Shufflebrain

Triclops hadn't merely learned faster than the normal Two-Eye. Triclops's test scores were exactly on the mathematical mark: were precisely as the one-to-one principle predicted, a priori. Let me convert the values to the scale used with IQ to show you exactly what I mean.

Let Two-Eye's IQ (normal) be 100. One-Eye's IQ turned out to be 80. Now if we take the 20-point difference--our increment of change from an extra eye-- and add it back to the 100 points for Two-Eye, we get 120 as the predicted IQ for Triclops. What did we actually find? The tricloptic animals had a mean IQ of 117, plus or minus enough standard deviation to make the score the same as 120!

By themselves, these data seemingly made a perfect case for the one-to-one principle, which Triclops obeyed to the letter, and which we would have convincingly asserted in the scientific literature, but for Cyclops, originally the source of mirth but now of consternation.

Light-Shock Avoidance in Salamander Larvae*

EXPERIMENT

AVOIDANCES

IQ

Rate

Per Trial

Acceleration

Per Trial

One-Eye

0.085

0.2364

80

Two-Eye (normal)

0.112

0.3044

100

Triclops

0.126

0.3504

117

Cyclops

0.188

0.5228

173

*From Schneider, C.W. and P. Pietsch,

Brain Research

, volume 8, pp. 271-280, 1968.

We had envisaged Cyclops as Triclops minus two natural eyes. And what was the mean cycloptic IQ? It turned out to be 173! It wasn't just that Cyclops IQ was much higher than Triclops's (which in itself was wacky). What was so utterly baffling was this. To make an accurate prediction of Triclops's IQ, we should have taken the normal 100 and added the 173 points (now the increment of change) to it. Triclops IQ should have been 273 points, not the measly 117 we actually observed.

***

I began to put an explanation together over a bottle of Chianti late one night at the kitchen table after my wife and kids had gone to bed. Ironically, the epiphany struck while I mused over a picture of a Riemann surface in a book I'd borrowed from a friend.[8]

Just consider what 273 visual IQ points would mean . That's 2.7 times normal-- practically triple the normal IQ! Suppose we shift from the visual to the auditory system. Ask yourself what it might mean to have a mind's ear three times more alert and discriminating than yours is now. Suppose, suddenly, the crackle of the corn flakes takes away your appetite. And what if the cat's meow summoned with the authority of the roar of the lion? And what, now, of the previously unnoticed pat of the rat? Pondering questions like these, I couldn't help but think of a line of graffiti on a wall in an Ann Arbor john:

"Every blip a blop

"And me a flop!"

No, we wouldn't survive if we awoke one morning with perception tuned up anywhere near the level equivalent to Triclop's calculated IQ. Nor would the salamander make it out in the woods with 273 visual IQ points. Not where too fast a response to a glint from the belly of a hungry trout might draw the egg-heavy female away from her lover before she had insured next season's crop of new salamanders. Maybe even 173 points would be too much to bear in a world where reward and punishment come in the form of life and death. Some amphibians once did sport a functional third eye atop the head. They've most vanished. Maybe they weren't gifted with Triclops's talent for making perception fit the one-to-one principle. Maybe the three-eyed beasts of our past failed Nature's test of intelligence, the price of which is not as a mild electric goose in the ass, but the demise of the species.

Triclops wasn't dumber than Cyclops, I concluded. His normal eyes had let him do with extra visual perception what my knife had taken away from poor old Cyclops: normal visual field data which Triclops could use to impose minus signs in calculating the final behavioral outcome. Cyclops's 173 IQ points represented a more primitive response than Triclops's 117. Higher IQ wasn't smarter. It was just higher. To borrow a metaphor from Hemingway's Snows of Kilamanjaro Cyclops's lofty IQ was like

"fat on the soul."

I tried to make a quick interpolation from 273 to 117 to see just what kind of math Triclop's mind would have to mimic. I couldn't even come close to an answer with pencil and paper. Carl and I would eventually write that the Triclops had toned down his response, with "integrative precision."[9] His IQ had algebra in it--complex tensor algebra. Poor old Cyclops, reminiscent of Bitterman's hammering goldfish, had performed simple arithmetic.