Shufflebrain

IN FORMAL TERMS, Punky was just a control. Indeed, in a technical paper I eventually delivered on shufflebrain at the Anatomy Meetings, he became a nameless item in a table of data, a slide on a screen, and a dependent clause of passive-voice prose. But Punky had made my structuralist partisanship vulnerable to the overwhelming case my own data had produced in support of hologramic theory. He had humbled me, Punky had. My narrow notions no longer seemed appropriate to the situation. I think I had begun to appreciate for the first time what science might be but seldom is in our day: the privilege of seeing Nature's secrets unfold, rather than an exercise in who's right and who's wrong.

Yet my ego was not anchored to hologramic theory. It was not my theory. I would remain aware of this fact at all times, as a hedge against new prejudice that might seep in and occupy the void left by removal of the old one. Yes, I believed hologramic theory, in my guts, but I believed it as I do the theory of evolution and the laws of thermodynamics: not as icon; not as an oath I couldn't disclaim if Nature should reveal something better.

Before Punky, I'd sought only to refute hologramic theory. Afterward, I began to look at the theory as a whole. And the range of its implications set my imagination on fire.

I soon began to realize how lucky I was that the salamander's feeding behavior had obeyed Lashley's dictum so well. For hologramic theory must also take into account what multiple holograms exhibit. From our imaginary experiments in chapter 4, we learned that, by shading, we can keep some codes out of certain parts of the photographic plate; we also learned that we can construct a multiple hologramic system without having every code exist in every single part; but no a priori mandate in hologramic theory rules out the possibilities multiple and asymmetric distribution in any given brain. What might I be writing now, had feeding programs been confined, say, to the salamander's left cerebral hemisphere? Equipotentiality is something we can know only after the fact.

What principles do account for the survival of feeding after shufflebrain? How can we explain the retention of the salamander's mental codes despite its scrambled neuroanatomy? There are two major explanations. The most obvious one is that various pieces of brain must have housed whole codes. Let's call this the wholeness principle. The second explanation, a much less obvious one, is that each piece of brain must have made its own independent contribution to the animal's behavior. We'll call this the independence principle. If codes had been partially represented in a piece of brain, or if pieces mutually depended on each other to construct meaningful sequences, I could never have swapped, flipped, rotated, deleted, reversed, or added parts of the brain--all parts!--without jumbling feeding behavior.

The imaginary experiments we performed earlier with transparent sheets illustrate the wholeness principle rather well. It is not difficult to appreciate that if feeding codes had been spread out like ANATOMY, my operations would have had a different meaning.

The independence principle seemed much more subtle and warranted further investigation. Besides, the independence principle predicted that I should be able to transplant new thoughts into a brain. The new codes ought become integral parts of the host's mental mix and add new features to the animal's behavior.

Punky's behavior certainly suggested the independence principle, but only indirectly. Demonstrating it required two active minds. Punky only had his donor's. But, critical to future experimentation, he did show that a salamander's behavior can display totally foreign phase codes.

***

Before I describe the actual experiments, let's look at the independence principle by way of another imaginary experiment. This time, instead of transparent sheets let's imagine a deck of cards. Let's begin with a conventional nonhologramic message, using a single card as a set for storing one letter. The meaning of our message--let's use DOG--depends on the relationship between our cards: where each lies in relationship to the others when the deck is at rest, or when a card turns up during the deal. If we shuffle the deck, we obviously run the risk of scrambling the meaning of our message. DOG might become GOD, for instance. Just as with our message, ANATOMY, on the transparent sheets, the message in our conventional deck is made up of inter-dependent elements.

The hologramic deck of cards is far different. Here each card contains a whole message. And if the same message is on each card, just as the same feeding message is in each part of the salamander brain, then shuffling will not alter the deal.