Mind Beyond Matter

The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known Universe, but, since practically nothing of the Universe is known, it is probably fairly low in the hierarchy of organic computers. Nevertheless, it contains powers and potentialities still largely untapped and perhaps unguessed-at. It is one of the strangest of all facts, impossible for the sensitive mind to contemplate without melancholy, that for at least 50,000 years there have been men on this planet who could have conducted a symphony orchestra, discovered theorems in pure mathematics, acted as Secretary General of the United Nations, or piloted a spaceship—had they been given the chance. Probably 99 percent of human ability has been wholly wasted; even today, those of us who consider ourselves cultured and educated operate for most of our time as automatic machines, and glimpse the profounder resources of our minds only once or twice in a lifetime.

In the speculations that follow, I shall ignore all paranormal and so-called psi phenomena. If these exist, and can be controlled, they may dominate the entire future of mental activity and change the patterns of human culture in manners unpredictable today. But at the present stage of our ignorance, such surmises are profitless and lead all too readily into the quaking quagmires of mysticism. The known powers of the mind are already so astonishing that there is no need to invoke new ones.

Let us first consider memory. No one has been able to form a reliable estimate of the number of facts or impressions the brain can store during a lifetime. There is considerable evidence that we never forget anything; we are just unable to put our minds on it at the moment. We seldom encounter really impressive feats of memory these days, because there is little need for them in our world of reference books and documents. Before the invention of writing, all history and literature had to be carried in the head and passed on by word of mouth. Even today, there are still men who can recite the whole of the Bible or the Koran, just as once they could recite Homer.

The work of Dr. Wilder Penfield and his associates at Montreal has shown, in a dramatic fashion, that long-lost memories can be revived by the electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain, almost as if a movie were being played back in the mind. The subject relives, in vivid detail (color, scent, sound) some past experience—but is aware that it is a memory, and not a present occurrence. Hypnotic techniques can also produce similar effects, a fact that was used to advantage by Freud and others for the treatment of mental disorders.

When we discover how the brain manages to filter and store the blizzard of impressions pouring into it during every second of our lives, we may gain conscious or artificial control of memory. It would no longer be an inefficient, hit-and-miss process; if you wanted to reread a page of a newspaper you had seen at a certain moment 30 years ago, you could do just that, by stimulation of the proper brain cells. In a sense, this would be a kind of time travel into the past—perhaps the only kind that will ever be possible. It would be a wonderful power to possess and—unlike many great powers—would appear to be almost wholly beneficial.

It could revolutionize legal procedures. No one could ever again answer "I've forgotten" to the classic question "What were you doing on the night of the 23rd?" Witnesses could no longer confuse the issue by accounts of what they thought they had seen. Let us hope that memory stimulation would not be compulsory in the law courts; but if anyone pleaded this future version of the Fifth Amendment, the obvious conclusions would be drawn.

And how wonderful it would be to go back through one's past, to revive old pleasures and, in the light of later knowledge, mitigate old sorrows and learn from ancient mistakes. It has been said, falsely, that a drowning man's life flashes before his eyes. Yet perhaps one day, in extreme old age, those who no longer have any interest in the future may be given the opportunity of reliving their past and greeting again those they knew and loved when they were young. Even this, as we shall see later, might be not a preparation for death, but the prelude to a new birth.

Perhaps even more important than the stimulation of old memories would be its inverse—the creation of new ones. It is hard to think of any invention that would be more valuable than the device that science-fiction writers have called a Mechanical Educator. As depicted by authors and artists, this remarkable gadget usually resembles the permanent-wave machine at a lady's hairdresser's, and it performs a rather similar function—though on the material inside the skull. It is not to be confused with the teaching machines now coming into widespread use, though one day these may be recognized as its remote ancestors.

The Mechanical Educator could impress on the brain, in a matter of a few minutes, knowledge and skills that might otherwise take a lifetime to acquire. A very good analogy is the manufacture of a phonograph record; the music may have taken an hour to perform, but the disc is stamped out in a fraction of a second, and the plastic "remembers" the performance perfectly. This would have appeared impossible, even in theory, to the most imaginative of scientists only a century ago.

Impressing information directly onto the brain, so that we can know things without ever learning them, seems equally impossible today; it must certainly remain out of the question until our understanding of mental processes has advanced immeasurably. Yet the Mechanical Educator—or some technique that performs similar functions—is such an urgent need that civilization cannot continue for many more decades without it. The knowledge in the world is doubling every 10 years—and the rate itself is increasing. Already, 20 years of schooling are insufficient; soon we will have died of old age before we have learned how to live, and our entire culture will have collapsed owing to its incomprehensible complexity.

In the past, whenever a need has arisen, it has always been filled with some promptitude. For this reason, though I have no idea how it would really operate, and suggest that it may be a complex of techniques rather than a piece of mechanical hardware, I feel fairly convinced that the Mechanical Educator will be invented. If it is not, thÈn the end of human culture is already in sight.

There are many other possibilities, and some certainties, involving the direct manipulation of the brain. It has already been demonstrated that the behavior of animals—and men—can be profoundly modified if minute electrical impulses are fed into certain regions of the cerebral cortex. Personality can be completely altered, so that a cat will become terrified at the mere sight of a mouse, and a vicious monkey will become friendly and cooperative.

Perhaps the most sensational results of this experimentation, which may be fraught with more social consequences than the early work of the nuclear physicists, is the discovery of the so-called pleasure or rewarding centers in the brain. Animals with electrodes implanted in these areas quickly learn to operate the switch controlling the immensely enjoyable electrical stimulus, and develop such an addiction that nothing else interests them. Monkeys have been known to press the reward button three times a second for 18 hours on end, completely undistracted by either food or sex. There are also pain or punishment areas of the brain; an animal will work with equal single-mindedness to switch off any current fed into these.

The possibilities here, for good and evil, are so obvious that there is no point in exaggerating or discounting them. Electronic possession of human robots controlled from a central broadcasting station is something that even George Orwell never thought of; but it may be technically possible long before 1984.

One of the many bizarre facts revealed by hypnosis is that false, but absolutely convincing, memories can be fed to a subject who will later be prepared to swear that these things really happened to him. We have all experienced dreams so vivid that, on awaking, we confuse them with reality; for 20 years I have been haunted by the "memory" of a spectacular Spitfire crash that I have never been able to classify as a real event or a hallucination.

Artificial memories, if they could be composed, taped and then fed into the brain by electrical or other means, would be a form of vicarious experience, far more vivid (because they affect all the senses) than anything that could be produced by the massed resources of Hollywood. They would, indeed, be the ultimate form of entertainment—a fictitious experience more real than reality. It has been questioned whether most people would want to live waking lives at all if dream factories could fulfill every desire at the cost of a few cents' worth of electricity.

We should never forget that all our knowledge of the world around us comes through a very limited number of senses, of which sight and hearing are the most important. When these sense channels are bypassed, or their normal inputs interfered with, we experience illusions that have no external reality. One of the simplest ways of proving this is to sit for some time in a completely darkened room, and then to gently pinch your eyelids with your fingers. You will "see" the most fascinating shapes and colors, yet there is no light acting on the retina. The optic nerves have been fooled by pressure; if we knew the electrochemical coding whereby images are converted into sensations, we could give sight to men who have no eyes. For the much simpler, though still extremely complex, sense of hearing, something like this has already been done on an experimental basis. The electrical pulses from microphones have been fed, after suitable processing, directly into the auditory nerves of deaf men, who have then been able to experience sound. I use the word "experience" rather than "hear," for we still have a long way to go before we can imitate the signaling system used by the ear; and that employed by the eye is vastly more complicated.

This is a good place to mention a somewhat eerie experiment once carried out by the great physiologist Lord Adrian. Going one better than the witches in Macbeth, he took the eye of a toad and cÈnnected it to an amplifier and a loudspeaker. As he moved about the laboratory, the dead eye imaged him on its retina, and the changing pattern of light and shade was converted into a series of audible clicks. The scientist was, in a crude way, using his sense of hearing to see through the eye of an animal.

One can imagine almost unlimited extensions of this experiment. In principle, the sense impressions from any other living creature—animal or human—might be wired directly into the appropriate sections of the brain. And so one could look through another man's eyes and even gain some idea of what it must be like to inhabit a nonhuman body.

We assume that our familiar senses give us a complete picture of our environment, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are stone-deaf and color-blind in a universe of impressions beyond the range of our senses. The world of a dog is a world of scent; that of a dolphin, a symphony of ultrasonic pulses as meaningful as sight. To the bee, on a cloudy day, the diffuse sunlight carries a direction sign utterly beyond our powers of discrimination, for it can (continued on page 144) Mind Beyond Matter (continued from 106) detect the plane of vibration of the light waves. The rattlesnake strikes in total darkness toward the infrared glow of its living prey—as our guided missiles have learned to do only in the last few years.

Could we interpret such sense impressions, even if they were fed into our brains? Undoubtedly yes, but only after a great deal of training. We have to learn to use all our own senses; a newborn baby cannot see, nor can a man whose sight is suddenly restored to him, though the visual mechanism in both cases may be functioning perfectly. The mind behind the brain must first analyze and classify the impulses reaching it, comparing them with other information from the external world, until it all builds up to a consistent picture.

There is no doubt that the range and delicacy of our own senses can be greatly extended by fairly simple means, such as training or drugs. Anyone who has watched a blind man reading Braille, or locating objects by sound, will agree without hesitation. (I once saw a blind referee umpiring a table tennis match—a feat I would not have believed possible. He had even refereed world-championship games!) Though the blind provide the most spectacular cases of enhanced sensitivity, there are many other examples. Teatasters, vintners, deaf lipreaders come to mind at once; so do those stage "clairvoyants" who can locate hidden objects by detecting intention tremors and other almost imperceptible movements on the part of their aides.

These feats are the result of intensive training or compensation for the loss of some other sense. But as is well-known, such drugs as mescaline and lysergic acid can also produce remarkable exaggerations of sensitivity, making the world appear far more real and vivid than in ordinary life.

A priceless mental power that is certainly attainable, because it has often been achieved, would be personal control over pain. The famous statement that "Pain isn't real" is, of course, literally true—not that it is any help to most of us when we have a toothache. Most (but not all) pain serves a valuable function by acting as a warning sign, and those rare people who cannot experience it are in continuous danger. One would not wish, therefore, to abolish pain; but it would be extremely useful to be able to bypass it, when it had served its purpose, by pressing a kind of mental override button.

In the East, this is such a commonplace trick that no one is particularly surprised by it. I have seen, and photographed in close-up, men and children walking ankle-deep in white-hot embers. Some were burned, but none felt any pain; they were in a state of hypnosis induced by religious ecstasy. One of my friends, while chatting with the chief fire walker at a Hindu shrine, once dropped a cigarette bÈtt. The fire walker stood on it and promptly leaped into the air. So much for the "tough native soles" theory; it is the psychological attitude that is all important.

The recent development of sound analgesia proves that the mysterious West also has some tricks up its sleeve. In this technique, used with success by many dentists, the patient listens to a pair of earphones and has to keep adjusting a volume control so that he can hear music in the presence of background noise. While attending to this task, he is unable to feel any pain; it is as if all his incoming wires are too busy to accept any other messages. Probably this, like the performance of the fire walkers, is a form of self hypnosis, but we can only do it with the aid of machines. Perhaps one day we may not need these mental crutches.

From hypnosis it is a short step to sleep—that mysterious state in which we fritter away a third of our pitiably brief lives. No one has ever been able to prove that sleep is essential, though there is no doubt that we cannot do without it for more than a very few days. It appears to be the result of conditioning, over eons of time, by the diurnal cycle of light and darkness.

The recent proof of the long-suspected fact that everybody dreams has led to the theory that sleep is a psychological rather than a physiological necessity; as one scientist has put it, it allows us to go safely insane for a few hours a day. This seems a very implausible explanation, and it is just as likely that dreams are a random and accidental by product of the sleeping brain, for one would hardly expect so complex an organ to switch itself off completely. (What do electronic computers dream about?)

In any event, some prodigies, like Edison, have been able to lead active lives on two or three hours of sleep a day, while medical science has reported cases of individuals who have not slept for years at a time and have apparently been none the worse for it. Even if we cannot abolish sleep altogether, it would be an immense gain if we could concentrate it into a few hours of deep unconsciousness, chosen when convenient.

The development of global TV and cheap telephone networks cutting across all time zones will lead inevitably to a world organized on a 24-hour basis. This alone will make it imperative to minimize sleep; and it appears that the means for doing so are already at hand.

Several years ago, the Russians put on the market a neat little "electric sleep apparatus" about the size of a shoe box and weighing only five pounds. Through electrodes resting on the eyelids and the nape, low frequency pulses are applied to the cerebral cortex and the subject promptly lapses into profound slumber. Though this device was apparently designed for medical use, it has been reported that many Soviet citizens are using it to cut down their sleeping time to a few hours a day.

Perhaps we shall always need the "balm of tired minds," but we will not have to spend a third of our lives applying it. On the other hand, there are occasions when protracted unconsciousness would be very valuable; it would be welcomed, for example, by convalescents recuperating after operations—and, above all, by space travelers on lengthy missions. It is in this connection that serious thought is now being given to the possibility of suspended animation, which we will need if we are ever to travel more than a very few light-years from the neighborhood of the Sun.

A safe and practical form of suspended animation—which involves no medical impossibility and may indeed be regarded as an extension of anesthesia—could have major effects upon society. Men suffering from incurable diseases might choose to leapfrog 10 or 20 years, in the hope that medical science had caught up with their conditions. The insane, and criminals beyond our present powers of redemption, might also be sent forward in time, in the expectation that the future could salvage them. Our descendants might not appÈeciate this legacy, of course; but at least they could not send it back.

All this assumes—though no one has yet proved it—that the legend of Rip Van Winkle is scientifically sound and that the processes of aging would be slowed down, or even checked, during suspended animation. Thus a sleeping man could travel down the centuries, stopping from time to time and exploring the future as today we explore space.

And this brings us to what is, perhaps, the greatest enigma of all. Is there a normal span of life, or do all men really die by accident? Though we now live, on the average, far longer than our ancestors, the absolute limit does not seem to have altered since records became available. The Biblical three-score-years-and-ten is still as valid today as it was four thousand years ago.

No human being has been proved to have lived more than 115 years; the much higher figures often quoted are almost certainly due to fraud or error. Our bodies are not like machines; they never wear out, because they are continually rebuilt from new materials. If this process were uniformly efficient, we would be immortal. Unfortunately, after a few decades something seems to go wrong in the repair-nd-maintenance department; the materials are as good as ever, but the old plans get lost or ig- nored, and vital services are not properly restored when they break down. It is as if the cells of the body can no longer remember the jobs they once did so well.

The way of avoiding a failure of memory is to keep better records, and perhaps one day we will be able to help our bodies do just that. The invention of the alphabet made mental forgetfulness no longer inevitable; the more sophisticated tools of future medicine may cure physical forgetfulness by allowing us to preserve, in some suitable storage device, the ideal prototypes of our bodies. Deviations from the norm could then be checked from time to time and corrected before they became serious.

Because biological immortality and the preservation of youth are such potent lures, men will never cease to search for them, tantalized by the examples of creatures who live for centuries and undeterred by the unfortunate experience of Dr. Faust. It would be foolish to imagine that this search will never be successful down all the ages that lie ahead. Whether success would be desirable is quite another matter.

The body is the vehicle of the brain and the brain is the seat of the mind. In the past, this triad has been inseparable, but it will not always be so. If we cannot prevent our bodies from disintegrating, we may replace them while there is yet time.

The replacement need not be another body of flesh and blood; it could be a machine, and this may represent the next stage in evolution. Even if the brain is not immortal, it could certainly live much longer than the body whose diseases and accidents eventually bring it low. Many years ago, in a famous series of experiments, Russian surgeons kept a dog's head alive for some days by purely mechanical means. I do not know if they have yet succeeded with men, but I shall be surprised if they have not tried.

If you think that an immobile brain would lead a very dull sort of life, you have not fully understood what has already been said about the senses. A brain connected by wire or radio links to suitable organs could participate in any conceivable experience, real or imaginary. When you touch something, are you really aware that your brain is not at your fingertips, but three feet away? And would you notice the difference if that three feet were three thousand miles? Radio waves make such a journey more swiftly than the nervous impulses can travel along your arm.

One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea or sky where there is a suiÈable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a second and more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh.

But even if we can keep the brain alive indefinitely, wouldn't it surely in the end be clogged with memories, overlaid like a palimpsest with so many impressions and experiences that there was no room for more? Eventually, perhaps yes, though I would repeat again that we have no idea of the ultimate capacity of a well-trained mind, even without the mechanical aids that will certainly become available. As a good round figure, a thousand years would seem to be about the ultimate limit for continuous human existence—though suspended animation might spread this millenium across far longer vistas of time.

Is this fantasy? I do not know; but I suspect that the truths of the far future will be stranger still. What will come after Homo sapiens we can imagine no more clearly than the caterpillar can conceive the butterfly dancing in the sun.