting the end.

  The third stage is usually the worst, for nature seems to have evolved pain to save life before it is too late. But after the blood begins to thicken and dry and the damage becomes irreversible, the pain eases progressively away - which suggests why those who die of thirst are so often reported to be joyous in their final hour - even as one of them was heard to murmur, "I'm melting, I'm sinking... I'm drowning in an ocean of unexplainable peace."

  THE SENSE OF PAIN

  When it comes to pain, it could be considered the final and most arresting of the feeling senses. However, I deem it more appropriate to place pain among the mental senses, the fourth sense group, which we now come to, partly because, like pain, the mental senses are in general abstract, if not nebulous, and closely involved with other senses. Any of the common senses in fact may become painful if experienced with sufficient intensity, like seeing a blindingly bright light, hearing a deafeningly loud noise, feeling an unbearably hot or cold temperature, or even smelling an aromatic "agony," which, I'm told, can torment such a creature as a tick whose odor-sensitive feet are olfactorily "burnt" if forcibly left too long in direct contact with even a normally pleasant-smelling substance.

  Whether or not such evidence proves pain to be mental is controversial and continues to be debated among doctors and judges, few of whom can claim they really understand pain, although they daily deal with it. Indeed the specialists who know the most about this elusive subject are more likely the scientific experimenters such as a team of zoologists at McGill University who recently raised a batch of Scottish terriers from puppyhood in solitary, protective restriction so they could experience no pain. Then, to everyone's surprise, when the dogs were full grown, they were evidently incapable of feeling pain, for none of them reacted to such provocation as having a lighted match singe his nose or a pin jabbed an inch deep into his flesh. Pain had thus been revealed as something to be learned, a state of mind!

  Such a concept should not be too hard to accept either, because it conforms to many people's experience of pain. I remember, for example, when I was a war correspondent in Dover, England, in September 1940, and got bombed out of a hotel, literally falling in two or three seconds from the fifth floor to ground level. Two British naval officers standing beside me were killed, but miraculously I was unscathed - or so I thought as I climbed out of the wreckage. Fifteen minutes later, however, I happened to notice a trickle of blood running down my ankle and discovered that a seven-inch hunk of flesh had been gouged out of my left calf. Perhaps it was the distraction of the fall, the expectation of being mangled or killed, that had served as an anesthetic. In any case I felt absolutely nothing of what would, under more normal circumstances, have been a painful injury. My mind at the moment was obviously not conditioned for pain. A neurologist, however, might say that, unknown to me, my mind had somehow influenced the polypeptide molecules that have recently been discovered to exist naturally in nerve cells and which, according to some researchers, can, under certain little understood circumstances, block pain as effectively as a shot of morphine.

  Whatever the technical facts, there is a lot of difference between pain itself and someone's reaction to it, a reaction that encompasses an almost unlimited range of possibilities. Does the Eskimo calmly hacking off his gangrenous foot with a hatchet to save the rest of him feel less pain than a similarly afflicted European who requires a delicate and expensive operation? A researcher who conducted a heat test on several dozen Eskimos, Indians and Caucasians to find out, discovered that they all began to feel pain when their skins got to 113°F., but they varied widely as to how hot and how long they could stand it, the more "primitive" ones usually (but not always) being the more relaxed. Pain, in other words, appears to be not a thing but a concept and therefore, in essence, abstract.

  In every investigation so far, to my knowledge, culture and training have fairly demonstrated themselves to be the critical factors in any sensation describable as pain. The famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, experimenting with dogs many decades ago, found that they reacted violently to the pain of a strong electric shock applied to a paw. But he conditioned the dogs to the electricity and the "pain" by consistently feeding them right after a similar shock every day. In consequence, a few weeks later, he noticed that the dogs were beginning to salivate as soon as he shocked them, because they were hungry and the daily shock was turning into a dinner call. Eventually the dogs became so receptive to the shock, even after Pavlov increased it to the point where it was burning and injuring them, that they would wag their tails in anticipation of something that had blossomed from a painful into a joyful experience.

  Another researcher went farther, this time with cats, not only training them to associate a shock with food but providing them with special switches so they could administer shocks to themselves whenever they got hungry, thereby proving that the shocks were their own free choice. Some of the cats in fact got so greedy they even took to fighting each other for possession of the switches.

  Comparable to this may be the curious fact that, if a certain kind of dragonfly is held firmly by the wings and its tail is put into its mouth, it will bite the tail and keep on eating it until the stump gets out of reach while the dragonfly slowly dies. Do you suppose such an insect would commit such an apparently pointless "suicide" if doing so were painful? Would an angleworm, cut in two right through its main nerve cords, its blood vessels, intestines, peritoneum and circular muscle system, continue on its way as two "carefree" angleworms if it, or they, were suffering in any comprehensible sense? Could the shriek of stripped gears in an overloaded old automobile be called a mechanical cry of "pain"? What is pain really anyhow? And is it an essential part of our world?

  We have characterized pain as abstract, but there are countless and conflicting opinions as to how necessary it is to the world. Hundreds of men and women of all the major races are known to have been born congenitally incapable of feeling pain. Perhaps they happened to have abnormal quantities of polypeptides in their neurons. In any case, they are not numb for they have fairly normal senses of touch, temperature, humidity, etc. They are like Edward Gibson who appeared in vaudeville at the turn of the century billed as "the human pincushion" because he encouraged customers to stick pins into him by the dozen and, at the climax of his career, smilingly submitted to crucifixion on the stage with real nails through his hands and feet until the show had to be stopped because "too many members of the audience fainted." Actually people like that are more to be pitied t
han envied, for nature and evolution are probably weeding them out. Indeed they often fail to survive childhood because they overlook the normal danger signals of pain, and neglect their unfelt hidden wounds and symptoms, which consequently get infected or deteriorate unnoticed until it is too late. The philosophical case for pain in the world and its polarity aspect under the paradox of good and evil are important subjects that we will return to in Chapter 18, but I can tell you now the good news that at least the physical aspect of pain has been found to have finite dimensions. For researchers recently discovered that the pain of heat reaches its "excruciating maximum" at a skin temperature of 152°F., beyond which, no matter how hot a fire gets, it feels no worse. I don't know how this maximum was established - it must have been agonizing for someone - but it is interesting to think that it might have saved the medieval torturers a lot of fuel and trouble had they known.

  Even so, there can be a mysterious benediction following torture which must be attributable to the mysterious potential for joy inherent in pain, a paradox that is a prime example of the relativity of the opposing aspects of life's qualities, and one of the Seven Mysteries presented in this book. Certainly a benediction came to a seaman named Kim Malthe-Bruun who suffered horrible torture in a Nazi prison but was able to write the next day: "Suddenly I realized how incredibly strong I am. When the soul returned once more to the body, it was as if the jubilation of the whole world had been gathered together here."

  THE SENSE OF FEAR

  A hunted animal is commonly assumed to be very frightened when his pursuers close in on him. Yet his understandable urge to escape is not necessarily based on actual fear - at least not on "fear" in the human sense. Take a running antelope overtaken and killed by a lion. There can be no doubt that he suffers a severe shock, but it is a natural shock which may involve little or no pain or fear. The normal kind of pain that forces an animal to reduce activity until his wounds heal has obvious "survival value" in evolution, and so does his reasonable fear, but what could be the survival value of pain or fear in a mortally wounded creature who is soon to be out of the living world? I can't think of any value beyond the warning of danger in his despairing last cries, cries which, however, could be just as effective if produced by painless shock.

  Studies of predation suggest that the prey usually behaves as if stunned, once the predator has seized him. He rarely struggles significantly and often does not even protest the fait accompli that has overtaken him. He may indeed be anesthetized by the shock if not the inevitability of being devoured by his natural superior. A case in point is the story of Major Redside, a British hunter in the Bengal jungle some fifty years ago, who had stumbled when crossing a swift stream, dropping his cartridge belt into the water. His companions happened to be beyond earshot and, now out of ammunition, he advanced in their general direction until he noticed a large tigress stalking him. Turning pale and sweating with fright, he began retreating toward the stream. But it was already too late. The tigress charged, seized him by the shoulder and dragged him a quarter of a mile to where her three cubs were playing. As he recalled it afterward, Redside was amazed that his fear vanished as soon as the tigress caught him and he hardly noticed any pain while being dragged and intermittently mauled when the tigress played "cat and mouse" with him for perhaps an hour. He vividly remembered the sunshine and the trees and the look in the tigress's eyes as well as the intense "mental effort" and suspense whenever he managed to crawl away, only to be caught and dragged back each time while the cubs looked on and playfully tried to copy mama. He said that, even though he fully realized his extreme danger, his mind somehow remained "comparatively calm" and "without dread." He even told his rescuers, who shot the tigress just in time, that he regarded his ordeal as less fearful than "half an hour in a dentist's chair."

  Something of the kind also occurs during battle and on other occasions of severe stress and danger. And it indicates that the more active the role one plays the less one feels afraid. Soldiers in World War I, for example, often said that staying still in a trench under bombardment was harder on the nerves than going "over the top" to fight in the open; that, although it took guts to expose yourself, once you did so, the excitement of action almost always made you forget the danger. Or, as a physiologist might say, the adrenalin flow that triggers fear is greatly influenced by the state of mind.

  Another aspect of fear is the interrelation between alternative, sometimes conflicting, anxieties. I remember walking along crowded Oxford Street in London one morning in 1941 when, without benefit of the usual air-raid warning, a German bomber streaked overhead and bombs began to fall. It must have been tempting to some of the pedestrians in that moment to shelter themselves by ducking into doorways or perhaps even diving into the gutter. But what self-respecting Londoner could bear the thought of being the first to show the white feather? No one did. For, in fact, the courage it would have taken to duck in full view of that crowd of shoppers clearly exceeded the courage it actually took to keep on walking as if there were no danger. And some Londoners were killed that day because they lacked the nerve to take reasonable but "shameful" precautions.

  A different example is the British captain who, perhaps a year later, drank a cup of tea on the bridge of his destroyer under dive-bombing attack. When the lookout shouted, "Aircraft on the starboard bow, sir," he didn't even look up. When he heard "Aircraft diving, sir," he sipped once more and took a casual glance skyward. And when the lookout said, "Bomb released, sir," he ordered, "Hard a-starboard," and finished his tea as the bomb hit the water nearby. Although such restraint made the captain a hero to his men, the very real conflict between fears hidden inside his mind was revealed to the ship's surgeon, who later chanced to glimpse him sitting alone in his cabin - weeping.

  Still another side of fear is its slow development over a period of time as the mind is enabled to assess the actual risk. An air force general in Vietnam once remarked that "after six months' flying, many pilots have aged ten years." And I have noticed the same thing over a much briefer span on the several occasions when my life was in sudden jeopardy, most memorably the time I was bombed in Dover. For I realized, as the floor dropped out from under me, that I might well get crushed to death by the collapsing building. Yet I distinctly recall my amazement that at that moment I felt no fear - for it did not occur to me until days afterward that the two or three seconds in which I heard the bomb falling and exploding, followed immediately by my own fall, simply weren't a long enough time to permit my adrenal glands to generate the sensation of fear. And notwithstanding the fact that the naval officer beside me was instantly killed by a bomb fragment and the other officer had his skull broken in the fall, fear had not arrived. Because fear is truly a conditioned state of mind.

  THE PROCREATIVE SENSE

  Continuing with our roster, the mating urge and capacity for sex arousal is still another important member of the mood and mental senses, although of course it often also involves seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, etc. And its essence is expressed in the orgasm that comes at its climax and is related to such other climaxes of bodily and mental function as "blowing one's top" in uncontrolled anger, the "flash" of creative inspiration or a paroxysm of anguish. The pioneer or prophet of the orgasm is widely considered to be Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who proclaimed it a vital expression of "Cosmic Life Energy." And there are other modern thinkers who agree that this climactic procreative sensation includes a spiritual counterpart to its physical aspect. Also, although the orgasm undoubtedly represents the most intense natural physical joy one can sense while in one's earthly body, I see no reason to deny that even greater ecstasies may await us, at least potentially, in transcendent states beyond.

  THE SENSE OF PLAY AND LAUGHTER

  Although laughter is widely accepted as the supreme outward expression of human pleasure, a little thoughtful research shows it can just as often be the surface manifestation of escape from a hidden conflict. Or, as Freud explained it, the humor that s
ets us laughing is a benign device for mastering our forbidden urges. And a modern psychologist might nod and say, "Indeed: like a cork on a bottle of potent brew."

  But if laughter, like weeping, is a surface phenomenon, it too is prone to be delusory, and sometimes on a mass and commercial scale. French theatrical producers long ago started paying rieurs (laughers) as well as pleureurs (criers) to provoke audience response, and any competent TV comedy director today knows how to "lay in a laugh track" with "canned laughter" or, increasingly often, to use a tape console with keyboard for fading in desired shades in the spectrum of laughter, shrieks and applause, from male belly guffaws to feminine hysterics or from a roaring ovation to scattered titters or sobs. And no less delusory, if a lot grimmer, is the weird disease called kuru or "laughing sickness," whose obvious symptom is anything but a laughing matter, for it has been found only among members of the obscure Fore tribe in eastern New Guinea where, to those who catch it and laugh, it is 100 percent fatal.

  The sense of pleasure (as distinct from laughter) has been studied less than that of fear, but it appears to be simpler and presumably easier to understand with its known centers in the brain, some associated with the appetites for food, drink and sex. There is even a spot in the septal area of the brain called the pleasure center, where, if delicate electrodes are implanted and just the right electric current applied, the delightful satisfaction imparted (according to one estimate) is "greater than the satiation potentials of all other known appetites combined." Although most of the research so far has been on animals because of the obvious human emotional, ethical and philosophical questions involved and the dangers of misuse if unscrupulous operators ever usurped these means of controlling humans, research is now progressing in man's own cortical pleasure centers and, in a few cases, techniques of therapy explored.