Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Einstein was so in awe of the genius of Newton that he felt obligated to compose a letter of apology to the long-dead English physicist for having to destroy a keystone in the massive arch of Newtonian mechanics. His theory of special relativity was necessary, he wrote, only to explain phenomena that approached the speed of light. Fortunately for the rest of us, Newton’s laws remained in effect in the familiar world in which we lived and traveled.

  The system that Einstein proposed so challenged conventional wisdom and common sense that many scientists refused to accept his new conception concerning the relationships among space, time, and light. There was one, however, that maintained an open mind. Hermann Minkowski had been Einstein’s professor at the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum. Minkowski later admitted that he had considered Einstein a mediocre student and was quite surprised to find his former student’s paper in his monthly physics journal. After studying Einstein’s equations, he had one of the science’s true eureka moments. In a frenzy of intellectual ferment, Minkowski set about with paper and pen to construct equations that proved beyond a doubt that there existed a higher dimension beyond space and time.

  Speculation about a higher dimension had been rife throughout the artistic and scientific communities of the late nineteenth century. Artists, philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists each speculated about the existence of a fourth dimension. All of them conceived of this higher dimension as one of space, as another perpendicular added to the three familiar ones that formed the intersecting lines we commonly call height, length, and breadth. But there remained one significant problem: how to conceptualize or visualize this higher spatial dimension. The predicament can be easily re-created by glancing at the ceiling corner of the room in which you are sitting. Observe the triple juncture of two walls meeting at the corner converging neatly with the ceiling. Where in this compact arrangement could one insert another plane? How could one imagine a fourth vector of space?

  Minkowski’s remarkable insight was that the fourth dimension did not comprise a fourth vector of space, but rather was the recombining of space and time. He conjoined the three vectors of space—height, length, and width—with the three durations of time—past, present, and future—and coined a new phrase, the space-time continuum, to identify his new fourth dimension. In words worthy of a dramatist, he began his address to a distinguished physics colloquium in 1908 thus: “Gentlemen! From henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest shadows, and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right.”

  Only a handful of people could understand Minkowski’s innovation. Space-time would be a useful concept when, in his next bold move in 1919, Einstein joined together the original four cardinal essences that Kant had defined as comprising the everyday world—matter, energy, space, and time.

  Because the idea of space-time was so dense and non-­commonsensical, it remained an impenetrable knot to the public. Most had to take it on faith. Their trust has been justified by subsequent scientific achievements that have been both dramatic and convincing. Scientists used Einstein’s relativity theory and Minkowski’s formulation to calculate everything from NASA’s interplanetary explorations to the interpretation of the photos sent back by the Hubble telescope.

  The reason so few can envision a fourth dimension is because the human brain was designed to deal with speeds at which the quirks of relativity and the space-time continuum are not apparent. Nothing in anyone’s immediate environment requires him or her to think in terms of 186,000 miles per second.

  In October the First Is Too Late, astronomer and science-fiction novelist Fred Hoyle wrote:

  You’re stuck with a grotesque and absurd illusion . . . the idea of time as an ever-rolling stream. . . . There’s one thing quite certain in this business: the idea of time as a steady progression from past to future is wrong. I know very well we feel this way about it subjectively. But we’re the victims of a confidence trick.

  Another profound insight came as a result of advances in quantum physics. Here was evidence that logical certainties and the spatial concept of locality were illusions. Quantum physicists made a series of pronouncements that the rest of us have not yet assimilated. For example, quantum physicist Eugene Wigner wrote, “The laws of quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without recourse to the concept of consciousness.” Many other quantum physicists have attempted to explain what it is that they have discovered, but because of the organization of our brains, we have difficulty with the concept of nonlocality and ESP. Nevertheless, the combination of quantum physicists and promoters of relativity theory changed the perceptions of those who could understand them.

  And this is where the story of the organization of Leonardo’s brain begins. Did he have a brain capable of achieving an altered state of consciousness? Could he access the fourth dimension? Did his brain possess a means to access the quantum state?

  Chapter 15

  Leonardo/Remote Viewing

  Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

  —Wyndham Lewis, art critic

  Quantum theory indicates that there are no such things as separate parts in reality, but instead only intimately related phenomena so bound up with each other as to be inseparable.

  —Henry Stapp, quantum physicist

  Huge geoglyphs, ostensibly created by ancient inhaibtants, have appeared in numerous countries, including Egypt, Malta, Chile, Bolivia, the United States (in Mississippi and California), and in other countries built by ancient peoples. Among the most famous and mysterious are those on the Peruvian plains of Nazca, outside the city of Cuzco. On this flat, barren tabletop, ancient Incas (or Nazcans) drew enormous figures by scraping the rock away from the underlying chalk. Because the rainfall in the area is so scant, unlike other geoglyphs, these are extraordinarily well preserved. There are some twenty-six of these huge earth drawings. Many of them are stylized animals, birds, and plants; a number of them are geometrical designs. No one knows why the natives in the area constructed them, or what purpose they served. As ancient tribes scratched their way into history, their drawings reached several hundreds of yards in diameter. Any present-day visitor who walks among them would not be able to comprehend their design.

  Somehow, these ancient people were able to create these designs because they could visualize the figures as if they were looking back down at them from a remote point high in space. Only individuals so positioned could appreciate the extremely large outlines of spiders, monkeys, whales, hummingbirds, plants, or geometrical designs. Scientists have tried unsuccessfully to come up with an explanation for the Nazca Lines. The one that is most likely, and often dismissed, is that the people who made these large displays were capable of what is called “remote viewing.”

  In the 1960s, physicist Hal Puthoff, director of the Cognitive Sciences Program at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), wondered whether or not quantum effects could be observed in the realm of what we consider “the normal world” and proposed a modest experimental grant to find out. His experiment involved remote viewing, which is the skill to see something that is impossible to see given your location. (Many ordinary people claim to have this skill.) He was contacted by a New York artist named Ingo Swann, who had participated in similar experiments and wanted to join this one.

  Puthoff had access to a well-shielded magnetometer that was so precise and delicate in its measurements, it could detect the decay of atoms. It was situated in a basement vault and shielded by MuMETAL (an extra-thick, high-efficiency magnetic alloy) and a copper and aluminum container. Swann was asked to perturb the operation of the magnetometer. Amazingly, he was able to deflect the magnetometer’s needle and stop the field charge altogether for roughly forty-
five seconds. He did this while located on a different floor from the magnetometer, and with purely mental activity. Then he drew a close approximation of the interior of the apparatus.

  Swann’s “remote viewing” was significant enough that Puthoff presented it at a conference, resulting in a visit from two CIA agents a few weeks later.

  In 1972, along with another physicist named Russell Targ, Puthoff began a twenty-four-year, $20 million research project designed to investigate the phenomenon of remote viewing. Subjects were asked to identify and describe distant “targets” hidden from their view. By the end of their collaboration, they had published 266 papers in scientific journals.

  The general procedure Puthoff and Targ followed in the early experiments was straightforward. They would send someone they called a “beacon” to a series of locations some distance from SRI, randomly selected from a huge list. The beacon would spend thirty minutes at each site. Meanwhile, the remote viewer was sitting back at SRI in a locked room, drawing the site and offering verbal impressions of where he imagined the beacon to be. The whole procedure was double-blind: Neither the experimenters nor the viewers were given any information about any of the sites where the beacon was—usually a series of six to ten sites in any given trial.

  Then they gave a list of that trial’s target sites to outside judges, who had nothing to do with the experiment, and asked them to go to each site in the series. While there, they were to match up the viewers’ drawings and descriptions with the series of sites, pair for pair, based on how closely they resembled each other. At that point, they would look to see if the resulting matches were more accurate than chance would predict. What emerged from these early experiments in remote viewing was that the most accurate information often came from viewers asked to draw their impressions, which were consistently more accurate than straight verbal descriptions.

  Their results soon found their way into the popular press, after which they were contacted by Pat Price, a retired policeman from Burbank, California. He told them that he had had ESP all his life, and had used it in his work as a police commissioner with spectacular results. The CIA asked the researchers to test the subject’s ability to remote-view a particular site when given only the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of the site.

  They gave the coordinates to Pat Price and he immediately sent in a five-page report describing the area. At first he described a few log cabins and a couple of roads, but then added, “Oh, over a ridge there’s this really interesting place. That must be the place you’re interested in.” He went on to describe in great detail a military site he identified as highly sensitive and surrounded by the heaviest security. Price came up with code names that all centered on the game of pool, along with other information about what was going on there, and the personnel involved. They sent the verbatim transcripts back to the CIA for confirmation. They also asked former test subject Ingo Swann to focus on the same coordinates and sent his report off along with Price’s.

  The CIA’s first reaction was that the viewings were way off. The coordinates had been provided by an officer from the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), and pinpointed the location of a staff member’s vacation cabin in West Virginia. So a high-security military site seemed wildly inaccurate. But the CIA officers noted a striking correlation between the two independent descriptions from Price and Swann. That seemed unlikely enough to send the OSI officer out to the site itself.

  What he discovered was that, unknown to the staff member that owned the cabin, just over the ridge was a highly sensitive underground government installation. The guy’s vacation cabin was indeed there, but so were other elements of the viewing, and they were top secret—a total ­surprise to the officers looking at the data. Some of the details were wrong, but a lot were right, even stunningly precise, like the fact that the labels of each file folder in a locked file drawer inside the underground building were all designated by pool terms: cue ball, cue stick, and so on. Price had even come up with the actual code name of the site: Haystack.

  I propose that Leonardo was a remote viewer who possessed a trait similar to that exhibited by Ingo Swann and Pat Price.

  During his employ with Cesare Borgia, Leonardo produced a highly detailed map of the town of Imola that was also very beautiful. The vantage point that he achieved was about the same height as that of the Incas in Nazca. Roger D. Masters, one of Leonardo’s biographers, waxed rhapsodic over the magnificent jewel of a map [Fig. 16]. The drawing indicates every street and building in the town in fine detail and includes the features of the surrounding countryside. Masters observed that Leonardo paced off the distances between every street and house, recorded his findings, collated them, and then transposed them to another dimension. Only by this means, Masters conjectured, could the artist have achieved such an astonishing degree of accuracy.

  Leonardo did indeed make notes indicating that he wanted to ensure the accuracy of the measurements of the town (although he also included the surrounding river system, for which it is unlikely that he made notes). This was his first map, however, and I believe that one of his goals was to be sure of his remote-viewing ability.

  Biographers fall into the trap of repeating each other’s descriptions of this magnificent aerial map as a “bird’s-eye” view. The altitude at which he drew this map exceeds 6,000 feet, or more than mile. No bird flies at this height. Later, Leonardo made maps of areas from much higher altitudes. He re-created the topographical features of the landscape of northern Italy with stunning accuracy; no one would see maps like this again until satellites beamed back high-definition photographs five hundred years later.

  Somewhere around the year 1502 the leaders of Florence approached Niccolò Machiavelli and Leonardo, who were working together in the employ of Cesare Borgia. The delegation beseeched them to come up with a plan that would diminish the power of their archrival, the city-state of Pisa. Leonardo devised an audacious design. It was so spectacular that Machiavelli sold the idea to the governing body of Florence, known as the Signoria.

  The Arno River flowed through the center of Florence and then continued on its way to empty into the Mediterranean, at Pisa on the coast, about sixty miles to the east of Florence. The scheme called for the diversion of the Arno River from the city of Pisa. Leonardo also hoped that his innovation would irrigate the entire Val di Chiana, which, at the time, was an arid region. What really caught the attention of the members of the Signoria was the added benefit of seagoing vessels trading with Florence directly. A series of locks would make it possible to journey up the Arno and dock at Florence, bypassing Pisa altogether.

  Before any of these plans could be instituted, an accurate map of the entire river system had to be created. Leonardo drew the entire length of the Arno River as seen from a height that would have to be thousands of feet, or even several miles, above northern Italy [Fig. 17]. Given his jammed schedule, it is highly unlikely that he surveyed the river system himself or had any assistants help him.

  The project ultimately failed because of improper engineering at the jobsite. Leonardo’s plans were poorly carried out, and bad weather intervened. The Arno River has been subsequently tamed just as Leonardo envisioned it—minus the diversion from its bed at Pisa.

  Among Leonardo’s maps is one that he drew of the Pontine Marshes. He performed this service for the city of Rome, and the Pope who wanted to drain these infested marshes. The detailed map is drawn from a height that is only achieved by satellites.

  Leonardo drew many other detailed maps besides these. No one has developed a credible theory of how a man on the move, who was engaged in many other scientific and artistic endeavors, could have surveyed the landscapes of so many different locales. Comparing Leonardo’s topographical maps to those of other fifteenth-century cartographers reveals how much more refined and accurate Leonardo’s maps were.

  Adding to the mystery concerning how Leonardo constructed his aerial maps is the strange case of his “Armenia letters.” These m
issives were addressed to, among others, a potentate in the far-off land of Syria and the head of the state of Armenia. Some of them contain whimsical stories, but they always contain details about the terrain. Whoever would have received these letters would have already been familiar with these descriptions, because they lived in that region, yet for some reason Leonardo felt compelled to write with detail about geographical places that he apparently had never visited.

  The letters have been a constant source of puzzlement to the many interpreters of Leonardo’s manuscripts. Some posit the theory that he wrote them to encourage a flight of imagination for the purpose of stimulating his production of distant landscapes in his art—that somehow, describing a place he had never seen would allow him to imagine scenes that he aspired to draw. Another theory is that they are Leonardo’s attempt to write down in literary form a description of far-off places about which travelers had told him.

  A third theory is that Leonardo was engaging in fantasy. Yet, there is nothing in any of his writings to suggest that he wanted to engage in fantasy. His scientific writing consistently railed against people who described something secondhand and did not personally investigate the phenomenon they were describing.

  Leonardo described Etruscan funeral mounds and the structures that sat atop of them that are only located on the island of Sardinia. He accompanied the verbal description with a drawing. Edward MacCurdy, who wrote the comprehensive work, The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci, tries to come up with an explanation, but also expresses his uneasiness:

  The description of the temple on folio 285r.c raises a question to which the answer as yet has been found. It is precise and circumstantial. “Twelve flights of stairs,” he says, “led up to the great temple which was the circumference of eight hundred braccia and built on an octagonal plan. At the eight corners there were eight large plinths, a braccia and a half in height, and three wide and six long at the base, with an angle in the middle, and upon these were eight great pillars twenty-four braccia high. . . .” Can this description refer to any temple he had seen? If so, on what occasion? Or are we to assume that despite the exactness of the dimensions, twice stated, the whole passage is merely an exercise of the constructive imagination testifying to Leonardo’s interest in architecture of the grandiose type and to nothing else?