Shufflebrain

What could the stimulus be? I wondered. I soon found (by placing normal animals in containers of different colors) that the animal was responding to its immediate background (to what was reflected from a distance of about 10 body lengths). How did the animal know the container it was in was a black pan, a brown oleo cup or a clear crystal bowl? If it's simply a matter of the intensity of light coming from the side, what if I put an animal into a clear bowl and set the bowl at the center of a circular fluorescent tube, which I did. No change! No matter how high I jacked up (or down) the intensity of light from the side, the animal retained the tan coloration it usually exhibited in a clear bowl. I even tried illumination simultaneously from the side and from above. These same animals that did not change their coloration during lateral illumination blanched within a few minutes after transfer to white cups; when they went into a black photographic dark pan, they darkened.

Let's apply a little hologramic theory to the problem, I thought. Picture a normal animal in a white plastic cup. It's receiving light from above and reflections from the sides. The reflected and incident light are from the same source, but different directions. Although the two sets of waves don't have enough coherency to generate an interference pattern they, nevertheless, have some consistent phase relationships. The phase differential, I reasoned, informs the animal about the optical properties of the immediate background. The stimulus for camouflage reaction, I reasoned, was like the object and reference beams in a hologram. That's why such low levels (moonlight) of illumination worked in white cups.

What about Cyclops, then, I wondered. With his eye aimed at the sky, he'd receive little if any reflection from the sides and thus couldn't register the posited phase differences. His vision wouldn't let him perceive his photic environment.

Over the years, and for the sake of reproducibility, I'd perfected techniques for transplanting the eye in Cyclops so that it's visual axis was vertically aligned.[12] Suppose instead, I tilted the eye obliquely off the vertical axis? If I'm right, the Cyclops of the Second Kind ought to blanch in white cups about like One-Eye.

The hypothesis worked. About a third of these Cyclops II as I identified them in a scientific article exhibited as intense a camouflage reaction as animals with a single natural eye[13]. Cyclops's abnormal psychology wasn't his intelligence. It was his geometric optics. He just didn't have a correct visual angle on the world to inform himself about what was out there. He wasn't any more stupid than you or I would be if we couldn't hold a page in front of our faces and were given an IQ test based on the contents of that page. Given half a chance (a cocked eye), Cyclops could see enough of his visual environment to execute the camouflage reactions.

***

Does any of this relate to human intelligence? If the connections were obvious, I wouldn't have to pose the question. But take a look at a few active-negative events at work in people.

Take so-called "functional" amblyopia, a condition in which an optically normal eye can go blind because of double vision. An ophthalmologist name L. J. Girard and his colleagues demonstrated that certain types of lenses can have dramatic effects on persons suffering from what is called "suppression amblyopia." Here are some samples from his and his co-author's tables of data. One little girl had entered Girard's clinic with a 20/80 eye; after four week of wearing his lenses, her amblyopic eye was up to 20/20. A forty-seven year old man with 20/200 vision--legally blind in some states--had his amblyopic eye improved to 20/20. A teen aged boy with 20/400 improved to 20/50.

Just as with Triclops, human visual perception imposes minus signs and cancels information that doesn't work out to one-to-one vision. When a human eye sends confusion to the brain, the mind can compute the eye out of action, which seems to be what happened in many of Girard's patients.[14]