by Guy Murchie
If it is wrong to ask where body and mind meet, as scientists and philosophers have been doing since philosophy began, what is it right to ask? The earliest realistic answer to this question I can think of is that of Henri Bergson who pointed out the absence of any boundary between the growth of the embryo bird inside the egg and the ensuing development of its behavior as it begins to peck its way out of the shell, to walk, eat, fly, sing, mate and raise its young, all these functions (physical and mental, concrete and abstract) being parts of the same continuous emergent life force. This of course is what Ashley Montagu meant when he defined mind as "an abstraction from behavior" for, although what we call "life" is generally very different from what we consider "nonlife," the difference is not absolute but essentially a difference in degree - perhaps a development in dimension with no real border or clear shift in between. Memory, in this context, is but a record of past behavior and events. Intention is but pressure developing for future behavior. Emotion emerges out of sense awareness, will springs up from microcosmic uncertainty, thought out of atomic vibrations, of matter waves, of nodes and resonances.
Even a down-to-earth, working scientist, J. M. J. Kooy, professor of theoretical physics and mechanics at the Royal Military Academy in Breda, Holland, must have had something of the sort in mind when he wrote in the Journal of Parapsychology for December 1957 that "it is of great importance to realize that a body in itself is a product of mere mind-spinning, not belonging to the real world of events, which is extended in space-time. What we call a 'body' is only a kind of permanence perceived by us in the 'course of events.' In a similar way, in quantum mechanics, an atom in a definite state of energy, or an electron by itself, must be considered only as a metaphor ... All these incongruities disappear as soon as 'matter' is replaced by 'action,' the basic material of becoming, of events..."
In the same vein, Bertrand Russell in The Outline of Philosophy declared categorically that "everything in the world is composed of 'events' ... An 'event' is something occupying a small finite amount of space-time... Events are not impenetrable, as matter is supposed to be: on the contrary every event in space-time is overlapped by other events."
Turning then to the mind, Russell added: "An important group of events, namely percepts, may be called 'mental'..." Mind he defined as "a group of mental events ... " whose "constitution corresponds ... to the unity of one 'experience." This perceptual experience of mind, he went on, must be closely associated with a brain because "the events that make a living brain are actually identical with those that make the corresponding mind." In fact the only generally acceptable difference between mind and brain is "not a difference of quality, but a difference of arrangement."
All of which may fairly be said to represent the forefront, if not the consensus, of current thinking about the body-mind relation, and which suggests that by natural law there must be a gradual evolution of matter into mind in any viable world where the various mechanical, chemical and electromagnetic responses of mineral elements progressively become sensuous, where crystal accretion develops into protoplasmic replication and the growth (by division) of cells sprouts into the behavior of larger, more complex groups of cells, and where finally their emergent sense response (a vital ingredient of behavior) blossoms into perception, consciousness and mind.
Evidently no one has demonstrated the existence of any clear seam or shifting of gears in this progressive emergence of mind through the kingdoms, although evolution includes all known changes of molecular combination, crystallization, fermentation, germination and flowering. So, to my way of thinking, it is almost certainly an evolutionary unfolding of dimensions: a process mathematicians think of as moving into higher derivatives, such as the shift from position to movement (at constant velocity) to acceleration (at constantly increasing velocity) to hyperacceleration (at constantly increasing acceleration) to hyperhyperacceleration (at acceleratedly increasing acceleration), etc. Something similar must also occur whenever a single (phase) wave becomes part of a group wave (as I explained in my Music of the Spheres), when a circle takes on motion relative to its surroundings and becomes a spiral, when a musical note is blended simultaneously with others to become a chord and when the chord is combined
sequentially with others to create a melody. So does matter become more than matter through addition of the time dimension, which brings on atomic movement or metabolism, turning the particle into a wave, the material structure into a flow (inevitably a changing flow) of energy - which again is like existence awaking into motion, motion spreading into growth, growth fermenting into awareness, awareness germinating into consciousness and consciousness flowering into mind and spirit.
It is as natural a progression as if you were measuring an angle with a protractor and you saw that it read 71deg. and then looked closer to see if you could get the reading any finer. But, to dramatize my point, let us now suppose that an angel (a very special "angle angel") appeared and leaned over your shoulder to help you, making your protractor grow magically larger so it reached out farther from the angle while more and more details of its scale appeared in your range of vision. By this means you could see the angle was not just 71° but 71° 12'. And then it might sharpen to 71° 12' 26". Then to 71° 12' 25.982"- and so on in a mysterious intensifying flow of divisions and relationships of steadily increasing precision.
But think now. Need there be any end to this? Perhaps you have begun to recognize it as the ancient enigma of Leukippos and Democritos who postulated the atom in the fifth century B.C., a momentous surmise that only in our time seems finally to be resolved by the quantum theory. But is the problem really solved? Can it be solved? What are quarks made of? Which are the ultimate monads of creation, if any - or are they all relative and illusory in this seemingly commonplace but really very drastic world?
J. B. S. Haldane once made the ingenious suggestion that mind might be "a resonance phenomenon." I suppose he was consciously agreeing with Niels Bohr's inspired idea that the wave function of matter represents its mental aspect (page 408). Or he may have meant that the electromagnetic rhythms of the nerve cells could be produced by tuning in from some unknown source, perhaps in a dimension still unknowable to this phase of existence. In any case, the narrowing of the "circle of confusion" as it resolves itself into a sharp point in the focusing process may be as applicable to consciousness and mind as to optics or harmonics - and just possibly it could turn out to be an interdimensional noumenon at the ideal center of this seam of the worlds. But, to me, it now seems a lot simpler just to realize that the essential difference between body and mind is that the body is bound by space and time while the mind is not, and therefore that the body is finite while the mind is free to transcend toward the infinite.
Chapter 11
Memory, Intelligence and States of Mind
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EVEN IF ORBITING out here is in essence a mental exercise, it does at least serve to acquaint our thoughts with space and time. And if we ever have to choose between the two, recognizing our dimensions of space as cyclic and constant, while only our time dimension is cumulative and changing, may persuade us to give the time dimension its due as a percept. To that end, in this chapter we will look first at memory, the interaction between different times (specifically past and present), and then to the intelligence that depends on it, as well as the states of mind that seem somehow to emerge out of it.
MEMORY
I know memory is hard to visualize or relate to the material universe, but it really shouldn't be because it is basic to mental continuity and consciousness. And it is built into rocks and stars as well as vegetables and animals, being intimately involved with everything right down to such laws of physics as the conservation of energy. In fact energy conservation itself is a form of memory. And this will be clear to you if you consider that the brick laid at the top of the chimney "remembers" the energy exerted by the hod carrier who lifted it up there and that many years later when the brick falls to the ground, it
expresses that memory kinetically by hitting the earth with exactly equivalent energy.
An elastic band likewise "remembers" the energy put into stretching it and voices that memory in its insistence on returning precisely to its original state of relaxation. Some kinds of plastic, however, have a subtler memory. Irradiated polyethylene may be heated, molded and cooled, after which it obediently keeps its new shape but without "forgetting" its original form, the memory of which is retained in the distorted crosslinking of its chain molecules. As a result, if this kind of polyethylene is heated again outside a mold, the aggrieved molecules will eagerly pull it back to its former shape - which, in a sense, is like reversing the flow of time.
Liquids seem much too disorganized to have as much memory as do solids but, surprisingly, water can "remember" its invisible patterns of circulation for days, even inside small containers. Laboratory experiments have shown that, if the faucet is angled enough to give the water even a slight rotary circulation as the tub fills, it cannot be drained a day or two later without the water swirling out in the same direction. This of course presumes the water was left completely uninfluenced, the whole time, during which its silent memory currents must have kept coasting round and round their orbits like asteroids circling the sun. There is a limit of about four days to this sort of memory, however, the imparted movement having by then been slowed down by friction to the point where the Coriolis effect (of the earth's turning) takes over, after which undisturbed water invariably drains counterclockwise north of the equator or clockwise south of it.
Understandably an ocean has a much longer memory than does a tub. And it gets it naturally not only from its currents but also through other activity, from storing up heat in summer and releasing it in winter to transporting it from the equatorial regions toward the poles, in either case retaining the effects of the weather of bygone years as a measurable record built deep into its dynamic body. But there is no end to such memories, from the salt in the Dead Sea that can never forget it was once part of the oceans to the mountain chains whose very shape is a pressing reminder of how they got there. Not to forget the Earth itself, whose body (including the atmosphere) is just one fat volume of the history of everything it has ever done - and so on to other worlds and systems of worlds and systems of systems without end.
Memory is everywhere. Yet it is as elusive as the answer to the question of whether a river is a flow of water or a channel cut by water. Is it, in other words, positive or negative? Abstract or concrete? If one could make an analogy that consciousness is like a needle moving forward through space-time followed by a thread representing the memory of that consciousness, the act of remembering it could logically be pictured as a reversal of the same motion whenever the thread shifts and guides the needle back through space-time to where and when it "remembered" it was.
The trouble with such efforts of course is that they don't really make memory understandable or visualizable. But there still may be a way of getting a down-to-earth grip on the "stuff" of memory. If you stare hard for about ten seconds at some bright object like a tree in sunshine, then shut your eyes, it is possible to "see" the tree still in a kind of under-eyelid vision or afterimage which presumably uses the same cones of your retina that saw it originally. If this isn't memory, it is at least close to it, for visual memory may well use the retina as well as the optic nerve to imprint its graphic images. Something similar probably occurs in aural memory, where repetition of words or sounds helps one to retain them through the auditory nerve, as has long been practiced in leaning by rote all over the world. And no doubt there are comparable reinforcements in smell, taste, touch and other senses, memory of which is known to involve nerve cells in the spinal cord, the solar plexus and, in conditioned reflexes, even below the waist.
The exact role of the cell in memory is not yet known completely, but recently animal experiments at the University of California have revealed nerve cells that can actually count, doing so by holding back the discharge of their electrochemical signals until an exact number of clicks has been sounded. By such means one type of monkey brain cells, in repeated tests, proved it could reliably count as high as nine. And in other research at the same university it was discovered that so-called Golgi bodies inside brain cells sprout out branchlike fibers as learning proceeds (see illustration, page 104), particularly in the parts of the brain most closely related to the senses used - this apparently explaining why the visual areas of the brains of artists have been found to contain a higher than average proportion of densely branched Golgis, and in musicians similarly developed cells in their auditory areas.
Even more strikingly specific has been the evidence of memory registration discovered by Dr. Wilder G. Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute about 1948 when, during a brain operation on a twenty-six-year-old woman with epilepsy, he touched a spot on her hearing center with his electrode and she exclaimed, "I hear music!" The music was a familiar tune, "Marching Along Together," and it kept playing as long as the electrode touched that exact spot but, when he removed the instrument, it stopped abruptly like turning off a tape recorder. Dr. Penfield knew he had happened on something important and repeated it some twenty times in the next hour, noting that the same melody was played every time and, significantly, that after each silent interval, the tune began again at its beginning as if the "tape recorder of memory" was somehow automatically able to rewind itself.
Experimenting further with other brain surgery patients, Dr. Penfield soon found that the "tape" was at least an audio-video "tape," because most patients could be made to see things as well as hear them, and none of their senses seemed excluded. These were not hallucinations either, for careful checking showed them to be reruns of real life experiences, and all the patients insisted they were much too vivid to be mere memories. Nor could more than one recording be played at the same time no matter how many electrodes Dr. Penfield touched to the various responsive points in each brain.
Another development that tended to confirm Penfield's brain-tape discovery occurred when hypnotism showed it could elicit similar remembrances in certain subjects. Indeed an elderly bricklayer under hypnosis was able to describe minute cracks, chips and other surface details on several ordinary bricks he had laid forty years earlier, just as if he were looking at close-up photographs of them.
But the pianist Arthur Rubenstein, who in his late eighties could learn a new sonata in one hour, hardly bothered even to hypnotize himself in guiding an automatic memory through extraordinary performances all his life. "When I play, I turn the pages in my mind," he explained to an interviewer in 1966, "and I know that in the bottom right-hand corner of this page is a little coffee stain, and on that page I have written molto vivace ... At breakfast I might pass a Brahms symphony in my head. Then I am called to the phone, and half an hour later I find it's been going on all the time and I'm in the third movement."
RESEARCH IN MEMORY
Work on the structure of memory storage has led to all sorts of fascinating experiments, many of them involving animals. To test the theory that memory necessitates continuous neural activity, rats were taught to go through a maze without an error, then they were frozen until their rate of metabolism dropped virtually to zero, then, revived, they still were found able to negotiate the maze faultlessly, demonstrating that uninterrupted neural function is not required.
An experiment with goldfish at the University of Michigan helped to prove that if a lesson just learned is not to be forgotten within minutes, it must somehow immediately deposit itself in a kind of memory bank that seems to be in the brain and presumably made of protein. The fish in this case were taught that when a light went on in their specially built training tank it would be followed 20 seconds later by an unpleasant electric shock, but that the shock could be avoided if the fish promptly swam over a barrier into another and unlighted compartment. Thirty exposures to the light-and-shock threat in the training tank were generally found to be enough to teach a fish to swim a
way from the light every time it went on and, most important, the fish would remember to make this evasive maneuver on seeing the light a day or a week later or even after an absence of several months. But if the experimenters injected a drug called puromycin (which inhibits the growth of protein) into the skull of a fish immediately after his training, the fish promptly and invariably forgot everything he had just learned. However, if the same ten microliters of puromycin were injected in the same way an hour after the training ended, by then the lessons had become so consolidated in the fish's memory that the drug no longer could block his normal power to retain his training and he would go on evading shocks for the rest of his life - indicating that the manufacture of protein must somehow enable the short-term memory of learning to be inscribed into the long-term memory of permanent knowledge.
