Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Because examples of the space-time consciousness and quantum nonlocality phenomenon violate causality and the limits of space and time, the left brain—and the scientific community—has dismissed these abilities as an anomaly. No one can explain them. Having lumped paranormal phenomena together with UFO sightings and the Shroud of Turin, most scientists assure themselves that the phenomena do not exist. They feel more comfortable working within the confines of science, preferring to focus their attention on what can be proven. Yet, there are too many examples in our culture of abilities that defy our supposed rational world. Sooner or later we will have to let them in.

  When pondering Leonardo’s brain we must ask the question: Did his brain perhaps represent a jump toward the future of man? Are we as a species moving toward an appreciation of space-time and nonlocality?

  There are other questions that we must ponder. Why do we have such an advanced brain that grew so fast compared to all the other animals? Why is it the only one that is divided? Why are we the only animal that assumes an erect position when all the other animals do not? Why are we alone among the primates in our loss of fur?

  Why are there left-handers?

  Why are we capable of killing each other?

  In response to these questions, perhaps Leonardo’s solitary presence is but a single link in the immense drama of the ongoing evolution of our species.

  Chapter 18

  Evolution/Extinction

  It will seem as though nature should extinguish the human race, for it will be useless to the world and will bring destruction to all created things.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  When the universe has crushed him, man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows he is dying, and of its victory, the universe knows nothing.

  —Blaise Pascal

  That brings up again the eternal question: Is the whole world of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that in this side of death we see with one hemisphere only?

  —Vincent van Gogh

  We are in a transitional stage of evolution. A theory called the anthropic principle attempts to delineate this. Generally, scientists are reluctant to discuss this principle because it replaces the randomness of the development of the universe with a hidden purpose. Eight mathematical constants exist in this universe. No one understands why they are constants. Newton’s gravity constant, the speed of light (always 186,000 miles per second), the planck constant, and five other abstruse mathematical phenomena make up the list. If there were any variations of even a trillionth of difference one way or the other, then atoms could not form into the stable elements they are, and stars would be unable to generate heat and light. Molecules could not link to form atoms, and the chain of advances culminating in consciousness would never have occurred.

  Quantum physicist Hugh Everett proposed that one of the implications of quantum theory is the presence of parallel universes. Why, some scientists ask, do we occupy a universe that just so happens to make it possible for us to ask the question, Why are we here? Why do we have a brain that seems so large, so overly complicated, and so much more advanced than what was needed to survive on the savanna?

  There have been enormous advances in identifying where in the brain the specific areas dedicated to various tasks are located, yet the search for the center of consciousness has eluded them. We have evolved to the point where we can look around and look back and ask Why? Emerging from living matter comes a new property: the ability to reflect on the universe.

  In his book The Fourth Dimension, scientist and philosopher Rudy Rucker put it nicely:

  I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone: the Mind is everywhere.

  Given how extraordinary each of these evolutionary steps has been, can human imagination conjure what the next step might be? How about all those evangelicals who are convinced the human species is going to hell in a handcart, or that the end of the world is nigh, and that when Jesus reappears on Earth, Armageddon will occur and the sinful and nonbelievers will disappear down a rabbit hole, at the bottom of which is a Boschian nightmare?

  Islamic revolutionaries sacrifice their lives because they believe they will be greeted by seventy-two virgins in paradise. Some Orthodox Jews want to dress in the same outfits that the Orthodox wore in the Middle Ages. Centuries ago, Shakespeare brought uncertainty to orthodoxy when he had Hamlet admonish his closest friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Supposing a modern pollster had canvassed the people of Europe at the end of the fourteenth century concerning their expectations for the new century. The fourteenth century had been one of the most dreadful centuries of Western civilization. Europe was marred by the Hundred Years War and pummeled by three successive waves of the bubonic plague that decimated the population by over a third. Very few significant social, political, religious, or scientific advances had the opportunity to make their mark.

  An aura of pessimism hung like the pall of smoke rising from pillaged villages dotting the European landscape. Reading how contemporary writers assessed the future, one thing becomes clear: Not a single chronicler, historian, courtier, nobleman, philosopher, or artist understood that the Renaissance was just beginning to blossom. Or that it would transform society.

  Similarly, in the 1790s, Europe was facing its first energy crises. The main fuel at the time was firewood, but the readily accessible great stands of trees had been felled, and axmen had to venture farther away from the population centers into the forests to locate adequate supplies. This made the cost increasingly expensive.

  Not one of the Enlightenment’s great thinkers anticipated that the most revolutionary social transformation of human society since the crossover from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture thousands of years earlier was about to begin. Coal was about to fuel Bessemer furnaces and fire the factories that would reconfigure the landscape of Europe. Mass migration of populations from farms to cities began. No one alive in the 1790s anticipated that the Industrial Revolution was beginning.

  The physicists of the fin de siècle were confident that all they had to do was to solve the two central problems in physics, both of which pertained to properties of light. Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetism in the 1820s ended with the Clerk Maxwell equations mathematically working out the relationships in 1876. This spanned a supremely creative period involving many different physicists from every country in Europe, and across the Atlantic in America. American physicist Albert A. Michelson announced triumphantly in the late nineteenth century, “The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”

  But there remained two puzzling problems concerning light. The distinguished Lord Kelvin delivered a speech at the end of the century in which he predicted the solution to these two minor problems would come soon. Physicists could then proudly close the book on physics just as anatomists had done on anatomy several hundred years earlier. After such an intense creative period, they planned “mopping up” maneuvers that could be used to arrange the new discoveries more tidily.

  No art critic or physicist alive at that time had any inkling that both their worlds were about to be turned topsy-turvy. The new art movements in the opening decades of the twentieth century—Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism—put to rest any talk about the wellsprings of creativity going dry. Physicists were stunned to discover that two entirely new branches of physics, relativity and quantum, both arising from those two unanswered questions, were revolutionizing their fields. The balance of logic was shifting to combination thinking. Long ago Aristotle had proclaimed what would become a lodestone of rational belief: If A is A it cannot be B.

  Well, maybe, said the quantum and relativity physicists. Perhap
s A and B combined to form a both/and entity instead of an either/or one. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf, in paraphrasing Shakespeare, nailed it: “To be or not to be is not the question; it is the answer.”

  Here we sit at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and once again the future can only be seen through a glass darkly. What chutzpah to think we can knowingly anticipate what is next. I believe we should sit back and enjoy the unfolding of a story about which we haven’t a clue as to the ending.

  Let us review the sixteen unanticipated steps up the ladder:

  1. The Big Bang—something out of nothing

  2. Atoms—stability out of chaos

  3. Stars—conglomerations of zillions of tiny motes forming gigantic entities

  4. Galaxies—star organization

  5. Hydrogen fusion—light where there had been darkness

  6. The beginning of the periodic table—elements created in the internal heat of stars from the fusion of hydrogen into carbon, nitrogen, etc.

  7. Supernovas—exploding stars creating the heavy elements above iron

  8. Molecules—atoms so configured that they conveniently begin combining with other atoms

  9. Water—a combination of two improbable atoms, hydrogen and oxygen

  10. Self-replicating molecules—DNA, the building block of life

  11. Cells—highly organized molecules arranged in a division of labor

  12. Organisms—cells joining to cooperate to make ever more complex organisms

  13. Sex and death—revolutionized the process of evolution

  14. Meta-qualities unexpectedly emerging from life—sentience, alertness, consciousness, and self-aware consciousness

  15. Language—the first entity that did not need a carbon-based benzene ring

  16. The splitting of the human brain into functionally different lobes, generating the first example of Mind—the ability to reflect on the meaning of it all

  The two central questions that continue to generate awe are: How did life emerge out of inert matter, and how did consciousness emerge to contemplate these questions. Current complexity theory (formerly known as chaos theory) explains how order can emerge from disorder—how the “impossibilities” occurred.

  If we take the long view, the division of our lobes and the dominance of the left brain over the right may be but a stage in the development of thought. Perhaps this was a necessary stage to pass through to develop language and the skill to complete complex serial actions. Mysteries remain. Our brain is three times as large as we would expect for a primate of our build. David Premack wonders at the “missing links,” remarking that “Nature provides no intermediate language, nothing between the lowly call system and the towering human language.”

  Sophocles once warned, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” There can be little dispute that in terms of survival of the fittest, the adaptation of human language was the most significant event to have occurred in the evolution of life . . . so far. No other life form has used it to investigate the origin of the very adaptation it has acquired. Insects can signal, some animals can inform, but only a human, thanks to language, can ask a question and, further, dispute the answer.

  But what is the curse that accompanied this vast expansion? Is the dedication of opposite lobes to a coordinate—space (right brain) and time (left brain)—a factor that is now preventing humans from achieving a space-time awareness? Has the vaunted language fluidity of the left hemisphere become an obstacle to accessing a different form of consciousness?

  Alfred North Whitehead affirmed this view:

  The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout centuries is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

  Here, then, is both the majesty and the tyranny of language. The ability to describe reality reveals a weakness in the scheme: the propensity to objectify. By having an entire cerebral lobe wired for processing linear language, we have inadvertently torn ourselves free from the matrix of nature. Humans gained enough distance from this matrix to look back upon it and decide that we were no longer part of it. Unity cracked and duality emerged. We are “here” and nature is “there.” But new information has upended the idea that there is a “there.”

  With the discovery of quantum mechanics, physicist John Wheeler summarized what mankind should understand, “There is no out there out there.” We gained objectivity but lost our sense of connectedness to the universe. We are presently embarked on a massive destruction of nature because we cannot visualize our role in it. Werner Heisenberg identified the problem thus,

  In classical physics, science started from the belief—or should one say, from the illusion?—that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.

  The objective stance resides in the power of naming. In the Bible, God first taught Adam to name. He did not attempt to teach Adam how to make a fire, which would have been more practical. (The Greeks opted for fire, as the Prometheus myth implies.) Instead, God made Adam name all the animals, thus gaining control over them. That is what naming does—confers control.

  The universe is itself a marvelous thing, and to have a consciousness that can perceive the universe, an amazement. Might it be possible that the ultimate purpose of life was to develop an organism that could see the universe?

  According to Wheeler, Mind and Universe are inextricably integrated. The Talmud expresses this subtle relationship in an apocryphal story of a dialogue between God and Abraham. God begins by chiding Abraham, “If it wasn’t for Me, you wouldn’t exist.” After a moment of reflection, Abraham respectfully replies, “Yes, Lord, and for that I am very appreciative and grateful. However, if it wasn’t for me, You wouldn’t be known.”

  The ability to accomplish this feat, however, would disappear tomorrow if our brains had not split into two, able to construct the notions of extensible space and linear time. The former creates the illusion that every “thing” occupies its own place, and as Euclid declared, that two points cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. But the minutest particles are an exception to this commonly held belief. As Werner Heisenberg reminds us of the inherent strangeness of quantum physics:

  [Atoms] are no longer things in the sense of classical physics, things which could be unambiguously described by concepts like location, velocity, energy, size. When we get down to the atomic level, the objective world in space and time no longer exists.

  Linear time creates the complementary illusion that events progress along a moving conveyor belt that begins in the past, appears for an instant in an evanescent present, and then continues into the impenetrable mists of a future that has not yet occurred.

  These two mental fictions are the direct result of the arrangement of the human hemispheric specialization, left and right brains. This arrangement served us exceedingly well in our long days in the Ice Age, but it has deceived us into believing that we are confined within a theater, watching a play. Fidgeting in our seats, many of us are troubled by the knowledge that something very large but nebulous remains hidden from view. Nevertheless, so convincing are the players and objects before us that most scientific materialists claim that the play is all that there is. Despite advanced and logical arguments, a considerable number of people continue to have a disquieting certainty that a larger stage exists behind the visible one. Albert Einstein held this view:

  It is very difficult to elucidate this [cosmic religious] feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. . . . The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by the kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma. . . . In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

  The splitting of the right brain from the left brain was a great boon. It created in the mind of early humans the axis of spac
e and the abscissa of time. We plot the “real” world on this graph. Despite the many exceedingly intelligent animals that populate the planet—dolphins, dogs, whales, and chimpanzees, for example—not one among them can maneuver in the dimension of time to the extent humans can.

  The brain’s division of space from time and right from left sets the conditions for the emergence of logical thinking based on cause-and-effect reasoning, which in turn is dependent on language. The addition of writing and reading accentuated the process. So huge was this advantage for humans that the left brain, the seat of reason and verbal communication, gained considerable power over the more primitive, mystical right brain. The ego’s throne room is located in the left brain, where it remains arrogantly certain that it controls events. Because of its subservient position in the right brain, its lack of language to express itself, and its control over the clumsy hand rather than the accomplished one, the id has difficulty getting the respect it deserves. Yet, this may be simply a stage in evolution.

  The life span of a higher species varies between 1,000,000 to 1,200,000 years, before it either experiences extinction or transitions into a new species. Homo sapiens are 150,000 years old, which means we are approximately twelve to fifteen years old in the life span of a species. This is about right. We are becoming stronger, and are capable of harming one another in a more deadly fashion. Yet, we are becoming more aware of our strength and the desire to restrain it. This is also the age when puberty begins and we have a rapid change in our physiology.