Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Neurologists distinguish among lefties and righties as to their preference for eye, ear, hand, and foot. The percentage of pure righties—that is, those who preferentially sight a gun with their right eye, hold a phone to their right ear, throw a ball with their right hand, and kick a can with their right foot—falls when compared to the overall percentage of people who consider themselves right-handed.

  The number of pure right-handers is about 88 percent compared to the figures for those who consider themselves right-handers, which average about 92 percent worldwide. These seemingly minor subcategories can be very significant. For example, during basic training, drill instructors quickly weed out those recruits who sight a gun with their left eye while steadying it primarily with their right hand and arm, because the recoil of the gun will injure their left chest and shoulder, rendering them ineffective potential infantrymen.

  The difference between left-handers and right-handers is more extreme than we realize. Even the diseases to which they are susceptible are different. Left-handers are more prone to develop autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. RHHMs are relatively protected from these afflictions, but are prone to develop more heart attacks and other vascular diseases.

  Leonardo was an accomplished musician, who learned to play the many instruments he designed, and also sang “divinely,” according to witnesses. This indicates a musical lobe in the great thinker’s brain. MRI scans of people listening to music who do not play music activates their right parietal lobe. If they are musicians who can play instruments by feel, but do not know how to read musical notation, then the right parietal and right frontal lobes activate. However, if they possess the skill to read music, the skill includes a marked shift to the left hemisphere. Music is clearly rooted in the right hemisphere—except reading musical notation, which is a left-brained function. Leonardo could do all three.

  For a composer to write the scores for the individual pieces of the orchestra, he or she needs the sequential, analytic left hemisphere. It is similar to solving a complex mathematical problem. Yet, we find that many of Leonardo’s works were composed in rebuses or symbolic puzzles. Talented composers, unlike the general public, possess large tracts of fibers connecting their left and right hemispheres. Or alternatively, they must have a brain that has more equally distributed language and music into each of the hemispheres. There is evidence that musicians are much more attuned to remote viewing than are nonmusicians. In one study, fifty music students from the Juilliard School were given several tasks to perform, all of which involved remote viewing. The students’ results topped the best results from the general population.

  The form of language that Leonardo used was highly metaphorical. He posed riddles and buried metaphors in his paintings. For this to occur, he had to have had a large connection of corpus callosum fibers between his right hemisphere and his left. The form of language based on metaphor—poetry, for instance—exists in the right hemisphere, even though language is primarily a left hemispheric function. To accomplish the task of the poet, a significant connection must exist between the parts of the right hemisphere, and, furthermore, there must be many interconnections between the two hemispheres. These fibers must be solidly welded to the language centers in the left hemisphere so that poetic metaphors can be expressed in language. Leonardo used the metaphor in his writings extensively—another example of connected hemispheres.

  Although he actively engaged in metaphoric phrasing that bordered on poetry, Leonardo considered poetry inferior to painting. He claimed that he was able to render in a single image the emotions that would take a poet pages of words to evoke. Whereas poetry is the mixture of right and left, images are perceived almost exclusively on the right. When we see something, we identify it with our right brain, and then we find the name for it with our left brain.

  Leonardo had all the characteristics of the brain that would allow for an increased sensibility to aesthetics, harmony, and creativity. They were present as the result of differences in the organization of the possibly gay, left-hander’s, musical, backward-writing, ambidextrous brain.

  And what are we to make of Leonardo’s determination, at some point, to live as a vegetarian? This was a time when falconry, hunting parties, and meat-laden festivals were the standard. Poor people who did not have access to meat longed for it; those who could afford it threw elaborate feasts where meat was the premier food on the menu. Leonardo did not choose to be a vegetarian for dietary reasons. Rather, he opposed the killing of any animal for the benefit of his digestion. He believed that plants did not have a nervous system and could not feel pain, but he felt that crabs, ducks, fish, and boars all experienced pain the same way he did.

  Leonardo’s stance was so exceptional for its time that a number of his associates commented on it. But Leonardo’s position on the interconnectedness of life on this planet resonated with the position held by a large number of mystics, gurus, shamans, and the Buddha, those who saw the world as one large interconnected community. These types were located in high concentrations in the East. In the West, where alphabets dominated, the type of thinking that would encourage the belief in interconnectedness was largely discouraged. Leonardo belonged to the small but exceptional group of Westerners who visualized the interconnectedness of all life.

  The left brain sees the world from a survivalist point of view. Everything is divided into “I” and “not-I.” The ego lives in the left hemisphere. The right brain sees the interconnections between all living things. Ordinarily, the right brain is suppressed by the left brain. Reading and writing an alphabet reinforces this attitude of us versus them, and inside versus the outside. Marshall McLuhan summed it up:

  We must once again accept and harmonize the perceptual biases of both [the left and right brain] and understand that for thousands of years the left hemisphere has suppressed the qualitative judgment of the right, and the human personality has suffered for it.

  Reading and writing encourage the growth of religions that glorify a Creator, instead of the awareness that the Creation is the manifestation of the Creator. Leonardo’s feeling of connection with all living things was the reason he practiced vegetarianism. His right brain must have had a larger influence on his consciousness than what is considered normal in a Western society.

  Leonardo painted the ceiling of the Sala delle Asse in the Sforzesco Castle in a most unusual manner. At first, it appears as a lush, covered herbiage with many vines competing with each other for space. Only after some real concentration does it become clear that the vines are not separate, but rather consist of one lengthy vine that only appears to interlace with itself. This drawing is a realistic portrayal of Leonardo’s worldview. He was putting forth in a complicated diagram what was for him a truth: All of life is interconnected.

  Four hundred years later, hardheaded, no-nonsense physicists would turn the physics community on its head when they issued mathematical proofs with the basic premise that the world was interconnected and that human consciousness had to be calculated into the equation. Butterflies flapping their wings do relate to hurricanes. Quantum theory and complexity theory (chaos theory) bear this out. When added to the fourth dimension, which includes the three vectors of space—height, length, and depth—and the three durations of time—past, present, and future—their conclusions challenge our common perceptions of reality.

  This was the idea that Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Bohm, Bell, and many others theorized, and what Puthoff and Targ established at SRI when they performed their remote-viewing experiments. Leonardo anticipated these insights. Leonardo’s brain was so complex that it had significant implications for the human species.

  Chapter 17

  Leonardo/Asynchrony

  In view of his uniqueness, it would seem that Leonardo blazed forth as a mutant, androgynous model of psychotechnical, right- and left-hemisphere integration. He passed on before he could be fully comprehended—even by himself.

  —José Argüell
es

  All evil leaves sadness in one’s memory, except the supreme evil, death, which destroys memory along with life.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  It takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make a unique self-conscious individual, and then he is good only for dying.

  —André Malraux

  Leonardo’s exceptional creativity resulted from his ability to access a different way to think. His ESSP-ness put him somewhere between the masculine and the feminine. His left-handedness, ambidexterity, and mirror writing were indications of a nondominant brain. His adherence to vegetarianism at a time when most everyone was eating meat suggests a holistic view of the world. The equality between his right and left hemispheres contributed to his achievements in art and science, unparalleled by any other individual in history. His unique brain wiring also allowed him the opportunity to experience the world from the vantage point of a higher dimension. The inexplicable wizardry present in both his art and his science can be pondered only by stepping back and asking: Did he have mental faculties that differed merely in degree, or did he experience a form of cognition qualitatively different from the rest of us?

  I propose that many of Leonardo’s successes (and failures) were the result of his gaining access to a higher consciousness. What kind of human at the turn of the fifteenth century would come up with two advanced versions of space (remote viewing) and time (predictive accuracy)?

  The Tigris passes through Asia Minor and brings with it the water of three lakes, one after the other, of various elevations: Munace, then Pallas, and the lowest, Triton. And the Nile again springs from the three very high lakes in Ethiopia, and runs northward, toward the sea of Egypt, with a course of four thousand miles, and by the shortest and straightest line it is three thousand miles. In his notebooks, Leonardo writes:

  The bosom of the Mediterranean, like a sea, received the principal waters of Africa, Asia, and Europe; for they were turned toward it and came with their waters to the base of the mountains which surrounded it and formed its banks. And the peaks of the Apennines stood up in this sea in the form of islands surrounded by salt water. Nor did Africa, behind its Atlas mountains, as yet reveal the earth of its great plains some three thousand miles in extent; . . . and above the plains of Italy where flocks of birds are flying today, fishes were once moving in great shoals.

  This is astonishing. The sources of the Nile had never been explored by Europeans, and were not known in Europe until they were discovered and described by John Speke in 1858. And yet 350 years earlier, it is described with reasonable accuracy by Leonardo. His stance on what occurred during prehistoric times could not have arrived via a traveler.

  I realize that what I’m about to make is a highly speculative claim, bordering on the “woo woo.” But, there are missing explanations for important events and facts that do not fit with our perception of quotidian reality. What follows are just a few of them.

  Rupert Sheldrake is an Oxford-trained biologist who has conducted ESP experiments on humans and animals. In his book The Sense of Being Stared At, he describes how his findings indicate that most people possess some degree of ESP. For example, in one simple experiment, he asked one of four people to call a target person at a specified time. None of the four knew which one of them was to make the call until an envelope was torn open in each of their respective houses. One individual out of the four was selected to make the call.

  When the phone began to ring, the person receiving the call would have to guess who was calling. The odds should have been one in four, or 25 percent correct guesses. Instead, there were some people who guessed correctly over 60 percent of the time. The results were not random, either. The relationship between the individuals strongly affected the outcome. Mothers and daughters had the closest connection. Distance did not matter in the least; some phone calls were made from as far away as New Zealand to Britain. The point of his experiment was that some individuals are endowed with an extrasensory perception that allows them to collapse space.

  Envisioning space in a manner that differs from the norm extends to another special group. What are we to make of mental abilities of certain chess masters who have been able to play multiple games of chess simultaneously while blindfolded, winning most or all of them? In Philadelphia in 1902, at the age of twenty-eight, Harry Pillsbury simultaneously played twenty opponents while blindfolded and defeated them all. He toured the United States, covering forty thousand miles, and demonstrated his skill at blindfolded, simultaneous chess games, leaving people to marvel at his amazing feat.

  Blindfolded chess masters have continued to baffle onlookers throughout the intervening years. In 1925 blindfolded Richard Réti played twenty-nine opponents simultaneously in Sao Paulo. After the exhibition, he left for home but forgot his suitcase. When somebody reminded him about it, Reti exclaimed, “Thank you very much. My memory is so bad . . .”

  Modern neuroscientists are unable to describe the mental process by which the blindfolded chess masters accomplished these feats. When the chess masters were asked how they could keep track of the multiple boards, most replied, if they could verbalize it at all, that they envisioned all the boards at once in their mind’s eye. In other words, they saw them holistically. If you or I were to attempt this tour de force, we would begin by trying to remember the configuration of all the boards in sequence. Within the first few moves this strategy would fail, and we would be unable to win or draw any game. We would be hard-pressed just to remember which board had what configuration.

  People possessed of Pillsbury’s and the other blindfolded chess masters’ skill envision space and time differently from the rest of us. And it is not just a matter of degree, but something more. How they accomplish this feat is unfathomable to the rest of us, who see the world in three dimensions of space and observe the linear passage of time.

  Autism is a form of congenital mental illness characterized by a child being “mindblind,” a phrase that indicates he or she is unable to empathize with others. Humans and other higher animals, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, possess something called “theory of mind.” We can often place ourselves into the mind of others and imagine how they are thinking or feeling. This gives humans and other higher mammals the ability to empathize and sympathize with the plight of others.

  Some autistic individuals on the end of the disability spectrum cannot do this. They tend to deal with objects more comfortably than with people. Outwardly, they seem to possess a very limited inner mental life, without much introspection or internal dialogue. High-functioning autistics can be cared for at home but require considerable attention. Severe cases must be institutionalized.

  On rare occasions among the population of autism sufferers, individuals appear who possess extraordinary mental talents. These autistic savants, as they are called, stump neuroscientists, who remain unsure how to explain their extraordinary abilities. Psychiatrist Darold Treffert in his book Extraordinary People has collected all the recorded cases of this phenomenon. He separates them into four different types: the lightening calculators; eidetic or photographic memorizers; those who have an uncanny musical memory; and the last and most rare, those possessed of artistic abilities that they could not have learned in the conventional way.

  Lightning calculators can tell you—in seconds—upon what day of the week May 10 of the year 3067 will fall. Eidetic memorizers can look at a page of print once and have it stay in their memory indefinitely. Those with the special musical talent can sit down and play any piece of music they have heard only once, and again, do so indefinitely. Kim Peek, the high-functioning autistic savant who served as the model for Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal in the movie Rain Man, can recite back any book he has read flawlessly and play any piece of music he has ever heard, without needing a score. Most interestingly, Kim Peek did not have a connection between his right brain and left brain—he was missing the corpus callosum.

  The last and most inexplicable form of autistic savants are thos
e rare individuals who can draw at a level of artistic refinement that typically only trained artists with years of experience are able to accomplish. The child, studied intensely by psychologist Lorna Selfe, was a young girl named Nadia who lived early in the twentieth century. Nadia began expressing her extraordinary talents at the age of three and half, and by age five, had moved on to produce artistic masterpieces that can compare to many of the drawings of the mature Leonardo. The interesting thing about Nadia was that she was mute when born. Her language skills were so primitive that she could only make crying sounds. She was taught language, and gradually, as her speech improved, her art deteriorated. By nine, she had lost the special skills she had exhibited from ages five to seven.

  In her prime as an artist, she could not talk intelligibly, made little eye contact, and was generally passive and disinterested. She was relatively helpless and needed assistance in the most basic human functions, such as dressing herself and tying her shoes. These extreme disabilities, however, fell away when she was provided with pen and paper. Left-handed, she could draw galloping horses with a rider in three-quarter views, using the correct perspective. No possible theoretical or other scientific explanation for how she could have acquired this skill exists. The acquisition of artistic skills proceed in time.

  Child psychologist Jean Piaget detailed how children acquire their perceptions of representational art. First, they draw stick figures; then, more details, such as hands and feet, are added. Then as they get older they make steady progress toward more sophisticated forms of drawing. Five-year-olds, for example, do not know how to draw a neck.

  Experienced artists take years to learn how to draw a person with the proper anatomical details in correct perspective. How was a five-year-old—a mentally dysfunctional child, in fact—able to draw this horse? Did she tap into a collective unconscious source of knowledge that only exists in the space-time continuum? Nadia presents a taxing mystery. Traffert speculates that she tapped into a form of space-time consciousness that was not available to the rest of us.