The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  THE SENSE OF TIME

  Awareness of rhythm and chronological sequence is as much a sense as sight or touch, I believe, and properly called the sense of time. It derives from sensitivity to a basic dimension of our finite world and is involved in the principle of transcendence (as we shall see in Chapter 19), one of the Seven Mysteries of Life this book is named for. Although closely associated with such feeling senses as awareness of space and vibrations (page 203), which have subtle organic manifestations, it is much more predominantly a mental sense and so fits in here among the other impalpable and hard-to-measure senses that are more and more indisputably classified as abstract.

  Of course time can be measured with the aid of such a modern invention as the stopwatch. That is how the traditional test of manhood in the old West, quickness on the draw, was finally accurately defined when a champion gunman took exactly three fifths of a second from touch to target. And a crack modern typist does about equally well in hitting 11 keys, or a piano virtuoso 15 musical notes, in the same fraction of a second. The latter feat, if you can believe it, was performed by Simon Barere playing Schumann's C Major Toccata with its 6266 consecutive notes in 4 minutes 20 seconds at the astonishing average pace of better than 24 notes per second. Which is slightly faster than the standard speed of movie frames that flash on the screen to create a nonflickering illusion of continuous motion.

  The movie illusion, however, can be provided for some creatures at only one thousandth the speed of others - because their time sense is geared that much slower. I am thinking of the difference between, say, a horsefly, who can easily see the gaps between frames in a standard movie, and a garden snail, who, researchers have found, cannot react to any visual event in less than four seconds and therefore theoretically could see a continuous movie when the frames were changing at about the pace of a slide show.

  A more important use of the time sense is for sex and species recognition, as in courting. The common firefly Photinus pyralis of course courts at night, flashing his light as he flies in a U-shaped dip. The female, sitting on a tall grass stem with a wide view, is excited by his U but waits almost exactly two seconds before flashing back. He gets excited in turn by her timely response. Then, as he turns to fly toward her, repeating his message, she answers again in her precise two-second timing and he "homes in" on the light of his life. The maximum error the male firefly has been known to tolerate in this exchange is a fifth of a second, which gives the approximate range of accuracy of his time sense - and, by it, if she is more than a fifth of a second too eagerly fast or more than a fifth of a second too indifferently slow, he just knows she can't be his true flame. His skepticism is well advised too, for, it has just been discovered, several species of fireflies have evolved preying femmes fatales, who mimic the flash sequences of females in other smaller species through which fakery they manage to lure a percentage of overanxious males close enough so they can catch and devour them.

  Man's own time sense is seldom nearly so precise, and its range has obvious limits. When you are told, for example, that heavy subatomic particles are created in high-energy collisions lasting only a one hundred-sextillionth of a second, but that these same particles "decay" much more slowly, taking a ten billionth of a second, you probably have trouble realizing the distinction between such seemingly instantaneous events. Yet actually the time ratio between them (10-23: 10-10 sec.) is the same as that between a second and a million years!

  In the north woods where I live, the time sense is commonly regulated by the sun, as when the lengthening daylight of February triggers the mating of the great horned owl, ensuring that its eggs will hatch in March when red-winged blackbirds arrive in flocks, followed by the main spring bird migration and the myriads of young, awkward mice, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits appearing exactly when the owlets must daily be fed their own weight in food. It is a precise but complex phenomenon, the stimulus coming from an exact mental measure of each day, the result unfolding into a neat biological schedule of developments.

  Animals in general and almost certainly vegetables, not to mention minerals, have something known as a biological clock that, in many tested circumstances, has been found to run accurately without temporal clues from the sun, moon, stars or earthly environment. It seems to be mental, having no proven location in the body, despite a theory that its timing could be regulated by the pineal gland, and its existence is known almost entirely through its behavior. Slugs - the kind that live on the undersides of stones in a pasture - lay their eggs about August first every year, even when confined in a seasonless, weatherless laboratory under artificial light (eleven hours a day), darkness (thirteen hours a day) and unchanging temperature and humidity. Ground squirrels kept in "total" darkness at near-freezing temperature for their life span of three or four years hibernate about a third of the time in a cycle that approximates 365 days. One squirrel, unable to hibernate because of being kept in a room as hot as 95°F. for nearly a year, nevertheless lost weight at hibernating time, when his biological clock forced his appetite and digestion into low gear.

  Humans feel their body clocks most unmistakably when they fly east or west through several time zones, because this temporal shift makes their sleep-wake, digestive, adrenal and other body cycles reset themselves proportionately, accompanied by a sudden metabolic loss of nitrogen and sulfur. It seriously handicaps the likes of actors, tycoons, diplomats, athletes, chess players and race horses whose internal "clocks" are forcibly advanced or retarded six hours for every 90° of longitude they travel through, with an inevitable corresponding quarter-circle shift in the angle at which they stand, walk or sleep.

  The solution to such problems has so far escaped us because we know so little about the elusive biological clock - indeed not even whether the body has a clock or is a clock. There is no shortage of theories though - such, for instance, as that of A. T. Winfree of Purdue University, who surmises the mainspring driving the bio-clock must be spiral-shaped, something like the gene. He developed the idea as a geometric generalization of periodic biological processes, which, being recurrent, can be presumed to be circling around axes of some sort, if only abstract ones. But each turn of such a bio-spiral would have to be geared to one sort or another of temporal influences, from cyclic enzymes to seasonal day-length changes. And one of the better of many possibilities for such a timer is even included in an independent theory proposing a mysterious regulator in the brain with characteristics of both an hourglass and an oscillator. Yet no one to date has really found the bio-clock or convincingly explained what might cause it to be stopped or reset (as many have been) by a whiff of oxygen, a flash of light or a dip into a freezer.

  To my mind, the greatest value of the biological clock, as it is revealed in both the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of world travel, is its positive demonstration of the intimate regulation of earthly life by Earth herself - proof, you might say, that life, in at least one sense, is actually celestial.

  THE OTHER MENTAL SENSES

  The remaining mental senses don't need detailed individual discussion here because all of them will be covered as occasion allows in the chapters that follow. Let me say only that every mature and normally active human knows them, if not from personal experience, through contact with others, including the animals. The navigation sense that we will take up in Chapter 12 is one of several that is far more widely distributed in animals than in man. To a lesser degree that's true also of the domineering and territorial sense (Chapter i 8) and the colonizing sense (Chapter `9) but probably not of the horticultural sense. On the other hand, the language sense (Chapters 9 and 11) is obviously most highly developed in man, and likewise the sense of reason (Chapter 11). But the other five mental senses (all in Chapter 11) of intuition, esthetics, psychic capacity, hypnotic power and sleep seem to broaden mysteriously out toward elemental qualities, the last being universal enough to include all creatures.

  THE SPIRITUAL SENSE

  I don't know how to subdivide t
he sense (or senses) of spirit, so I simply call it one sense. It is far too mysterious and immeasurable to do otherwise. It also seems to be the ultimate of all senses, something we can't help but return to at the end of this chapter as well as in Chapter 22 and, most completely of all, in the final and all-embracing Seventh Mystery of Life.

  INTERSENSE RELATIONS

  Miguel de Unamuno once wondered whether eyes and ears might somehow become aware of each other's worlds. He could have broadened the question of course to include smell, taste and other senses. And he might eventually have even explored the curious, if little known, relation between them. It is the sort of subject at any rate that one would hardly expect to hear talked about except in some such fabulous place as the flavor laboratory of Arthur D. Little Inc., consulting engineers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the rooms are not only immaculate to reduce the number of extraneous molecules and silent because "noise dulls the perception of odors" but constantly maintained at 65 percent humidity, which, I understand, permits the keenest smelling - all this exhaustively determined by the head sniffer whose awed assistant once said, "He can smell to three decimal places."

  I suppose it was in a laboratory of this stamp that nearly a century ago something called "colored hearing" was discovered. At least that was the accepted name for what William James described in his Principles of Psychology as "a strange idiosyncrasy, found in certain persons, consisting in the fact that visual impressions on the eye, touch on the skin, etc. are accompanied by distinct sensations of sound, these being only extreme cases of a very general law which says that all our sense organs influence each other's sensations." James went on to cite cases in which persons, who could not read because the letters they were looking at were too far away, suddenly found themselves able to read them when a tuning fork was sounded close to the ear. He also reported opposite cases of persons unable to hear sounds too faint or far, who suddenly heard them when colors were flashed before their eyes. And similar uncanny amplifications applied, he noted, to smell, taste, temperature sense and touch when these were combined with exactly the right colors and tones, suggesting that some mysterious sort of resonance must interjoin one sense with another, despite the fact that the vibrational frequency of the one (say, light) could exceed that of the other (say, sound) by a factor of a trillion.

  The first measured interaction between light and sound I ever knew about was produced at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 when a laser beam was made to generate sound waves in a sapphire at an unheard-of radarlike acoustical frequency of 60 billion vibrations a second. It exploded the sapphire and spurred thinking among intersense resonance engineers, to judge by the subsequent development of the acoustical holograph, which "sees" with sound waves like a bat, though not through "ears." Instead it sees through eyes by transforming its sound waves into light waves for reassembling the three-dimensional image on a screen so it will be visually looked at.

  Before we leave the subject of intersense resonance, if that indeed it be, I should mention that I've heard of music lovers who claim they habitually see colors when they hear certain melodies, indeed that they enjoy the music the more because of it: like an aria that "spreads as northern lights in ice pale blue" or a fugue flashing red and orange flames. Is this purely subjective? Or could there be some objective explanation, as is suggested by the fact that a surprisingly high percentage of nearly a hundred different listeners, questioned separately, have observed the same colors with the same tunes, and too often for it to be explained as coincidence? Historical research has even unearthed old records to show that Bach called E flat a grayish tone but B flat yellow-green while Schubert saw E flat as reddish-gold and B flat simply green, and Rimski-Korsakov viewed C as white and E flat a gloomy bluish-gray. Psychologists term such correlations chromatic phrenopsis (possibly an emotional cross-leakage of current between optic and auditory nerves), which, under various names, continues a tradition going back at least into the Middle Ages, possibly as far as Pythagoras, to whom is attributed the original concept of an analogy between the seven colors of the rainbow and the seven notes of the musical scale: C=red, D=orange, E=yellow, F=green, G blue, A=indigo, B=violet.

  An even more controversial cross-sense is the repeatedly observed finger vision known as DOP (dermo-optical perception) through which certain extraordinarily sensitive persons, mostly young women in both America and Russia, have demonstrated, while blindfolded under stringent laboratory conditions, that they could read newspapers and recognize colors, some with opaque shields between their hands and the material they "saw," a few reading fluently even with their toes, feet, shoulders and elbows. One Russian girl also proved able to taste with her forearms. There was general agreement that light colors felt smooth and thin, while dark ones were rough and heavy. Yellow was slippery, soft and light in weight; blue smooth and cool; red warm, sticky and coarse; green stickier; indigo like glue; black like thick tar. Theories to explain the phenomenon ranged from that of Professor Richard P. Youtz of Barnard College in New York who thought it might be an infrared sense to Russian psychologist Abram Novomeysky's electromagnetic theory that it is akin to the "seeing" of electric eels.

  ABSENCE OF SENSE

  Space research seems to be the latest discipline to contribute to sense science, mainly by conducting experiments into what the absence of any sense stimulation might do to a man - say, a man lost alone in space. And it found, to nobody's great surprise, that floating limply in a tepid bath in the silent dark hour after empty hour is very trying for most of them, normally leading to hallucinations within a day. Various subjects have reported seeing "prehistoric demons," rows of little yellow gnomes, squirrels marching with knapsacks through futuristic beehive cities, five-dimensional teeth and the ultimate "gone" feeling of being swallowed down an "astral throat" into a "stomach outside the universe" - some such effects persisting for days after returning to normal living.

  The world record for enduring "total" sense deprivation - staying alive, conscious and sane without appreciably seeing, hearing or feeling anything - is 3 days and 20 hours, recorded in 1962 at Lancaster Moor Hospital in England. This ordeal of course did not include motionlessness, the world record for which is only 4 1/2 hours, and I doubt if the darkness, silence and feellessness were anywhere near total.

  In actuality there is a large, sometimes fearful, amount of background noise to be heard in one's ears if one rests quietly, listening for it and tuning on it. Even on a still night in subfreezing weather I find I can hear something like crickets chirping, wind whistling, machinery grinding and of course my own heart thumping. And something comparable occurs with vision for I see what appears to be the Brownian movement of molecules in the air and other mysterious moving forms and colors, especially when my eyes are shut.

  PHOSPHENES

  This brings up the subject of a kind of inner sight that is hard to categorize because it is not yet well understood but seems too important to omit from our discussion of senses. It is the phenomenon of images known as phosphenes, the scientific word for the "stars" you see when your head gets banged and for the scenes that appear when you're half asleep or when you meditate with your eyes closed. Derived from the Greek phos (light) and phainein (to show), phosphenes may appear whenever visual input from outside fails to penetrate your eyes. They are believed to originate primarily inside the retina and brain, "reflecting the neural organization of the visual pathway," andmay be the nearest thing to a scientific explanation for the visions of religious mystics. Pilots flying alone in empty skies at very high altitudes habitually experience phosphenes, and presumably astronauts on long interplanetary voyages will be familiar with them, although at least some of the flashes already seen by astronauts going to the moon are deduced to have been caused by the heavy particles known as cosmic rays.

  Phosphenes are also seen, probably inevitably, by all normal young children (not to mention animals), to whom they may be as real as the external world - that is, until, little by
little, the unfolding years of growing up shed light on how to tell the difference. Between the ages of two and four, when the child can hold a crayon but knows little of how to draw objectively, he is most apt to draw things with a distinctly phosphene character. And this is about equally true of primitive humans who lived during mankind's childhood, to judge by the phosphenelike figures in some of the prehistoric cave paintings, in folk art and Indian blanket designs. Drugs likewise bring on phosphenes, particularly hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline, psilocybin or LSD. So does alcohol, as anyone who has been through delirium tremens can tell you, and diseases of high temperature, particularly scarlet fever.

  Probably the simplest way to see phosphenes though is to shut your eyes and rub your eyeballs hard. This is pretty certain to ignite for you an array of lights like a city viewed at night from an airliner, a dramatic crystalline checkerboard or moire pattern featuring many colors and flashing rubies, diamonds, sapphires and emeralds. That these patterns are not just random is now well accepted, especially as they were recently classified into fifteen categories by a researcher named Max Knoll on the basis of reports from more than a thousand volunteers. While psychologists seem reluctant to conclude more than that "certain forms are characteristic of each pulse frequency for each individual," to my mind these fifteen characters are rather otherworldly and exciting and I let myself imagine they just might be the alphabet of some still undiscovered interworld code or script - or maybe even the signs of a mental zodiac of the universe.