Shufflebrain

Signals from the frontal lobes often have an inhibitory effect on other areas of the brain. (One theory behind prefrontal lobotomy was that it relieved the uptights.) Pribram began wondering if such inhibitory activity might represent something akin to parsing a message-- breaking a sequence of letters or words into meaningful chunks. Maybe to lobotomized patients words such as "hologramic theory" seem like "ho logramichteory"; or "ho log ram ich teory."

He tested his hypothesis on monkeys with what he called "the alternating test," a modified version of the shell game as he describes it.[23]

In the alternating test, the monkey sits in front of two inverted cups, one with a peanut under it, the other not. To win the peanut, the monkey must turn up the cup opposite the winning choice on the last trial (thus the name 'alternating'). At the end of a trial a screen descends, blocking the monkey's view of the cups and remaining down anywhere from a few seconds to several hours. Monkeys find the game easy, and, after a little experience, readily win peanuts, even after the screen has been down all day long. But following frontal lobotomy, Pribram found the monkey "will fail at this simple task even when the interval between trials is reduced to three seconds."[24]

It occurred to Pribram that "perhaps the task appears to these monkeys much as an unparsed passage does to us." What would happen, he wondered, if he organized the message for the lobotomized monkey? He thought he could do the parsing by alternating short and long pauses between trials. In the original test the interval between trials was randomly selected (for statistical prudence). Now, though, the animal would sit in front of the cups, as before, and would again win a peanut by selecting the cup opposite the correct choice on the previous trial. But the screen would remain down for either 5 or 15 seconds. Alternating short and long pauses was to akin to converting an amorphous sequence, as for example LRLRLRLR, into sets like (L+R) (L+R) (L+R), the 5-second pauses representing the plus signs and the 15-second pauses the parentheses.

How did the lobotomized monkeys make out? In Pribram's words, "immediately the monkeys with frontal cortex damage performed as successfully as the control animals whose brains were intact."[25]

Pribram's findings have practical implications that go beyond far beyond the frontal lobe. It might be possible to develop strategies to assist a damaged brain in carrying out functions it has only apparently lost. Such clinical strategies could conceivably evolve from exercises like finding the common denominator in the functions of the rat versus human hippocampi.

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Primates seem to parse information rather well in comparison to other highly intelligent organisms. The forward growth of the cerebrum, a hominoid characteristic, would seem to coincide with parsing capabilities. But potential pitfalls await us if we oversimplify any brain function. Consider this anecdote Alexander Luria relates about the English neurologist Sir William Gower.

Gower had a patient with a speech aphasia that surfaced when the person tried to repeat certain words, 'no' being one of them. During one session, after several failed attempts to repeat Gower's sentence, the patient became exasperated and declared: "No doctor, I can't say 'no.'"[26]

It was as though Gower's patient housed at least two disconnected mental universes. (The observation seems akin to split brain.[27]) Obviously, if the two independent universes can't communicate, they can't integrate (or parse, for that matter). The psychologist, Julian Jaynes[28] has proposed that human consciousness evolved, and history dawned en passant, following the development of new connections between the left and right temporal lobes[29]. A capacity for acute self-awareness, Jaynes cogently argues, is a cardinal characteristic of present-day human beings. According to Jaynes, when a prehistoric person reported, for instance, hearing the voice of the gods, he or she probably heard himself or herself without recognizing the actual source. Our ancestors, in the Jaynes's theory, had "bicameral" minds--minds like the U. S. Congress divided into a Senate and House.

I don't know if Jaynes is right or wrong. (And I have no advice as to how to test his hypothesis experimentally.) But the harmonious blending of mentalities, like Buster and animals in the looking up-experiments, is consistent with the hologramic principle of independence--but on a cosmic scale. The smooth, continuous blending of one universe with another is something the hologramic continuum can do very easily, in theory. Nor would we need a lobotomy to separate dimensions; that could be done with signals producing the equivlance of desgructive interference--jamming!

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