Shufflebrain

Unlike other species I work with, the axolotl spends its entire life in the water. Because of a genetic quirk, it fails to metamorphose into a land dweller. It does undergo internal changes as it develops into an adult, but not the drastic transformations other salamanders go through. Metamorphosis usually wipes out my stock for the season. The axolotl, however, passes into adulthood uneventfully, and lives five or six years, and sometimes longer, under laboratory conditions. By the time I was ready to experiment again, Calvin's axolotls had not only become adults but had been Looking-up for well over a year. If I had had a dissecting microscope, I would have used every last one of them much earlier, and they wouldn't have been around for what happened next.

Shortly after my article appeared in Harper's, I received a phone call from Igor Oganesoff, a producer for the CBS News program "60 Minutes." People at CBS had liked the article, he said, and he asked if I would perform experiments in front of the camera.

With the wrong camera angle, my experiments could easily come out looking like Grandson of Frankenstein in Indiana, which would have been unfair to Punky and Buster as well as misleading to the audience. Yet I couldn't envisage Igor Oganesoff wanting to produce a horror movie. At that time, I was an avid fan of "60 Minutes" and vividly recalled two pieces he had produced: one had portrayed the world inside a Carmelite cloister in California; the other captured an aspect of chess master, Bobby Fisher, I didn't think the world had previously suspected. I was sure Igor Oganesoff could do justice to shufflebrain. And with the opportunity to reach fifteen million people... I decided, what the heck, let's do it.

Techniques worried me, I said, trying to imagine what would work in a visual medium. Did I remember the work done with microscopes during Walter Cronkite's "21st Century", Oganesoff asked. The cameraman Oganesoff had in mind, a man named Billy Wagner, had taken those pictures. Place a camera in his hand and Wagner becomes a genius. There was, I replied, a double-headed microscope that enabled two people simultaneously to view the same microscopic field. But I didn't have one of those expensive instruments. Details like that, Oganesoff said, were his worry. As we were talking, I thought about Calvin's large, well-trained axolotls. It was time I did some experiments with adults, anyway. Their brains could be seen even without a microscope, if worse came to worse. Yes! I thought it might be quite feasible. After a preliminary visit, Igor made plans to film the operations in July and the results in August, between the two political conventions.

Meanwhile, I scrounged a fresh batch of axolotl larvae from Humphrey. I also carried out a few preliminary operations with adult axolotls, to work out technical nuances and get my hands back in shape.

Calvin had graduated, and another student had taken his place. He lacked Calvin's touch with animals and couldn't seem to get the knack of weaning larvae onto liver. I undertook the chore myself, and while at it decided to study the Looking-up response carefully.

Looking-up is surprisingly easy to induce. The quickest way is to put the larva in an opaque cylindrical container and give it a sort of tunnel view of the world above. Then, with one session a day, for four or five days, a brisk, discrete tapping of the dish, followed in a second or two by a reward, will instill the trait. After this, Looking-up behavior persists for weeks, even after the reward has been withheld. Once the animal has been trained, the Looking-up response is virtually guaranteed. I decided to put Looking-up on "60 Minutes".

***

The experiment I performed on camera involved three animals: two naive axolotl larvae and a trained adult "Looker-up" from Calvin's old colony. The anterior part of the trained adult's cerebrum replaced the entire cerebrum of one naive larva. Would the host become a Looker-up? The other naive larva served as a donor animal, and I transplanted its entire brain into the space left in the adult's cranium. Would the transplant "confuse" the adult? Mike Wallace eventually called the second larva "the loser". For it received no brain transplant.

I decided not to call the viewer's attention to Looking-up, and instead focused attention on the survival of feeding after shufflebrain operations. I had no doubts about feeding. But Looking-up was still very new. Something could have turned up to change my mind. If the paradigm turned out to be a fluke, trying to correct the misinformation broadcast on television would be like attempting to summon back an inadvertently fired load of buckshot.

Looking-up: