Shufflebrain

In the Horridge preparation, the body of a beheaded insect is skewered into an electrical circuit. A wire is attached to a foot. Then the preparation is suspended directly above a salt solution. If the leg relaxes and gravity pulls down the foot, the wire dips into the salt solution, closing the electrical circuit and-- zappo! A jolt is delivered to the ganglion cells within the headless body. In time, the ganglion cells learn to avoid the shock by raising the leg high enough to keep the wire out of the salt solution.

An electrophysiologist name Graham Hoyle went on to perfect and refine the Horridge preparation. Working with pithed crabs, he used computers to control the stimuli; he made direct electrophysiological recordings from specific ganglion cells; and, because he could accurately control the stimuli and record the responses, Hoyle was able to teach the cells to alter their frequency of firing, which is a very sophisticated trick. How well did the pithed crabs learn? According to Hoyle, "debrained animals learned better than intact ones."[7]

I'm not suggesting that we replace the university with the guillotine. Indeed, later in this chapter we'll bring the brain back into our story. But first-rate evidence of mind exists in some very hard-to-swallow places. Brain (in the sense of what we house inside our crania) is not a sine qua non of mind.

Aha, but does the behavior of beheaded bugs really have any counterpart in like us?

***

In London, in 1881, the leading holist of the day, F. L. Goltz arrived from Strasbourg for a public showdown at the International Medical Congress with his arch-rival, Englishman David Ferrier who'd gained renown for investgating functional localization within the cerebral cortex.

At the Congress, Ferrier presented monkeys with particular paralyses following specific ablations of what came to be known as the motor cortex. Ferrier's experiments were so dramatically elegant that he won the confrontation. But not before Goltz had presented his "Hund ohne Hirn," (dog without brain)-- an animal who could stand up even though his cerebrum had been amputated. [8]

The decerebrated mammal has been a standard laboratory exercise in physiology courses every since. A few years ago, a team of investigators, seeking to find out if the mammalian midbrain could be taught to avoid irritation of the cornea, used the blink reflex to demonstrate that, "decerebrate cats could learn the conditioned response."[9]

Hologramic theory does not predict that microbes, beheaded bugs or decerebrated dogs and cats necessarily perceive, remember and behave. Experiments furnish the underlying evidence. Some of that evidence, particularly with bacteria, has been far more rigorously gathered than any we might cite for support of memory in rats or monkeys or human beings. But the relative nature of phase code explains how an organism only 2 micrometers long--or a thousand times smaller that, if need be--can house complete sets of instructions. Transformations within the continuum give us a theory of how biochemical and physiological mechanisms quite different from those in intact brains and bodies of vertebrates may nevertheless carry out the same overall informational activities.

Yet hologramic theory does not force us to abandon everything else we know.[10] . Instead, hologramic theory gives new meaning to old evidence; it allows us to reassemble the original facts, return to where our quest began, and with T. S. Eliot, "know the place for the first time."

In the last chapter, I pointed out that two universes developed according to Riemann's plan would obey a single unifying principle, curvature, and yet could differ totally if the two varied with respect to dimension. Thus the hologramic continuum of both a salamander and a human being depend on the phase code and tensor transformations therein. But our worlds are far different from theirs by virtue of dimension. Now let's take this statement out of the abstract.

***

It's no great surprise to anyone that a monkey quickly learns to sit patiently in front of a display panel and win peanut after peanut by choosing, say, a triangle instead of a square. By doing essentially the same thing, rats and pigeons follow the same trend Edward Thorndike first called attention to in the 1890s. Even a goldfish when presented with an apparatus much like a gum machine soon learns that bumping its snout against a green button will earn it a juicy tubifex worm while a red button brings forth nothing. Do choice-learning experiments mean that the evolution of intelligence is like arithmetic: add enough bacteria and we'd end up with a fish or an ape? In the 1950s a man named Bitterman began to wonder if it was all really that simple. Something didn't smell right to him. Bitterman decide to add a new wrinkle to the choice experiments.