Shufflebrain

The movement within a pregnant woman's uterus can't be equated to the simple push-pull action-reaction of a hydraulic shock absorber. It is behavior. Just as the embryo's lungs, heart, eyes, face and a brain gradually develop through fishlike, froglike and ratlike stages into what we might be willing to call a "baby," so the primitive mind we start out with must gradually and continuously evolve into a human mentality. The course our development takes runs right by the junctures where our aquatic vertebrate cousins stopped evolving. And when one of us gets off course too soon, what we do en route to the formaldehyde jar is fishlike, salamanderlike, or ratlike... depending on our point of departure.

Yet in spite of an unbroken thread running all the way back through our development, we emerge from the uterus infinitely different creatures from when we first implanted into its soft, warm, sticky inner wall. How do we become so different during development? The independence principle, remember, permits new codes to be added virtually at will to the pre-existing deck. Buster serves as a precedent for such additions.

The independence principle also frees us from having to assume fundamentally different laws of Nature in order to explain how experience can add to our mental stores what development builds into us spontaneously. In hologramic theory, one general principle serves all the codes, whether we call them memories or instincts, learned ideas or innate thoughts, a priori or a posteriori knowledge. An examination of this prediction of the theory was the next phase of my research.

***

I lost my job at the beginning of 1970, before shufflebrain was a complete story. A miniature depression had begun in the sciences during 1969. Shortly after I was fired, a staff writer for Science magazine came to the conclusion that what many scientists were calling a "Ph.D. glut" was really a myth. True, the article conceded, the really good jobs were getting hard to find. Competition had intensified, and there was no doubt that the federal government was spending significantly less on science. But the article implied that only the Willie Lomans of science were driving taxi cabs, washing dishes, freelancing, busing dishes and drawing unemployment checks. Directly or through friends, I soon contacted the anatomy department of every medical school in the United States and Canada, without success. And wherever else I looked, there were no jobs, not for me at least. Perhaps it was the Science article, which I believed at the time; perhaps it was the serious economic plight of my family (the oldest of our four children had had to miss a semester at the University of Michigan); perhaps it was my still-incomplete shufflebrain research; or the fact that my unemployment insurance was running out. In any case, when a friend eventually arranged an interview for me at Indiana University's optometry school, I found it psychologically impossible to negotiate seriously for anything. Had my pride been operative, I would have rejected their job offer, which carried lower rank and less pay than my former job. And I would never have worked as a scientist again.

But by the autumn of 1970, I was drawing real wages again. I had a splendid office overlooking the most beautiful campus I had ever seen. Although my lab had nothing in it, my morale was high. I had applied to the university's grant committee for a few thousand dollars to tide me over until I could secure federal funds. When I got four hundred dollars instead, I was still too euphoric to bitch. And I set about doing what scientists of the generation before mine had routinely done: made do!

Making do included scrounging salamanders from a wonderful man, the late Rufus Humphrey. Humphrey had retired to Indiana University from the anatomy department of the University of Buffalo (now the State University of New York at Buffalo). As chance had it, I'd joined that department, myself, for a period in the early 1960's. After taking over some discarded dissecting tables Humphrey had once used for his salamanders (Humphrey was a maker-do of world class rank), I'd written him to tell him that his picture still hung in the microscopic anatomy lab at Buffalo. Thus began a lasting friendly correspondence between us.

Humphrey studied the genetics of a salamander known as the axolotl. Some of his purebred strains ran back to 1930. His colony (which continues today as the Axolotl Colony at Indiana University) is famous, worldwide, among people who work with amphibians. Even if I had not been on a scrounging mission, one of the first things I would have had to see in Indiana was Humphrey's axolotls.