Shufflebrain

To check a salamander's reflexes, I flick a fingernail on the rim of the dish. When an animal has recovered from stupor, it usually jumps in response to the flick. As I placed the opacum larva with the axolotl brain on the stage of the microscope, I noticed that he had righted himself and was standing on the bottom of the dish. I gave a light flick, expecting him to give a little jump and then swim out of the microscopic field. Instead, he slowly arched his little back and looked directly up into the barrel of the microscope, right into my eyes. My heart missed a beat. I had observed this looking-up response in only one other place--over on the table among Calvin's axolotls, where the donor had come from. Immediately I jumped up, went over and flicked every last dish on the axolotl table. Every axolotl there looked up in response.

Next, I checked out the stock opacum larvae. Flicking only caused them to scurry around in their dishes. Not one stock opacum looked up.

Now back to the operating table! Again, I flicked. Again the opacum with the axolotl brain looked up. I tested the other subjects that had had operations. They did not look up. Again I tried the axolotl recipient. Again it worked. Unwittingly, I had discovered that a learned response can be added to the hologramic deck.

***

My looking-up little animal reminded me of a sermon I had heard decades earlier in a down-at-the-heel, no longer extant church at the corner of 111th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. The sermon had been about gratitude, and the preacher had used an anecdote from his Ohio farm boy youth to illustrate the theme. His father used to let hogs into the apple orchard to clean up windfall fruit, the preacher said. It always amazed him that the hogs would devour every last apple on the ground but never once look up at the trees, the source. Looking up! I haven't practiced the religion of my boyhood for a long time. Nature has taken its place. But often, very often, in the laboratory, at the moment of a new discovery, I have felt intense gratitude, not for being right--for I've had the emotion when I was completely wrong--but simply for being there. Looking down at my talented opacum, I felt that same gratitude, to an almost overwhelming degree. And thus I gave this new paradigm the name: "Looking-up."

***

Before I had the chance to carry out a decisive investigation of Looking-up, my general good fortune seemed to disappear. The Looker-upper died of a fungus infection. Something happened to the tap water, and the brine shrimp were hatching in minuscule quantities, forcing me to abandon the opacum stock just to sustain the experimental subjects in good health. Then the time came to surrender the borrowed dissecting microscope. The optometry school had rooms full of junked optical equipment from which I jury-rigged a substitute. But under it, I committed butchery. Then the National Institutes of Health rejected my application for research funds. I finally began to lose confidence, and I would have closed the lab permanently had not Calvin's job depended on feeding the axolotls. But I could not go near the lab.

***

Although I could not yet make a public case for "Looking-up," I was now privately convinced that hologramic theory applied to learned as well as instinctive behaviors and that the abstract rules were indeed the same for both. I felt that the time had come to make the main part of the shufflebrain story known. And I was convinced that my days in the laboratory were over. If what I wrote was going to be a swan song, why say it in the stiff, lifeless prose of science and bury it in unread archives? If the story was as interesting as it seemed to me, perhaps a popular magazine would take it. Harper's eventually accepted my article and published it in their May 1972 issue.

But once again, the calamity was only apparent. On the elevator one day, a colleague of mine, asked if it was true that I did not have a dissecting microscope. He said "hmm" when I said "yes". A few weeks later, I was busy preparing a neuroanatomy lecture when someone began kicking on the door. I opened it and there stood the colleague from the elevator, a brand new dissecting microscope in each hand and a big grin on his face. He had convinced the dean that our graduate program required dissecting microscopes. And would it be an inconvenience to store two of them in my laboratory? I still wonder if he saw the tears in my eyes.

***