Shufflebrain

Here's another illustration of the transplantability of salamander parts.

This fellow is an axolotl into whose dorsal fin, I'd transplanted a hind leg and an entire brain, including the donor animal's inner ear, where it's orgas of balaance reside . I spliced the leg to the brain with a hank of spinal cord. I knew the splice worked when the transplanted limb began to feel for the floor of the aquartium and walk on its own. Nerves from the ear must have grown into and hooked up with the brain. Also, the leg would kick wildly where the animal rocked back and forth, presumably from stimulation of the transplanted inner ear. I used to call this animal Thumper, from the sometimes jackrabbit-like action of the transplanted limb.

Here's an animal with an entire head tranplant in its right orbit. The donor head, which came from a beheaded embryo, developed normally with two anatomically perfect eyes and a snapping set of jaws. The transplanted head couldn't eat because it lacked the rest of the equipment -- which was transplanted somewhere else. The host was a larva at the time of the transplant operation. Did the two heads think as one? By all indications, each retained its separate psychological identity.

In the mid-1960's, while searching for a system that would allow me to extend my theory from regeneration to memory, I decided to perform experiments with the brain. Hologramic theory had just begun to emerge as I was gearing up.

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Its predictions were at odds with virtually everything else I believed. Hologramic theory predicted that memory cannot be explained by the structure of the brain.

"What kind of a nitwit would seriously believe a thing like that?" I asked a senior colleague. "Don't we use legs to stand on, teeth to chew with, bronchioles to breathe through? Sperms swim with their tails. Hairs curl or don't curl depending on the detailed structure of their proteins. Even genes work because of molecular anatomy. Why should the storing of mind be different?"

Hologramic theory not only stirred my prejudice, it also seemed highly vulnerable to the very experiments I was planning: Shuffling neuroanatomy, reorganizing the brain, scrambling the sets and subsets that I theorized were the carriers of neural programs. I fully expected to retire hologramic theory to the bone yard of meaningless ideas. I had begun licking my canine teeth like a mink who has cornered a chicken. I even began considering which scientific meetings would be best for the announcement of my theory. I should have awaited Nature's answers. For hologramic theory was to survive every trial, and my own theory went down to utter defeat.

***

Will my experiments prove hologramic theory to the careful reader? Maybe, in the casual or even legal sense of establishing truth. Possibly, according to the pragmatist's test: For hologramic theory works. But as the logician tests truth, my answer is I hope not.

No experiment can deliver the whole truth about a theory. Take Einstein's special theory of relativity, for instance--the most powerful and durable theory in all the natural sciences, and the source of the famous e = mc square. Unless Einstein was totally wrong, there is no actual c-square--the square of the speed of light. He assumed that the speed of light is the maximum velocity any mass-energy can attain. Obviously, no experiment will ever detect what is greater than an attainable maximum.

Theories deal with generic features of a subject, with explanations for groups of facts or classes of events as a whole. They serve our understanding precisely because they exist in the ideal, operate in the abstract, and lend themselves to perfectibility. For many of Nature's secrets lie beyond experience. Experiments yield controlled experiences. By their very character, experiments must focus on particular observations. They furnish concrete examples of a subject in the reality we know best. But experiments cannot penetrate to the ideal core of a theory, and they cannot take us to the repository of the theory's meaning.

Experiments may let us examine a theory's consequences and test its predictions. They may produce the results a theory forecasts, and by so doing establish widespread belief in the theory. And that is fine, as long as we do not forget the distinction between belief in the truth and the truth itself. Failure to make this seemingly obvious differentiation is a serious philosophical malady within many sciences today.