Humankind Advancing, Vol.2, No.4 October 1991

Theme: FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF NEUROSCIENCE


CONTENTS

Editorial

Initial Quotes
Quote from Sperry
Quote from Gore
Quote from Sperry

Three Pioneers
David Hubel -- [Nobel Lecture; discussion]
Hubel and Wiesel -- [Inter-species differences in brain construction and function; discussion]
Thorsten Wiesel -- [Nobel Lecture; discussion]
Quote from NCL
Roger Sperry -- [Nobel Lecture; discussion]
Quote from Milner
The Concept of Emergence

Into New Territory
Sperry on Consciousness
Quote from Freeman
Gerald Edelmann -- [Brain events implicated in thinking; discussion]

Reflections

Acknowledgments

References


Editorial

After his guest lecture at the California Institute for Technology a few years ago, Nobel Laureate James Watson, the co-discoverer (with Francis Crick) of the intricate structure of the DNA molecule and author of The Double Helix, was asked by a young listener: "If you were a student entering university and trying to decide on a field in which you had the greatest chance to make fundamental discoveries, discoveries with the impact of those you have made, which field would you choose?"

"The brain -- how we think," Watson answered at once.

The speed and conviction of the answer was even more impressive than its content. Watson apparently spoke about something that had occupied his own thought for a long time.

And why is the brain so important?

Because our human future and the future of our earth depend on its performance.

More knowledge about how we think, and why we think as we do, may prevent hopeless efforts in the solution of our problems that would lead only into dead ends. It may shed light on how to find more adaptive ways of thinking, and how to achieve genuine progress toward a desirable and sustainable, quality of life.

As part of a constant search for an adequate perception of reality to guide us, the theme of human advance will this time be treated from the perspective of neuroscience.

The present issue does not attempt to present an overview of the most recent discoveries in neuroscience. The field is in a constant flux, and new discoveries tomorrow may contradict those of today or present them in a different light.

Concentration is directed rather on the flow itself, on the dedication and excitement of pioneers and their co-workers, who succeeded in establishing well-winnowed constants that have weathered the storm of critical counterattacks and have remained valid in spite of innumerable experiments to disprove them.

Though many of the most well-known turning points in brain science had to be left out, it is hoped that the material presented will permit tantalizing glimpses into the mystery of the field, arouse interest in students, and attract the genius-to-be.

The fascination of this special field of study does not lie only in the complexity and the many hidden secrets of the brain itself, it lies most of all in the products of the brain -- the experiences, thoughts, emotions, and insights responsible for our history and our culture. Many brain specialists -- but not all of them -- are satisfied to concentrate on the brain-part of the mind-brain relation; it already seems to provide ample work and never-ending surprises for more than an entire lifetime.

Those dissatisfied with this approach argue that the brain is of interest only because its knowledge throws additional light on our major problems and is essential to their solution.

Both of these points of view will receive attention.


Initial Quotes

Interest in the problem of the mind-brain relationship extends far beyond the immediate concerns of neurology and psychology. Inability to comprehend the essence of mind has been a major obstacle to the progress of philosophy throughout its history. Questions such as those concerning scientific truth, the nature of reality, and the place of man in the cosmos require for their study some knowledge of the constitution, quality, capacity, and limitations of the human mind, through which medium all such problems must be handled. Much of man's religious dogma and his moral and even legal codes are deeply influenced in the final analysis by mind-matter concepts. It was the broad significance of the problem as much as the difficulty of reaching a solution that prompted William James to declare that the attainment of a genuine glimpse into the mind-brain relation would constitute "the scientific achievement before which all past achievements would pale."

Roger Sperry, 1952

* * * * *
We are the difference. For the first time since life on earth began four billion years ago, a living organism can begin to understand what is happening to this planet. We can see that the health of species is interconnected, that if we let too many disappear, we will go too. For the first time, a living organism can consciously do something to halt mass extinction. Perhaps most important, for the first time a living creature can gaze out across the species of the earth and say: This is beautiful. I care. I will not let it go.

Rick Gore, Asst. Editor, National Geographic

* * * * *
Many people fail to see how a "save the world" strategy derives from a concept of consciousness in relation to brain physiology. The answer, put very simply, goes as follows: The fate of the biosphere will depend on human value priorities, which will depend upon assumptions about human life and its meaning--which the new theory modifies in critical ways. The new view of consciousness [see "Sperry on Consciousness," below] radically revises the kinds of beliefs upheld in science about ourselves and the world, with conceptual impacts that reach deeply into religion, science, philosophy, and social priorities in general.

Consciousness pervades nearly all aspects of the human enterprise. Everything ever known or felt, seen, heard, believed, imagined, or experienced in any form has to be processed through this universal medium, the conscious mind. Conveyer of all our values, our sense of purpose and meaning, of right and wrong, of beauty, joy, and so on, consciousness is central to all that matters most in life. Any basic revision in its conception, therefore, or in its role, or how it relates to the physical brain or to outside reality is bound to produce sweeping reverberations. An implied answer, for example, to just the one question, "Is consciousness mortal or immortal?" would have repercussions in all dimensions or levels of the social structure.

Roger Sperry, 1991


THREE PIONEERS

In 1981, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was shared by three pioneers in neuroscience. The following reports about their work are based on their Nobel Lectures, delivered in Stockholm on Dec. 8 of that year.

David H. Hubel

[Discussion, based on his Nobel Lecture]

Breakthrough discoveries of the way vision works were achieved by David H. Hubel and Thorsten N. Wiesel together. Their cooperation must have been an exceptional accomplishment, worthy of the prize itself. After explaining that he cherishes science for several reasons, but "above all the rare moments in which some apparently isolated facts click into place like a Chinese puzzle," Hubel writes: "When a collaboration works, as ours has, the ideas and the clicking into place often occur simultaneously; usually neither of us has known (or cared about) which of us originally produced an idea, and sometimes an idea occurred to one of us, only to be forgotten and later resurrected by the other." (P.522)

In their Nobel Lectures, each of the scientists treats a different aspect of their common work. Hubel, who was an accomplished specialist in single-cell recording already before his collaboration with his fellow discoverer, treats the initial exploration of the primary visual cortex -- the region where signals from the eye reach the cortex first.

Single-cell recording enables the researcher to pick up the activity of one single nerve cell in the brain and to register how it changes in response to external input, that is, how it reacts to stimuli from the environment. Hubel had activated cells with moving spots on a screen, and his work with Wiesel was of similar nature, but resulted in new and unexpected knowledge.

"Our first real discovery" Hubel says, "came about as a surprise. We had been doing experiments for about a month....and were not getting very far; the cells simply would not respond to our spots and annuli. One day, we made an especially stable recording.... and by the end we had a very different feeling about what the cortex might be doing. For 3 or 4 hours we got absolutely nowhere. Then gradually we began to elicit some vague and inconsistent responses by stimulating somewhere in the midperiphery of the retina. We were inserting the glass slide with its black spot into the slot of the ophthalmoscope when suddenly over the audiomonitor the cell went off like a machine gun. After some fussing and fiddling we found out what was happening. The response had nothing to do with the black dot. As the glass slide was inserted, its edge was casting on the retina a faint but sharp shadow, a straight dark line on a light background. That was what the cell wanted, and it wanted it, moreover, in just one narrow range of orientations.

This was unheard of. It is hard now to think back and realize just how free we were from any idea of what cortical cells might be doing in an animals daily life." (Pp.516/517)

What Hubel and Wiesel had discovered was the incredible specificity of cell reaction; the amount of discrimination that takes place already at the rudiments of perception. Had no other investigators seen such an event, or had they seen it and passed it over as irrelevant to the aims they were pursuing? It takes an unusual degree of open-mindedness to correctly interpret an unexpected event, an event for which the investigators' mindset is not prepared, or for which it is even counter-prepared. (The latter problem is so common, that breakthrough-solutions are often found by young beginners or the uninitiated rather than by specialists with many years of experience.)

Further investigations led both men to the discovery that often cells do not only "want" lines of specific orientations, but also of a certain limited length. Sometimes no response at all could be elicited, just because a correctly oriented line was too long.

Moreover, it was found that as several "simple [primary] cells" converged on one "complex [secondary] cell" farther ahead in the visual pathway, the result was that the latter seemed to be already sensitive to the rudiments of an idea. For instance, a simple cell would respond only to a certain stimulus at a certain location in the visual field. For a complex cell, the location of that stimulus was irrelevant. Thus, while a simple cell signaled the observance of a concrete fact, the complex cell abstracted the (to the animal) most relevant aspects of that fact only. Hubel interpreted this phenomenon as combined input of several simple cells, each of which was sensitive to a different location of the specific stimulus in the visual field, into one complex cell. Concept formation, thus, can be understood as a basic function of the entire nervous system, becoming more sophisticated at every point of cell convergence.

In spite of Hubel's remarkable discoveries in the field of single-cell recording he warned that not too much should be expected of single cells, and that large systems of such cells are needed for perception to occur.

Therefore, the thorough investigators added experiments in anatomy to their work, as well as the study of the development of visual system specificity early in an animals' life (about which Wiesel will report).

- - -
But first let us have a quick glimpse into the fascinating world of inter-species differences in brain construction and function.

As may be known to most readers, the motor system in the brain of the frog reacts directly and immediately -- jutting out the animal's tongue -- to a moving curved black object perceived by the visual system. The frog must act that way. Even if the tongue hits a sharp object instead of the expected delicious bug, it is tossed out again and again. The frog is the slave of a nervous system that has no arrangements for choice in the matter. --

HUBEL and WIESEL worked with cats. In cats, the decision to act upon visual input is made in the cortex; in frogs it occurs already in the retina. "At first glance it might seem astonishing" the investigators explain, "that the complexity of third-order neurones in the frog's visual system should be equalled only by that of sixth-order neurones in the geniculo-cortical pathway [nerve-bundel in the brain containing nerves from the eye] of the cat. Yet this is less surprising if one notes the great anatomical differences in the two animals, especially the lack, in the frog, of any cortex or dorsal lateral geniculate body [nerve-bundel in the brain specific for mammals, but not amphibians]. There is undoubtedly a parallel difference in the use each animal makes of its visual system: the frog's visual apparatus is presumably specialized to recognize a limited number of stereotyped patterns or situations, compared with the high acuity and versatility found in the cat. Probably, it is not so unreasonable to find that in the cat the specialization of cells for complex operations is postponed to a higher level, and that when it does occur, it is carried out by a vast number of cells and in great detail." (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962, p. 150)

During the process of evolution, each advance in neural construction provided for more and better choices; it decreased slavery to innate action patterns, and increased the organism's freedom. With the perfection of memory and learning, entire new worlds were opened, never existing before. -- Let us now turn to these.

Torsten N. Wiesel

[Discussion, based on his Nobel Lecture]

Does experience actually change the structure of the brain? -- And if so, how?

It is Wiesel's Nobel Lecture that describes the experiments both investigators performed in this fascinating field of inquiry. Ingenious use was made -- with results that illuminated one another -- of parallel experimentation (under different environmental conditions) in two fields: neuronal development, and behaviour correlated with it. Specifically, the effect of visual input -- or lack of it -- shortly after birth was studied. First, the experimenters worked with kittens, but because the eyes of these little critters are closed after birth anyway for over a week, newborn monkeys, who are visually alert from day one, were found to provide more relevant information.

It was discovered that, if one eye is unused during a "critical period" after birth, different for each species, inactivated nerve cells in the brain -- rather than becoming unresponsive -- shift allegiance from the unused to the active eye. The nerve cell columns in the cortex with connections to the covered eye considerably diminished in width, and the available space was taken over by competing neighboring columns, the cells of which branched out vigorously. If both eyes are unused, cell column shrinking is less pronounced, and cells of each of the eyes still react to individual visual input (though integration of that input is severely impaired). Cells involved in more complex tasks higher up in the visual pathway seem to be more sensitive to lack of use and may cease to respond completely.

"We have learned," Wiesel says, "that competition and synchronization of inputs are important factors in forming and maintaining [a needed] balance. If these processes are disturbed early in life, the system can be permanently altered."

The effect is most dramatic during the very first weeks after birth (during which even a few days of blindness lead to substantial changes) and declines during the end of the critical period, which lasts in cats about three to four months, in monkeys about 1 to 2 years, and in humans five to ten years (reflecting proportions of environment-dependent brain growth). The occlusion of vision at any time thereafter -- when the nervous system's basic connections are completed -- does not have lasting effects, but can be reversed.

Fully realizing the implications of these discoveries, Wiesel concludes: "Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development....neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development. We have studied this process in detail in one set of functional properties in the nervous system, but it may well be that other aspects of brain function, such as language, complex perceptual tasks, learning, memory, and personality, have different programmes of development. Such sensitivity of the nervous system to the effects of experience may represent the fundamental mechanism by which the organism adapts to its environment during the period of growth and development."

- - -
Countless questions arise. For instance: can one-sided concentration on efforts to raise a child's intelligence quota be overdone to the detriment of his or her character development?

"Character starts developing at birth, and develops most rapidly during the period of 18-30 months of age, normally stabilizing at age 10."

NCL (National Character Laboratory, Inc.)

A.J. Stuart, Jr., President, 4635 Leeds Ave., El Paso, TX 79903, U.S.A., will provide more details on request.


Roger W. Sperry

[Discussion of his Nobel Lecture]

Roger W. Sperry, who received his prize for new and extraordinary insights into the working of the human brain, overturned the previous belief that the right hemisphere of the brain is inferior to the left. Though talking, reading, and fine manual manipulation are governed by the left half of the cerebral cortex (and are severely impaired through a stroke or injury on that side), there is no reason to believe that thinking is therefore absent. In fact, Sperry's careful and ingenious tests proved that the right half of the brain has unsuspected abilities and is in several important fields even superior to the left.

Beginning his Nobel Lecture with a statement of general beliefs preceding his discoveries, he continues, "It thus came as a considerable surprise in the early 1960's, when tests on commissurotomy or `split-brain' patients seemed to indicate the presence in the right, so-called `minor' hemisphere of a considerable capacity for cognitive understanding and the comprehension of language, both written and spoken." (P.1223) (The patients Sperry tested had undergone a successful operation -- conducted by Drs. Bogen and Vogel -- to relieve them of severe epilepsy which did not respond to any other treatment. A large nerve fiber bundle connecting both halves of the brain's cortex, the corpus callosum, had been completely sectioned.)

Although the patients were during their normal daily lives, when both sides of the brain received the same input, indistinguishable from other persons, Sperry found that occlusion of input to one half of the brain would establish a different and separated memory-world. "Each brain half...seemed to have its own largely separate cognitive domain with its own private perceptual, learning, and memory experiences, all of which were seemingly oblivious to corresponding events in the other hemisphere. Although the basic hemisphere deconnection syndrome in man proved to be essentially similar to that worked out earlier in cats and monkeys, its manifestation was much more dramatic in the human subjects. The speaking hemisphere in these patients could tell us directly in its own words that it knew nothing of the inner experience involved in test performances correctly carried out by the mute partner hemisphere." (P.1224)

Discovered superiority of the brain's right half included "intermodal spatial transformations from three-dimensional to unfolded, two-dimensional forms" and many other intricate spatial tasks. Remarkable, furthermore, was the right-hemisphere's all-at-once grasp of phenomena for which analytical methods were useless, such as the recognition of faces.

Sperry freely acknowledges the contributions of his favourite graduate student, Jerre Levy, who conducted studies designed specifically to investigate the right brain's unknown capabilities, and who proposed that "left and right hemispheres are characterized by inbuilt, qualitatively different and mutually antagonistic modes of cognitive processing, the left being basically analytic and sequential, the right spatial and synthetic." (P.1224)

Brain asymmetry has functional advantages; each method of thinking is superior for a different task. One mode of thought did therefore not supplant the other. But to avoid interference with one another, each needs a separate space of its own.

When a person born without a corpus callosum was tested, for instance, it was found that both halves were adequate in language and verbal facility, but unable to work well in such fields as geometry and geography -- specialties of the right hemisphere. Language on the right side was acquired at the expense of that side's normal functions.

The impact of Sperry's studies was enormous. Not only the scientific community was excited world-wide, but the general population, too, grasped the idea of formerly unknown superior modes of thinking in the silent half of the brain as something extra-ordinary. Books and articles on the subject mushroomed, both, scientific or semipopular and speculative. "Left-brained" and "right-brained" quickly became household words, and Sperry was celebrated as a liberator from what many perceived as analytical-thought tyranny.

He, however, remained remarkably unaffected. His Noble Lecture does not contain a single word about the most exciting projections: the implication of the right side of the brain in such fundamentally important human experiences as values and religion. Instead, he calls for caution. "The left-right dichotomy in cognitive mode is an idea with which it is easy to run wild. Qualitative shifts in mental control may involve up-down, front-back, or various other organizational changes as well as left-right differences." (P.1225)

That does in no way mean that Sperry is uninterested in values or religion. On the contrary, he does not cease to emphasize the tremendous importance of values in world affairs. In fact, for over a decade now he has turned his entire work in science -- the work that brought him to the zenith -- over to other investigators to concentrate on what he sees as the most important task: to bring about the acceptance of values that would leave our earth a habitable planet for our descendants.

- - -
But before we turn to the neuroscientist's philosophical thoughts, let us have a glance at his earlier achievements in the development of the brain. Many experts consider his breakthroughs in that field even more important than his later split-brain work. There is a good chance to find reference to them in any textbook in the field, opened at random.

For instance, when I just did that, I found that Professor MILNER wrote in Physiological Psychology, p.460 "Nowhere in the body does the effect of neighboring cells seem so important as in the nervous system. Not only do neurons and glial cells coexist in symbiotic relationship, each providing substances necessary for the proper development of the other, but each nerve also grows under the influence of others, especially those with which it will eventually synapse. When an axonal branch finally reaches its target and establishes a synaptic connection, its growth ceases, and changes in the membranes of both cells take place at the point of contact. Sperry (1944, 1948, 1963), in a very elegant series of experiments, showed that the course of axonal growth was very accurately determined..."

The Concept of Emergence:

A full understanding of the concept of emergence is fundamental to the grasp of Sperry's view of consciousness, described on the following pages. Emergence is a vital aspect of the process of evolution, and it occurs throughout the universe, wherever natural forces interact.

R.F. Thompson explains on pp. 8/9 of his Foundations of Physiological Psychology (1967) -- where I first encountered the concept -- that "if a number of elements are combined into a complex system, the system often exhibits properties not exhibited by the elements themselves. Such phenomena are sometimes termed emergent properties." As an example, Thompson cites the combination of hydrogen and oxygen to form water and adds that in the earlier days of chemistry such (and other simple) properties could not be predicted [which surrounded the concept with mysticism and led to its rejection in science], while "present-day physics and chemistry, for example, can develop accurate theoretical predictions about the characteristics of water from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, and a knowledge of the manner in which they interconnect and interact with one another when they form water."


INTO NEW TERRITORY

Sperry on Consciousness

Milner's description of Sperry's achievements referred to an area in which the latter had started his investigations more than half a century ago. In the meantime Sperry has become deeply dissatisfied with the attitude of mainstream-neuroscientists who concentrate on objectively observable events alone and ignore, on principle, the most astonishing and magnificent product of the brain: subjective experience, or consciousness.

In 1969, Sperry published a provoking paper, "A Modified Concept of Consciousness," in which he described consciousness not as a result of the neuronal activity commonly studied, but as a higher-order emergent of events in the brain we do not yet fully know or understand. Moreover, he maintained that subjective experience directly influences brain function -- that is, that the firing at the nerve cell level differs depending on whether consciousness of an event is present or absent. It is therefore a distortion of reality, he believes, to speak of events in the brain only in the language of neuroscience. What we do, and what our brain directs us to do, occurs because of our power to think and feel and love and hate.

In Sperry's own words: "Compared to the elemental physiological and molecular properties, the conscious properties of the brain process are more molar and holistic in nature. They encompass and transcend the details of nerve impulse traffic in the cerebral networks in the same way that the properties of the organism transcend the properties of the cell, or the properties of the molecule transcend the properties of its atomic components, and so on. Just as the holistic properties of the organism have causal effects that determine the course and fate of its constituent cells and molecules, so in the same way, the conscious properties of cerebral activity are conceived to have analogous causal effects in brain function that control subset events in the flow pattern of neural excitation. In this holistic sense the present proposal may be said to place mind over matter, but not as any disembodied or supernatural agent."

With arguments like these, Sperry succeeded to bridge the fatal gap between science and the humanities. To believe in the importance of values did not anymore imply that science was rejected; to believe in the validity of science did not anymore mean that values were irrelevant.

At first, Sperry's views were generally rejected; but within ten years, the entire field of psychology and the behavioral sciences had switched from an area in which the word "consciousness" was taboo to one in which it became a much-used topic for research. Even the hard sciences are now admitting that "an adequate brain theory cannot be formulated without incorporating a model of consciousness," that consciousness helps direct neural activity in the brain, and that it cannot be treated adequately without taking account of philosophy and metaphysics. (Edelman, 1989, pp. 10, 12, 257-260).

* * * * *
Consciousness...enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input and perceptual synthesis. In short, the act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stimulus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change it to their own advantage.

W.J. Freeman, 1991

===================================
Gerald M. Edelman

[Discussion of brain events implicated in thinking]

Edelman describes thinking as the result of three basic mechanisms: Developmental selection, experiential selection, and reentrant mapping. (P.43).

Developmental selection occurs through genetically determined neuronal connections which increase the chances for survival and production of offspring in a given specific environment. (Sperry's early work -- on amphibians -- threw important new light on the intricacies of developmental selection.)

Experiental selection presupposes the development of a nervous system able to be affected by experience. "At the level of their finest connectivity," Edelman says," rich nervous systems like those of vertebrates cannot have precise, prespecified, point-to-point wiring and...in general, uniquely specific connections do not exist." (Pp.41) -- It is at this point on the evolutionary scale that experience actually determines part of the brain's structure.

Edelman differentiates memory (perceptual categorization) from learning, which is an additional feature. "In an environment containing unforeseen juxtapositions of events that may affect survival," he maintains, "it is learning, not just perceptual categorization, that ensures successful adaptation." (P.56). -- What a given creature is able to learn, differs of course from species to species and depends upon its brain's structural and functional specifities -- the features evolved for its survival so far. (P.57)

Reentrant mapping, a concept introduced by Edelman, refers to the correlation of groups of nerve cells in different regions of the brain, each of which is receiving disparate input. Such reentrant mapping provides the basis of perceptual organization. (P.45). -- Edelman explains that mapped regions exchange signals by reentry, which is "a process of temporally ongoing parallel signaling between separate maps along ordered anatomical connections." (P.49). -- In other words, different sense impressions must be coordinated with each other and with memory to make an experience meaningful.

Why? "The world of stimuli available to a newborn animal does not exist as prior information simply to be manipulated according to a set of rules, similar to those followed by a computer executing a program. While the real stimulus world obviously obeys the laws of physics, it is not uniquely partitioned into "objects" and "events." An organism must contain or create adaptive criteria to develop information allowing such a partition. Until a particular individual in a particular species categorizes it in an adaptive fashion, the world is an unlabeled place in which novelty is frequently encountered." (P.40)

Reentrant signaling, thus, serves to make sense out of an otherwise intrinsically meaningless creation. It produces a kind of memory that is continually updated and reorganized through learning and ongoing present experience, a process resulting in consciousness (p.93).

Without consciousness, events dominate. Consciousness directs attention to those events that serve an animal's adaptive needs. It provides "means of freeing animal behavior from the tyranny of ongoing events" -- for short periods if primary consciousness is involved, for a far wider range in the case of higher-order consciousness. (Pp.92/93). But all subjective experience is dependend upon "parallel sensory channels of different modalities" (p.93) and is unique for the brains of higher organisms, which have "enormous numbers" of "re-entrant connectivities." The system is not the same as feedback, which uses fixed paths, control and correction. Reentry, is not just corrective; it is constructive. (Pp.64,65,67.)

In short, thinking depends upon a constant interplay of genes, experiences, and creative subjective awareness. On p.92, Edelman shows an impressive list of adaptive functions of consciousness such as correcting errors during changing conditions, explicit comparison of outcomes on the basis of individual values, and so on.

- - -
The major part of Edelman's book The Remembered Present (1989), upon which the preceding information is based, contains detailed information about the specific areas in the brain between which re-entrant signaling takes place. -- Edelman, too, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine (in 1972). However, his interest in "global brain theory" -- a theory involving all of brain function -- started only around 1978.


REFLECTIONS

Hardly 30 years have passed since the then prevalent attitude in science was expressed in the words "No useful purpose has yet been established for the sense of awareness." (Wooldridge, 1963, p.240). Consciousness was perceived as an epiphenomenon -- a superfluous side-effect of brain function -- that was, and should be, completely neglected during the study of the brain. The same attitude dominated another discipline, psychology and the behavioral sciences, with deplorable results. The advances made in neuroscience during the last 30 years reinstate consciousness securely into its rightful place at the apex of evolution and open the doors for a mutual enrichment of the sciences and the humanities -- with promises for the removal of persistent roadblocks obstructing our progress toward the solution of global problems.

How much more will we know and understand in another 30 years? Will we know why it is so difficult to think and act adaptively?

Sometimes, it seems as if erratic swings to extreme positions are intruding on and overwhelming simple sound thought. The following information, for instance, was found in the May 1991 issue of TRANET, (p. 14):

"LIVE LONG AND DIE OUT" is the message given to mankind by Vol.1 No. 1 of The Exit Times (VHEMT, P.O.Box 86646, Portland, OR 97286-0646 U.S.A.) The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is a network of mostly men who promote sterilization with the aim of creating a healthy Earth without humans. They see the next few decades as both the culmination and the end of human existence. We now have the technologies and the know how to recreate an Eden on Earth for a waning population. But we are creating a Hell on Earth because of overpopulation and the conflict and misery inherent in the human species. The VHEMT future is one of growing bliss and euphoria as the human population is purposefully decreased to elimination."

A hoax? - but TRANET is a serious and responsible publication. -- If taken earnestly, one question immediately comes to mind:

Who is going to experience the wonders of our planet in a world without humans?

It is one of the most important lessons of neuroscience that such a question must be asked. -- There may be contented animals -- without death awareness -- without the perception of cruelty or guilt, and feeling despair only temporarily while being hunted, starving or freezing to death. But none of them is likely to be elevated by the mysteries that are the gift of the universe to human beings alone. None of them will -- except in a narrow instinct-like way -- feel compassion and responsibility for the suffering of other living beings on earth. None of them is able to reflect, to question, to discover, to innovate, to enter new realms of understanding.

We understand already that the "conflict and misery inherent in the human species" is inherent in all creation; but it is we who are shaken by this fact -- it is we who strive to change it.

It may be objected that the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" is the best idea that ever occurred to reduce population pressure and create an otherwise elusive paradise on earth -- without the need of wars, of epidemics, of mass starvation, of cruel totalitarian methods -- as long as it does not succeed. As soon as a harmonious balance with nature is achieved, as soon as the state of Eden is experienced, the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" just needs to dissolve itself and strive for a status-quo.

But would such a movement not selectively eliminate only persons concerned about the quality of life on earth and would the remainder ever be able to achieve a state of Eden? -- Furthermore, would a status-quo even be desirable while a world of innumerable and unforeseeable miracles is waiting?

Rather than predicting the future as dark and hopeless unless our species ceases to exist, let us find solace in the thoughtful words of the former Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations, Robert Muller:

"To humanity I would simply say: `Do not despair, but learn.'"


Acknowledgment: I wish to thank R.W. Sperry for his standing permission to quote from his work.


REFERENCES

Edelman, G. (1989). The Remembered Present. New York: Basic Books.

Freeman, F.G. (1991). The Physiology of Perception. Scientific American, Feb.1991, pp. 78-85.

Gore, R. (1989). The March Toward Extinction. National Geographic, June 1989, pp. 695-6.

Hubel, D.H. (1982) Exploration of the Primary Visual Cortex, 1955-78. [Nobel Lecture]. Nature, 299:515-524 (7. Oct. 1982).

Hubel, D.H. and Wiesel, T.N. (1962) Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat's Visual Center. Journal of Physiology, 160:106-154.

Milner, P.M. (1970). Physiological Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

Muller, R. (1982). New Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Sperry, R.W. (1952). Neurology and the Mind-Brain Problem. American Scientist, 40(2) April 1952.

Sperry, R.W. (1969). A Modified Concept of Consciousness. Psychological Review, 76:532-536.

Sperry, R.W. (1982). Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral Hemispheres [Nobel Lecture]. Science, 217:1223-1226. 24, September 1982.

Sperry, R.W. (1991). Search for Beliefs to Live By Consistent With Science. Zygon, 26:237-258.

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