Chapter 3: BRAINWORK

The human skull is an impressive work of natural architecture, especially when bald. It seem to be an apt crown for a creature of will and decision. But look inside this formidable bone casing and see what a disappointing glob of ooze is the master of thought. Undifferentiated, it has a pasty white stuff over a grey matter, spangled with fibrils and fibers, the whole suffused with pink from countless blood vessels, and, if it could be dug into, it would reveal firmer membranes, and a chunky stem that connects to the long spinal chord.

The differentiation of large areas is so vague that some surgical operations are couched in how many grams (of the 2000 or so) are removed or how many millimeters of depth one may safely penetrate.

Unlike other organs in the body, the brain does not usually reject tissue transplants. This feature not only suggests that the chemistry of the brain is generalized but also why specific functions can locate here and there and relocate, too.

Brain operations are delicate partly because we do not know what to be delicate about. Still, successful brain operations must be as old as the oldest settlements of mankind, because a number of ancient skulls exhibit trephinations, penetrations by bores and saws, and a subsequent healing and continued life. What came out is unknown or perhaps the aim was to relieve pressure; there is, after all, little reason to believe that the atmospheric pressure on earth, or the electrical pressure for that matter, have remained conveniently the same. Anyone who has confused brains with "sweetbreads" at a butcher shop will agree that "the brain has many characteristics of a gland." And R. Bergland and R. Page go on to say: "it contains hormones, it is bathed in hormones, it has hormone receptors, hormones may serve as its synaptic neurotransmitters, and hormones modify the brain's main function, behavior. .. Endorphin and other hormones may be produced in small quantities locally within the brain but transported in larger quantities from the pituitary to the brain on demand." [1] We see one reason for the brain's innocuous appearance now: its innumerable cells are like a massive inelegant hotel, in and out of which hordes of tourists flit. It houses a great many transactions.

This grand hotel is well lit. It is completely electrified. Every neuron is an electrical capacitator. The hormones could not move so readily otherwise. For the brain lacks muscle to lever the hormones about, and it is insulting slang to call a man a "musclebrain." The blood capillaries of the brain are very numerous and carry around the food of the cells and remove their excrement. They also transport hormones to their work sites. If the mechanical pumping system is out of order, even for a few minutes, and the hormones do not get to work, many brain cells asphyxiate and the lights go out forever. The capillaries may burst, too, from time to time; the larger the rupture, the greater the damage, but the location of the stroke is more important; vital faculties may be impaired. Although the brain can switch many functions around its inchoate mass, there is a limit to its versatility.

Its liability to asphyxiations and strokes does not mean that the brain is overworked. A persuasive case can be made for the belief that humans have far more brain matter, especially of the highly touted "grey matter," than is needed for normal functions. J. Lorber found a "socially completely normal" young man with a large cranium, a 126 I. Q., and a first class honors degree in mathematics, but with cerebrospinal fluid taking the place of at least nine-tenths of the normal complement of cerebral tissue.

Highly excited and continually enraged characters are sometimes subjected to leucotomies in which, perhaps emulating unknowingly the ancestral practice, some material of the frontal lobe is cut or burned away like a malignant tumor, leaving the patient afterwards somewhat dulled but relaxed. One wonders whether there is a disproportion between the storage capacity and the practical facilities, among other problems, so that the active behavioral outlets are technologically backward. Perhaps this might account for the displeasurable unsatisfied agitation of people, who sense too much, undergo spasmodic muscular urges, and want to express an impossible number and variety of thoughts.

Suppose infants were to be typically relieved of some of their cerebral matter, in a practice like circumcision. (Frantically crying small children have been experimentally leucotomized, in fact.) How would they develop? Would they be nicer to their parents? Then Bleuler would not have to laugh at those who, he said, attributed insanity to the lack of family discipline.

They might even be relieved of one of the two hemispheres of the brain, preferably not the left hemisphere, which seems to have some rational qualities. One would hardly know the difference – after all, who knows that a person is going about with a kidney removed? – and, as we shall see, some difficult human problems might be solved. For one thing, everyone, without exception, would be right-handed; this would represent a considerable social gain and relieve many people's anxieties. But it might handicap the ten per cent or so of genetic left-handers whose left brain is on the right, and they would lose some of their more "rational" faculties! This could be prevented by waiting until the handedness of the infant is proven, but would leave society with its left-handers. Still, the government might wish to allow another ten per cent or some percentage to lose their left hemisphere as a low-budget method of supporting arts and culture, we would have an anatomically generated group inclined to be musicians, poets, and artists who will be right-handed, but in other major respects distinct from the rest of the population; they would probably not understand fully the joys of mathematics, logic and spelling; the caste system, sought for thousands of years in India and elsewhere, would become a fact.

Little is known of brainwork, but what is known can carry us surprisingly far in our conception of human nature. It is well, first, to remind ourselves of how the human brain and central nervous system relate to their lower class relatives of the animal kingdom, and how much of human activity begins, and ends, in the basement. Then we can suggest where to look in the central nervous system, especially in the brain, for the source of those operations that are peculiarly human: the activations and transmission system, the electric and chemical processes, and the proneness to specialization of functions found in the cerebrum. With this knowledge, we may venture such hypotheses as appear plausible on the dozen or so aspects of human nature that are the hallmarks of this book: the poly-selves, control, anxiety, instinct-delay, displacements and projections, memory, obsessions, habits, language and symbols, pragmatism and sublimation.

Animals sense their surroundings – smells, chemicals, sights, temperatures and so on. Their sensitivity can be more varied, greater, subjectively "more ingenious" than the human's, or less. Like man, "an animal does not react to all the changes in the environment which its sense organs can receive, but only to a small part of them." [2] (A carnivorous water beetle does not attack and devour a tadpole simply if it sees one, but it will attack any solid object, tadpole or not, if a kind of "smell of meat" arouses it.) Internal operations of the nervous system must contribute "motive" in animals.

There is a mutual relationship between internal and external factors in the sense of an additive influence on the motor response. A high intensity of one factor lowers the threshold for the other factors. A high hormone level increases the responsiveness to external stimulation; if the hormone level is low, very intensive external stimulation is required to bring the total of causal factors above threshold value.

Automatic centers of the Central Nervous System maintain a continuous flow of impulses to central nervous motor mechanisms; but some kind of block prevents an uncontrolled and chaotic discharge of muscles. The discharge requires adequate stimulation by signs typical to the species, whereupon an innate releasing mechanism removes the blockage.

All of this about the CNS and instincts of animals apply to humans. Rigidity of instincts and behaviors, and the restriction of choice and decision, in animals, generally are more than among most humans but are not to be exaggerated. That food cannot divert animals from sex and vice versa is of course incorrect, and so on to the confusion of decision-making, that is, the selection of what drive to pursue and how far, which is vulgarly considered to be a human problem alone. Any animal can take a long time to make up its mind – too long, in many cases, and disaster or failure or good fortune may result.

In the thirty years since Tinbergen wrote his book on animal instincts, ethology has run wild and is pressing upon the sacred functions of the human mind. We need to be most cautious in our defense, consequently. The cerebrum of higher animals directs the hypothalamus to cause the pituitary gland to stimulate by an "adrenocorticotrophic" hormone the adrenal medula to exude catacholamines and the adrenal cortex to emit corticosteroids that plague the motor and nervous system from the brain to the toes for action. The hypothalamus governs the pituitary gland, controls the clocks of the brain, alerts the body to changes soon to occur, and synchronizes the performance of the endocrines throughout the body.

The hypothalamus, buried deep in the brain, is so widespread among animal species that it is unlikely to be the source of distinctive human behavior or to have changed to become so. The fact that it is responsive to cerebral signals suggests that the "human-disease", when it affects the whole system just described, originates in the cerebrum.

The human anatomy offers essentially three brains, it is true – four, if the cerebral hemispheres are accorded autonomous status. One is reptilian (the archicortex), one from the lower animals (the mesocortex), and one from the higher animals (the neocortex). A. Koestler has argued that grave problems arise for humans because of "insufficient coordination between archicortex and neocortex [3] . He ascribes intellectual operations to the new brain, and emotional behavior to the lower, older systems. MacLean refers also the "schizophysiology" of the limbic, as the older is called, and the neocortical system, saying that the old brain provides a crude and confused animalistic and nonsymbolic picture of the outer world [4] . Koestler proceeds to the theory that rational behavior, housed in the neocortex, is interrupted, disorganized and overwhelmed often by the activity and responses of the older systems.

I cannot follow this reasoning. For one thing, it could take no account of the late splurge of research into inter-hemispheric differences and of late electrochemical research. More significantly, the theory seems to be based upon an old theory of human nature, the mind and body distinction, the reasons-and- emotions duality, the rational-irrational distinction, that has led psychological theory nowhere. The human can be viewed as fully nonrational, or as rational, but so can the earthworm. H. J. Morowitz has gone the limit and asks sympathetically, "Can Bacteria Think?" They are human-like in tissue, functions, and genetic coding. They respond to varied stimuli, exhibiting sensing, big-clocks, memory, and aimed organic mobilization (decision). The human is, of course, very different on traits that humans deem important.

The cerebral cortex or neocortex activates intensely and overall when stimulated by pain or strong anxiety. Blood flow, metabolism, and electrical fields and discharges increase. The person becomes alert to the self and the world around him. There is no question that the pragmatic philosophers were correct in assigning to anxiety, to the sense of problems, the major role in problem solving efforts, hence intelligence. Man would like to solve his problems by automatic reflexes but he must feel pain and anxiety, both specifically and generally before he can perceive the problem, and while he works upon it and resolves it.

The cerebral cortex, for all the noble brow it presents and the most important tasks assigned to it, results from a slap-dash design. Surprisingly, when the subject is at rest and awake, in a comfortable supine position with eyes closed in a silent laboratory and neither spoken to or touched, the pattern of flow throughout the cortex is not uniform. On the contrary, the flow is always substantially higher in the front part of the cortex than in the central or rear parts [5] . The density of blood vessels is the same hence "the remarkable difference in flow rate suggests that the overall activity level of the front part of the resting brain is about 50 percent higher than that of the rear parts." [6]

Apparently, as expected, the aware human is spending his quiet time "getting his head together." The phrases are: "busy planning and selecting" behaviors; "focused on inner thoughts, particularly on reflections on one's own situation;" "simulation of behavior." Notable is the fact that the perennially excited frontal region of the brain seems to suffer from poor evolutionary logistics, a merely ordinary blood circulatory system. It is as if Washington, D. C., had the same postal system as Detroit, but the employees worked longer hours. The situation suggests that the evolutionary saltation or quantavolution which precipitated mankind, in order to evade helpless confusion, may have selected large frontal brain mass but that this expansion in volume did not result in all-around equalized work assignments in coping with the problems presented.

Widespread among animals and working to all intents and purposes as it does in man, is the neuro-transmission system. In humans, neural impulses are passed from one neuron or nerve cell to another; 10 billion neurons, these with their projecting fibriles – an axon to emit a message, dendrites to receive them – are half in the brain and half elsewhere in the body. No two neurons are chemically the same, because, said Polyak once, "All neurons have different shapes." [7] And they carry differently shaped muscles along their dendrites, too, according to Crick. Between any two neurons exists a gap, a synapse, where chemical neurotransmitters wait like boats to ferry messages among the neurons. There may be a dozen types of boats; a few pick up a message merely to dump it, while the others transmit their messages dutifully.

An increased electrical potential of a neuron, relative to an adjacent neuron, makes it emit a charge which rides a chemical molecule, the neurotransmitter, across the synapse gap to hand it over to the adjacent neuron. The neurotransmitter then breaks down like the exhausted messenger in King Lear. It seems a great waste to lose these myriad molecules when they might be left to ferry many another charge between neurons; perhaps it is to keep the hormone factories humming. This island-hopping path may be considered "slow" or "fast" depending upon what kind of speculation one is indulging in. Speeds of a mile a minute are common. Delays here may be significant in letting messages go elsewhere. Also the messages may not get through because of the insufficiency of neurotransmitters to carry them and because of sabotage by other boatsmen.

The neurons are exercised to do their part. They beat electrically in the nervous system's rhythm of perhaps ten times a second. "Neurons... have electrical beats, and large numbers of them beat in place, as armies marching in step. When impulses come in, from the eyes particularly, the neurons begin to scintillate, to get out of step with each other, and the brain wave rhythm breaks up." So says Ralph Gerard [8] . Too much synchronization gives tubular vision, too strict an attention to one thing. Too weak a synchronization would promote inattention and flightiness. Perhaps, thinks Gerard, the strictness would depress attention and be a cause of mental depression; perhaps slackness would elicit anxiety, mania, even epilepsy.

We say, yes, this is an old and common system, but we can see in it some possibilities of human peculiarities. Gerard gives us more food for thought: the thresholds for messages crossing the gaps fluctuate; electron movement, Brownian movement, and other factors vary at any given synapse. If this were not the case, every input would excite exactly the same output. Innovation would be as minimal as with spinal and emotional reflexes. With threshold fluctuations the same, stimulus may vary the paths of its impulses and thus favor innovation. Of course, he suggests, in this case there would be less coherence and more flights of ideas.

We wonder whether the synapse may be the location of the instinct-delay that we regard as the basic glory and problem of humans. Gerard points out that

The synapse can only be present because it is important not to have a message go through on an express track from one receptor to one effecter. Otherwise, why break the nerve path and cause slowing, the chance of confusion, and all the rest? The synapse permits changeability, allows the units to connect now this way, now that way... Every synapse is thus, in effect, a decision point. A message comes to it from the pre-synaptic fiber; does it go out over the post-synaptic one or doesn't it go out? That is the decision the nervous system makes – at a near infinity of places and times [9] .

Many animals have the same system, indistinguishable in detail from the human. Let us grant that here may be the source of animal decision-making, for instance the determination to hunt rather than rest, or simply to rest rather than move. With this, I see two possibilities for the "Human Difference."

We may have a pollution problem: the human system may be dumping so many neurotransmitters and neuro-inhibitors into the synaptic canals that messages cannot pass or cannot pass clean. This would occur, say, if the human endocrine glands were overbusy at a constant rate, whether from mutation or some physiological constant, environmentally induced. Suppose that dopamines, which are neurotransmitters, generally clutter the passages: the results would be a universal set of schizophrenic behaviors. Remove a large proportion of them and we revert to the hominid.

The present interest in dopamine receptors in the brain and elsewhere highlights the electro-chemical complexity of the human being. Dopamine neuroreceptors are more numerous in the brains of diagnosed schizophrenics, especially in the limbic area and the candat nucleus. Depressing the receptors suppresses schizophrenic symptoms. The energizers of the dopamine receptors are numerous drugs, some of which exist naturally in the body. Does a particular diet or food do so? Does an atmospheric gas do so? A particle? An ion as attached, for example, to oxygen? Does ambient stress level? Does climate? (hot, cold, damp. . . ?) Winds? Could a combination of these stress the hominid to the point of humanness? And persist permanently?

The body absorbs a continuous supply of small negative ions, negatively charged molecules. There are some 1000 to 2000 ions per cubic centimeter of air over open land, in a ratio of five positive to four negative, according to Soyka and Edmonds [10] . Many reports declare overdoses of positive ions are unhealthy, inducing overproduction of serotonin and emotional imbalance and listlessness. A. P. Dubrov has assembled a volume of studies, many of them from the Soviet Union, on the effects that the geomagnetic field has upon the biosphere, including humans [11] . The two effects – the ion and geomagnetic – are related, and both are implicated in brain activity. At today's levels, they condition the anxiety level of humans, and the behavior of plants and animals. Whether the present rates were established in the course of human evolution is important for explaining human nature today, but is consigned to the volumes on Homo Schizo I and The Lately Tortured Earth for discussion. How these phenomena affect the speed of mental operations and memory recall is unknown.

Like people, who pollute their own environments, the brain is frequently its own poisoner. For, in a coup d'état which may have occurred at the time of humanization, the "higher center" of the brain seized most of the power to requisition the drug supplies of the body and to order the manufacture of more. Even though a hemo-encephalic barrier exists to protect cerebral tissues from most of the drugs going though the body tissues, the barrier can be breached by concussions, intoxication, and "affective storms" which result from the sudden flushing of the brain with certain hormones. The storm could originate from traumatic fear – accident, rape, battle, etc. Acute states of anxiety ensue. If "continuous and successive, they might weaken the hemo-encephalic barrier, causing an increase in permeability, and, consequently, the affective ability of the individual." [12]

The instability of the cortex is rendered more possible by its separation by other barriers from the midbrain extra-pyramidal apparatus. Cortical agitation may itself promote increased stress on itself, also, and on the central nervous system if it breaks up, as for example happens temporarily in hypnosis; its transactions with the midbrain and limbic system through the extra-pyramidal apparatus are destabilized.

A baffling problem is presented in that no single substance seems to control any given behavior of the human or his brainwork. The brain has a great many endorphins and peptides, which are identical with hormones found throughout the body. What instructions do they convey? Are they coded or merely combined in their association with other substances and electrical charges? The flow of adrenaline from the adrenal medulla, a neural tissue atop the kidneys, is excited by nerve fibers which can ultimately be excited by the cerebral cortex. Electroconvulsive therapy, for example, applied to the brain, activates the adrenal medulla. Drugs can motivate cerebral activity but also distort it. Since enhanced motivation always presents the problem of its control, the distorted attitude is most likely out of control.

The pituitary gland is associated with the brain, part of it being composed of brain tissues. It emits perhaps a dozen hormones. These affect growth; they stimulate thyroid gland activity, the sexual organs, pigmentation; they influence blood pressure; and so on. These processes and many others in endocrinology are not well understood yet. Substances come from several sources; they may have specific or general inhibitors. They may affect several organs, their quantities do not have well-measured effects. When later we speak of displacements, the multi-functional overlap in behavior affecting endocrinology becomes a factor of importance; it invites confusion (including perversions) in the absence of intense directiveness toward a goal.

If one also asks only which gland or organ is the most important determinant of human nature, one would have to give the traditional answer: the brain, and particularly the cerebral cortex. All else is almost indistinguishably animal and no peculiar human operations have been noted for any function or secretions. We cannot discount the possibility of a constant change of a quantitative nature in the total endocrinal system or even in the adrenals that would place the human in a distinctive drug environment, compelling him to behave differently – to think, to talk, to make war, to have gods. However, if this has happened, it is because of a "decision," a forced and involuntary command, of the cerebral cortex. It orders its own drugs, its own blood supply, its own electrical currents and charges. It can both reduce and increase its orders: that is the vital point. It may appear, all too early, that I am coming to the idea of the World as Will, to use Hegel's expression, so I must say that I am exceedingly aware of the complex interaction occurring inside the human and between the human and his environment. Homo sapiens schizotypus is not at all the traditional idea of cerebral homo sapiens sapiens.

The human cerebrum, we hypnotically repeat to ourselves, is much larger than the primates', even if exceeded by the elephants'. If the human central nervous system, including the endocrine glands, is not proportionately increased in size, we have a situation where electrical and chemical supplies have to be generated or, if not generated, then rationed among a vastly greater number of neurons and synapses.

This, although working against the first mechanism of Human Difference – pollution and excess – would yet have the same effect, of confusion, dispersion and delay by frequent non-achievement of synaptic threshold requirements, overworking feedback signals for more supplies. Far more displacements would occur. The most "ridiculous" and "irrelevant" behaviors and thoughts would be normal. A chronic general anxiety would be present: justified fears of failure coupled with continuous interference in the completion of tasks. This begins to look like the Human Difference.

That the speed of neural activity accounts for differences among species is unquestionable. Alexander von Muralt has called "saltatory conduction" a great advance in evolution [13] . The speed with which nerve impulses are transmitted is lowest in primitive forms and highest in mammals. It is 25 meters per second at 20 deg C in myelinated (sheathed) frog nerves to 100 meters in mammals. The velocity depends upon the conducting mechanism, the diameter of the fibre, the myelinisation of the fibre, and the ambient temperature. The cephalopod nerve must carry a far heavier bulk of fibre and consume much more oxygen to carry the same message as a frog nerve. The frog nerve relies upon tubular sheaths of high-resistant protein, myelin, to concentrate the passing electrical impulse, and upon feeding the impulse at nodal intervals between sheaths with ions and dyes to accelerate it by leaps from one sheathed interval to the next. Mammals have evidently a more efficient system than the amphibious frog.

Experimentation is in too early a stage to distinguish between man and primates with respect to their relative efficiencies in saltatory conduction. That man's conduction velocity may be less, or may put strains on the supply of charges and accelerators is conceivable; humiliating though it might be to possess a "regressive" evolution, this could promote a generally higher level of nervous tension, hence "intelligence."

Holding neural speed constant in all "higher" animals, there would still exist a speed problem with humans. We should inquire whether the human brain expanded coincidentally with humanization or "long before." If the two happened together, humanization might be the effect of slowed responses owing to greater synaptic distances. In the simplest model, two types of distances are involved in a stimulus response. Thus: the left hand transmits a feeling through the central nervous system to the right brain hemisphere, which feels "hot" but must transmit the information through the intervening fibers of the corpus callosum to the language center of the left brain, which then forms the words "it's hot !" for the voicing apparatus to exclaim. First, does the large size of the right cerebral hemisphere make any difference to the speed of the impulse of the heat signal? Second, does the distance traversed within the brain to inform the left brain mean another delay? Third, does the distance from the language center to the exclamation center and then the voice muscles add more delay? The answer in all three cases is probably "yes."

Unfortunately, we are not in a position today to know these three speeds, nor those of a primate with which we would compare them. The interhemispheric transfer time has been studied and times of from 3 to 28.5 milliseconds have been obtained for fairly comparable tests. R. Puccetti, calculating that a flash of light through the left visual field to the right hemisphere, thence to the left hemisphere for conscious reporting, would take 9.75 msec for a certain subject, reasons that perhaps twice this time, 19.50 msec, would be required for the right hemisphere to 'know' that the signal had been completed; that is, only after 19.5 msec would the transaction be fully perceived. He believes the delay must be unconsciously perceived but suppressed, "fudged over", to use the vernacular [14] .

Swanson and Kinsbourne found interhemispheric transfer times of from 2 msec to 21 msec depending upon the degree of uncertainty and displacement of location with which the subjects were presented the stimulus; the findings led them to doubt that the interhemispheric delay was significant [15] . The difference between 21 and 2 was assigned to the searching process. The authors grant the simplicity of the test. Even a minimal difference would be greatly enlarged if the brainwork had to zig-zag many times across the corpus callosum. (An experiment with a cat showed a first interhemispheric crossing of under 10 msec velocity and a second interhemispheric delayed response to occur 40 to 50 msec after the initial response.)

Swanson, Ledlow and Kinsbourne conclude that "crossing the structural link does take time, but the time is short and is overshadowed by other factors that involve how the subject distributes attention before stimulus presentation and how the stimulus directs attention after presentation. '' [16] This generalizes from tests so simple that ordinary animal behavior must involve many times the interhemispheric delay. And only in the case of humans is there a significant specialization that would necessitate interhemispheric transfer and coordination in a large proportion of brainwork and behavior. The human exercises many of his important qualities through myriad transfers.

When a hemisphere is performing one of its special functions, high electrical measures register, by contrast with the opposing hemisphere. The activity is evidenced in high average evoked potentials (AEP) and in electroencephalogram beta waves [17] . These results confirm that the experiencing which is taking place in one hemisphere is not occurring strongly in the other [18] . Under such circumstances, there must ensue over time a great many contradictions between the left and right brains, in memory, method, and predispositions of attitudes and behavior. Every new experience therefore requires more preparatory transfers for coordination and planning.

The "ever restless human mind" thus must be more than a metaphor and more than an abnormality of some people. To behave as a whole unity, decisively, with both hemispheres, requires continuous trade-offs of impressions. If enough cannot be done while awake, dreamwork must go on apace. Here, too, is a source of obsession. Transfer dyssymmetry of several types occurs analogous to coordinating two allied armies on a battle front, one can never be sure that all are agreeable, informed, supplied, and prepared for action, and the action carries its own nasty surprises.

But, before going further with the potentialities of the bicameral brain for producing human nature, a brief statement of the situation may be in order. Many studies have appeared in the past few years [19] . An impetus was provided by the availability of persons who had undergone a commissurectomy in which the cord of fibres constituting that giant commissure, the corpus callosum, was severed. With this, the great part of all direct connections between the two cerebral hemispheres is broken. The left side of the brain is not privy to new information or signals presented to the right brain, and vice versa.

The patient is not apparently abnormal; indeed, if the operation were performed to block epileptic seizures, he feels better, because the electric storming of the right hemisphere cannot cross the chasm of severance so as to storm the left hemisphere. Sperry wrote: "Everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left each of these people with two separate minds, that is, with two separate spheres of consciousness," [20] – together, we would add, with the general consciousness discussed above.

The gist of the studies, whether carried out upon normal brain structures or commissurectomized ones, is that the brainwork of the two hemispheres differs. Although either hemisphere can carry on all known mental operations alone, when the two sides are coordinated in the normal manner, each has its special functions and "superiorities." "Asymmetries are in general present at birth or in early childhood or even in utero.. very probably genetically determined.. not absolute, but are distributed along the spectrum.." [21]

The left hemisphere, which, contrastingly, connects with the right side of the body, is called dominant (except that in true left-handers the right hemisphere is dominant), not so much because it specializes in the logical and analytic processes, and verbal and mathematical functions, as because it controls the right hand. The right hemisphere specializes in spatial orientation, arts and crafts, recognitions of whole images, and music and acoustics, including vowels but not consonants. Generally the left brain is more localized, the right more diffuse and prehuman [22] .

Yet something of all of these occurs in both hemispheres. Some of it is culturally induced; fluent Japanese speakers carry their vowels on the left, westerners on the right [23] . The right hemisphere (until the Japanese case came along) was described by some students as feminine, the seat of intuition and artistic taste, whereas the left was labeled rational and correct.

Memory is notably diffused throughout the brain, although a single hemisphere or less could store more memories than one could ever recall. A hemisphere is insensitive to its sources. It does not footnote a datum as coming from outside or from across the corpus callosum.

In fact the brain receives, recognizes and stores information and sensory bits without discrimination. They all become electrochemical transmissions whether they begin as caviar or cacophony. Once they reach the brain the transmissions generate resonances in a number of cells, sometimes widespread, sometimes localized. If they are intensive experiences, they resonate thousands of times on top of the electrical rhythms already present in the cell. They dig in especially where similar circuits already are patterned, and both reinforce, refer to, and learn from (are modified by) the preexisting patterns. Discriminations of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste are created in the brain. A taste of nectar is a gang of electrically resonating cells with experiences of sweet things from the mouth. A mild electrical stimulation of related cells in the brain might provide an even sweeter taste.

The latest model of the brain – and there have been many before – views it as a repository of holograms. A hologram is a global representation of an object produced by two laser beams, one focused on the object prior to interfering with the other beam, and the interference pattern can record itself on a photographic plate with what our brains regard as verisimilitude.

Karl Pribram has illustrated the holographic process by a tennis novice watching an expert play. As he observes, his brain makes transformations of the whole configuration, activating and impressing the appropriate motor patterns. That is, the brain resonates to the watched behavior and is reminiscent of the gestalt theory of learning and problem solution [24] .

In his treatise on the brain, Pribram points out that any piece of an artificial hologram film reproduces the whole of the figure, which, if analogous in the brain, means that every cell or a great many clusters of cells might contain total images of much that enters the brain. This may be why, in so many instances, a lesion of the cerebrum is compensated for, the brain being in this regard one of the most dispensable tissues of the body.

In addition, the hologram concept lets one explain better one of the two basic types of logic engaged in by the brain to simulate the recapture of primate instinct, the analogue and the digital logics. Without reliance upon the calculating modes of the left hemisphere or of speech, the right-handed person can employ his left hemisphere on a parity basis with his right in accomplishing instant intuitions of the connections between all manner of distantly related objects, memories, and ideas by superimposing new holograms upon old and reacting to the new experiences in the light of the old.

The brain is perhaps receiving and storing prior holograms in the millions, and is recognizing its own when its ordinary feat is duplicated outside, as artificial holography. Animal brains must make holograms too. The point is that humans may be making two sets for each hemisphere. Such a situation may have grave consequences, because the two hemispheres are not identical and add different resources to the process.

The division of holograms, together with the specialization found in each hemisphere, and even adding the delays occurring in interhemispheric transmission, cannot overcome the centralization forced by the pragmatic needs of the one body, the shared limbic and midbrain elements, and the central nervous system and musculature otherwise. There exists a sensation of consciousness pervading the whole brain down to the stem.

For example, a concussion will usually act to depress generally all electrical activity; the localized blow is referred generally. Again, in a 15-year-old right-handed boy, callosally sectioned, the right hemisphere could not initiate speech, but could understand nouns and verbs, could carry out oral commands and could write with the left hand [25] .

S. J. Diamond describes a circuit that spans the whole brain from the parietal lobe on one side to the opposite parietal lobe, and which encounters the corpus callosum in passing [26] . Giraud describes a global sensory psychic experiencing, common to man and animals, that arises out of the sympathetic nervous system, glandular secretions and muscular tone [27] . Jerison warns against overemphasizing localization and specialization, which may be useful to isolate parts of the system in order to study them more easily: "recent evidence points to the waking brain as being a complex interactive system in which truly isolated functional systems probably never occur." [28]

Sommerhoff, who ignores the "split brain" entirely in his large treatise on the Logic of the Mind, writes "In terms of internal representations the unity of the physical self finds expression in a family of characteristic transformation expectations the brain assimilates during ontogenesis." The unity of the whole self requires the additional inner representations where the object is seen by the observer who knows he is observing. Thus the self comes from experiencing, and is the record of experiences and expectations of further experiencing.

The source of consciousness appears to be still in the brain stem. From there, even in commissurectomized subjects, some alternative – that is both left and right side – operations are controlled. Such operations "are capable of exercising a metacontrol over the higher processes of consciousness." [29] This would be the animal consciousness, not self-awareness.

How vulnerable the unity of the self is, and yet how adamant everyone is, including ourselves, about the self being an absolute unity. The analogy of a social organization comes to mind. It is in a perennial conflict between the division of labor and centralization. As Kinsbourne has pointed out, bilateralism, by which he means a highly coordinated dualism of the hemispheres (for learning, perception, memory, and volition, as his own effective investigations have shown, are independently able in each hemisphere), is not needed for linear information processing, hence specialization [30] . This is a matter of dispute. And a certain amount of information is dualistic.

It must be stressed that specialization in the brain is not complete in any respect, no more than the division of labor in society is ever absolute (there is always a shoemaker or tailor at work despite the great factories). Brain specialization is limited to a dominant ganging or bunching of cells such that they alone respond (or do not respond) unless they are excised, in which event the minor gangs take over their functions, on a reduced level at first, then increasingly so, and sometimes with full capacitation. The union shop, when on strike, so to speak, finds its work taken on by less skilled scabs.

We can assume that even the very minor specialized bunches here and there are active all the time. It may be these which are responsible for some of the competitive mutual inhibitions, as well as collaboration, between the hemispheres that Kinsbourne has noted [31] . Hoppe speaks of the quantitative and qualitative impoverishment of the dreams, fantasies, and symbols of commissurotomized patients, laying it to an interrupted preconscious interhemispheric stream [32] . He suggested that a "functional commissurotomy" may be present in some severe psychoses. That the hemispheres can pull themselves apart functionally seems no more absurd than the known cases of total hysterical paralysis or catatonism.

J. Levy argues that differentiation of functions which are lateralized is a result of competition whereby speech and language, e. g., develop in the dominant hemisphere and displace less elaborate psychic processes such as patterning images into the opposite sphere [33] . The source of this pushy competitiveness must be humanly genetic. Anatomical and physiological differences between cerebral hemispheres develop in the human foetus [34] . "Non-human animals have not been demonstrated to possess cerebral specialization in any manner similar to humans, that is, no double dissociations have been reported in nonhuman mammals." [35] The genetic impetus may have originated in a mutation to the large cerebrum, with a neural "weakness for data collection and transfer" in one hemisphere, which required continuous orderly attention.

That these minor locales may be disaffected is not an extreme view; the researchers, perhaps in their exuberance, speak of contradictions. When callossally sectioned, one hemisphere can be led to think and act angrily against the other. Are we to believe that there is no tension between left and right brains in the presence of specialism, when the corpus callosum is exchanging not only sensory information – albeit sometimes traumatic – but novel commands to change itself, give up its habits? Hence sensations of hesitation, doubt, reflection, disobedience may be part of interhemispheric relations since a hemisphere does not know the source of a message, it cannot be declared that doubt and disobedience and fear are "external" sensations, incapable of being incited from a source within, namely the opposing hemisphere.

Nor should we ignore another reciprocating effect of specialization. In society as a whole, a tendency to specialize intensifies efforts at coordination. The same logic may apply to interhemispheric relations. A great many more messages will flow as the brain specializes. This may occur in a given lifetime and be more cultural than genetic. The civilized capabilities are left-brain and may be at the basis of the larger ever-present anxiety of the civilized person.

Handedness is observable in some mammals, for instance lions [36] and various monkeys. It may have been elicited and stressed because human activity was being stymied by conflict and hesitation in the brain. A hand and the right one was potentiated, had to be given preference. The novel decisions (calculating, symbolizing) were being made by the left brain; perhaps it could not count upon the right brain passing the commands to the left hand without blocking or censorship. Otherwise why would not the left brain have resigned the extra quantum of dextrousness to the left hand under the control of the right brain? And passed its share of manual tasks to the right brain to execute, as the right brain does now do it?

The latter "choice" makes it appear that either the dominant brain by its peculiar specialization otherwise makes for dexterity, or that dexterity induces specialization in one hemisphere. But what do language, abstraction, logic, and symbolism have to do with dexterity? Is it sheerly genetic coincidence that the two are enclosed in the same hemisphere? The right brain could use dexterity, or bilateralism, as well. Music, sounds, spatialism, images: these need a right hand also. Nonetheless, a right-hander is left-brained altogether. And the brains of mammals, including primates, are only slightly asymmetrical, and behave, with clumsy hands, more like two right-brain human hemispheres.

The apparent solution for the human effect is to introduce a third factor, the fear of loss of control owing to the onset of left-brain specialization. Owing to a pressing need to specialize, whether genetic or electrochemical, a leadership or dominance problem is presented. "Somebody has to be boss" in the face of increased inputs of unresolved differential impulses, attention and decisions between the two hemispheres. "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease." Let the left brain, which is causing the new problems and is even physically enlarged to a degree, take the initiatives and give it the baton, the hand, the already most developed instrument for dealing with the world.

Sperry reported that monkeys with sectioned commisures accept either of two contradictory solutions to a problem, one solution coming from the left, the other from the right. Not so man. For matters in the right-handed domain, the left brain insists upon its solution even if wrong and forces the left hand to give in, if necessary. In its few manual competences, the right hemisphere does the same. It must be one hand, not two, else the problem will be sent "back to the drawing boards."

Species changes are rarely neat. A solution is piled upon unresolved problems. New tissue is made of old. A new task is given to an old bone. Two holes become a nose, two feet a fishtail. In cats and monkeys, personality, temperament, coordination, internal functions, alertness, activity, achievement of learning, and responses – all remain the same after the corpus callosum is severed [37] . Bilateral symmetry persists, rather uselessly, in the brain. The hominid surrendered bilaterality and gained a human mind. Human nature begins with an unbalanced brain and a determined hand.

Dexterity by its very existence reinforces poly-egoism. Apart from what may be happening in the brain (though never separated from it), the full anatomical laterality, manifest in a thousand ways, makes itself felt as a division between major and minor modes, dominance and subordination, ruler and ruled. The dominant body side is even sensed as heavier, Ornstein has pointed out. When someone slaps his own forehead guiltily (usually with his dominant hand) and says "I could kick myself," it would probably be with his dominant foot.

The brain as such is an insensitive organ, so we feel no contradiction in the left brain dominating the right side of the body. Hence the right (though representing the left brain in action) is obviously authoritative in legend, custom, law, politics, work, and other practice [38] . The right is morally right. Right-sided behavior and authority are connected. Since the right side is authoritative, the opposite of authoritative is antiauthoritarian. Often it is "leftist." We may surmise that also in the individual the left-side is anti-authoritarian. The basic polyego is of a ruler and ruled, but the ruled is frequently anti-authoritarian, a leftist. In authoritarian cultures the left-handed are said to use the "wrong" hand (e. g. Alsace, France). In administering a pretest of a national survey questionnaire, employing the occasion of an all-female meeting of Planned Parenthood, a birth control group appealing to independent-minded women, I observed that the baker's dozen of members present were all left-handed. I received incredulous and suspicious reactions when I remarked about it afterwards.

An experiment may be presumed that would demonstrate that persons protesting an imagined "capture" by another party (paranoia) will reveal the resentment against the offense by uncoordinated hand behavior when compared with authority-accepting subjects. Perhaps even the enduring conflict between "science" and "humanism", the "Two Worlds" of Professor Snow, can be construed as an interhemispheric conflict situation.

The specialization of the left brain encompasses speech, grammar, figures, signs, abstract solutions, classical logic, and the dominant right hand movements. These are products, not the Ding in sich, the underlying drive of the brain. They must refer to a more basic concept, and I find it in the term "order." "Order" contains nuances of "Truth," authority, goal-setting, completion, instrumental and linear progression. This is all that we would expect from human nature (of course, the left brain simultaneously contains its mammalian routines of half the body). We need only turn over the final card: the opposite of order; what prompts order: confusion, delays, fear, disorder. We need not be amazed and then suspicious at the stupendous analogy with society and social thought, where right and order fight together against anti-authoritarianism and disorder.

It may be that the more the asymmetry the greater the disorder of the brain, the greater the perception of fear and of the need to control the self and the world. Sex differences may be salient in this regard. Lionel Tiger reports: "The single fact, that some part of the brain is characteristically different in males and females, is one of the most significant findings in neuroendocrinology." [39]

Perhaps the hormonal variation is related to brain asymmetry, for we discover in the research of Jerry Levy proof of the greater symmetry (bilaterality, hominidity?) of the female brain. The right hemisphere of a woman has greater verbal capacity than the male's and her left brain can handle perceptual information better than a man's. This confirms older psychological tests comparing boys and girls on spatial and language tasks.

It does not obviate the possibility of total cultural determination of the difference, but this is not likely. The differences collate also with the insistent, though disputed, claim that men are more dominant and power-seeking than women. Again, it would be important to have intensive research done on the correlation between the gamut of asymmetries and the range of control demands with regard to the self and others.

In much mental illness and in personal and collective disaster, as Deikman and Parry have indicated [40] , there occurs a takeover of behavior by right hemisphere religious, aesthetic, ecstatic, imagistic thinking and intuitive irrational action. The reader may be reminded of an expression from World War II: "There are no atheists in foxholes." According to A. Shimkunas, in schizophrenia the left hemisphere is overactivated and overloaded, and is accompanied by a highly arousable right hemisphere. Interhemispheric transfers are defective and cannot be processed in the commonly organized manner [41] .

If there is a fear of oneself, where does the presence and fear of several selves and of ego dissolution originate? The split brain is obvious but whence the multisplit? As ventured above, the minor locales of specialization in both hemispheres may, in handling events, offer different solutions than the dominant solution, no matter in which sphere. I am tempted to suggest that the resisting major hemisphere may enlist minor special spheres as allies. For instance speech can be interrupted by a blockage of imagery from the right hemisphere. The blocked imagery can go to vague speech centers in the right brain or spread to motor centers that refer back to the major speech center as compulsive vocalization. Bleuler (359f) described how patients were observed to operate on as many levels of identities as they had "complexes," whereas normal people inhibited irrelevant material.

Although certain human operations generate from a bicameral brain and the problems of its coordination, we must not regard these two cerebral chambers as the two centers of homo schizo. The conditions resulting from the brain discoordination can include not only a sense of several identities and no identity at all, but also an interplay of elements, messages, responses, and directions within a single hemisphere. As a by-product, and ultimately a possibly great achievement (or defect) of the lack of phase coupling between the two hemispheres, elements of a single hemisphere may develop embarrassing or inspiring contradictions.

A one-hemisphere person can maintain as many mind-sets and behaviors, perhaps, as a two-hemisphere person can. These would include neurotic and psychotic and all other types of behavior. This thesis stands yet unproven. Perhaps it cannot be proven, like the feral man, the hypothetical human who from birth has not known humans. Infants are on occasion born without corpus callosa and other commissures, but this condition is accompanied by abnormalities that render general judgements difficult. Persons with extensive one-sided brain damage are studied under similar limitations. The origins of human behavior in utero and its rapid extension outwards from birth, make even the meaning of post-callosolectomy behavior in a young child unreliable. His lack of basal anxiety, or excess, or typicality in respect to it, can hardly be laid to the sectioning of his corpus callosum.

The reasons why psychosis and neurosis may be possible in persons with severed callosa are several: observers and experiments practically all agree that such persons are surprisingly "normal," which for us means to possess the nature of "homo schizo" and the potential for mental disturbance. Second, the two hemispheres still retain rich connections with the limbic system through the brain stem, and through this indirectly with each other; both the direct and indirect connections can produce typical and atypical behavior. Third, within itself, each hemisphere carries thousands of well-trodden neural pathways, including atypical ones, so that each can maintain its own peculiar behaviors; it does not matter absolutely that these paths drive off the cliff, so to speak, when they arrive at the sectioned callosum.

If a living person is discoverable who by mutation or accident has always subsisted upon one hemisphere, we would have to argue that he or she is not quite human. He should reveal a defect on the basic parameters of homo schizo that we have laid down. That he would not be devoid of human qualities and would be generally human might be surmised; the heavy acculturation that would discipline his mind and behavior from birth onwards would earn him membership in the human race.

Pursuing this line of reasoning leads to the possibility that humanization occurred in one place, at one time, to one person and with sufficient systematic force to account for a left-brain/ right brain difference plus an endocrinal or electrical potential, say, that conferred what we call "human nature" soon upon a small number of persons and then later upon a larger number. (Yet once more we reserve the possibility that only a minority of humans have possessed the dominant genetic structure peculiar to the species, which was necessary to establish the constitution and behavior of the species.)

We have fixed upon hormonal and cerebral imbalances as the probable source of human delayed-instinct behavior. Humans are prone to hormonal and electrical irregularities in the processes of neural transmission. They also convert a phylogenetic bilateralism into a species-specific division of labor and heavy-handedness. There is enough "wobble" and "conflict" in message transmission and brainwork to delay all instinctive behavior requiring cerebral references, to the point of genetically predisposing self-awareness or a poly-self, a general fear or anxiety, and a grasping for control wherever the attention may settle, in order to assuage fear and gain self-control.

The remaining concepts that were introduced in order to explain human nature in the first chapter can be explained readily in terms of the brainwork already described; these would be memory and obsession; habit and compulsiveness, to which I now append psychosomatism; and displacement, utilizing language and symbols. Memory consists of electro-chemical gestalts or holograms diffused around the brain with some asymmetry: so much we have said. A recent theory, not to be dismissed, even argues that every neuron contains all memories. The deeper the imprinting, or the more active the electrochemical gestalt, the more obsessive it becomes, prone to compete with other experiencing for attention and volition; by these last terms – attention and volition – we mean connecting with general consciousness and pushing past or suppressing all other gestalts of the moment with a heavier charge, "beating them to the punch." Presumably, unlike animals, the human develops his memory by continual brainwork; that is, memorizing is itself an obsession, transferring and reinforcing memories is part of the overtime behavior of the human mind. The desire to forget is in competition with the fear of forgetting. Who is to judge when memorizing has become obsession, and should cease? Decisions of what to forget and what to remember are "policies" of the "highest" importance to the person and to society. I shall have more to say of this in the next chapter.

Enough has been said earlier on habit and compulsion to carry us forward into the subsequent chapters. Memory, obsession, habit, and compulsion all reduce to a single basic operation in the brain: that of repetitiveness. It is for the ameliorators of undesirable symptoms and for ethical philosophers and politicians to make innumerable distinctions of practical conduct. People and cultures can be graded and scored, encouraged and deprecated, in hundreds of ways. Within the brain, sometimes dealing with itself, at other times transacting with the outer world, a constant busyness occurs which a) experiences by internal and external sensing, b) imprints neurons electrochemically, c) distributes and redistributes charges, and d) emits commands, many to be aborted, to change some internal function or external relation.

Homo schizo's aim in life is to recover his instincts so as to reduce fear. In a roundabout way, the being seeks to control all the ultimately uncontrollable operations to reestablish the tranquility of conscience-less, instinctive behavior. Even when unsuccessful and painful, he persists. Given the options of a blow from outside or an unending succession of self-blows, what creature would choose the way of man and rest content with it? What blow can equal the premeditation of death – a thousand blows to a coward and who is a hero, except the animal, while man suffers the inevitable consequences of identification with the dead, poignant recall, projections into the future and anticipations thereof?

All brain operations instigating somatic change are psychosomatic conversions. This is obvious, upon reflection: the sight of food stimulates the appetite, which sets the guts to "growling." Indeed, it is no quibble to say that all brainwork is somatic, hence psychosomatic; every thought leaves its trace. But even psychiatrists say "psychosomatic," meaning some physical abnormality that they will track to its psychic lair and despatch by psychotherapy. At the same time, if possible, they will be applying medicine and surgery to the physical wound. They are materialists, as is this book. In what we are saying, there appears to be no need to introduce a new kind of psychic essence. Going along this route, our ignorance, too, is assumed to be materialistic.

Many observers, even, or should I say, especially, medical men, incompletely realize the full "harmony" (to use a pejorative term paradoxically and with malice aforethought) of psychosomatism and "purely" mental aberration. So we find, for instance, Hoskins accepting the common idea that schizophrenics are frustrated, inadequate, lacking in robustness, and unable to face the stresses of life [42] .

The same can be said of infantry soldiers being withdrawn from the front lines. The losing battle of control has been fought in the inner and in the outer systems, in the tissues and in the conventional expressive apparatus of voice and conduct. Not only this – crowds of schizoid "draft-dodgers" have escaped the line of battle and carry on in politics, the stage, in all walks of life – not least at the dinner table.

"If anything can go wrong, it will," is more than a joke in psychosomatism. There seems to be no limit to where the brain can reach in its flights from fear. It is not only a matter of being tired in the morning, but also of paralysis, of being covered with open sores, of a stomach digesting itself, of fingers like claws, of heart attacks, of impotence, of deathly coma. The brain, and it must be the "higher centers," dealing with the "lower centers" in lieu of dealing with the outside world, exercises its obsessions and compulsions. "The stomach doesn't need more acids? Give it acids anyway." "I've already ejaculated a holy word? I'll repeat it a hundred times."

The brain's decision to do one of these seems to be based upon a victory, a pyrrhic victory, of course, of one lively gestalt over another, both sides unleashed to battle upon the breakdown of the ego order. Both have their "traditions" or habits behind them, their memories and training, their proneness, so that whether a person psychosomatizes or bays at the moon is predictable to a degree, this despite the fact that both tendencies are rooted in the dense thicket of same-seeming cerebral neurons.

If all psychic phenomena are somatic and have somatic effect, is the reverse also true, that all somatic disease is psychic? If a skier breaks her leg in a fall, does she have a psychic wound? Medically, it may be irrelevant to say so: an ambulance, a hospital, a bolt, a cast, and in several months she will be skiing again. Psychologically, her case may have so many aspects as to defy analysis in a few lines; to quote her mother, "She's crazy to take chances like that, just to be with the others."

Perhaps further study might arrive at the conclusion that the only facet of the whole affair that was not psychic was the breaking of the bones. Then it is like a duodenal ulcer; the only facet that is not psychic is the ulcer. Or the heart attack of the manic depressive; only the cardiomuscular erraticism is not psychic. It is probably significant that most people, in explaining a personal accident, find themselves at fault; we suspect that the source of the guilt feelings may be not only their religious training, but a private knowledge that they were psychically not in command of themselves. "Civil conflict" within the brain, because of specialization and the larger regionalization, must be far more frequent than observed, even continuous. It is the monitor and censor from the dominant section that gives out regular bulletins that "All is quiet on the western front" – until the front collapses.

Migraine (megrem, ultimately from the Greek and Latin hemicrania, half-skull) may provide significant testimony of inter-hemispheric conflict. Migraine is a common severe headache of one side of the head, occurring more frequently among women. Since no apparent organic cause can be assigned that does not merely reiterate the symptom, and because psychic distress often precedes a migraine, it may be heavily psychosomatic, more specifically an ego conflict engaging the left and right cerebral hemispheres.

The preference of the disease for women may be attributed to their more eccentric endocrinal secretions and indicates that the chosen weapons of battle are hormonal, and the crux of the battle the resistance to an equilibrated flow in the handling of material that requires smooth inter-hemispheric cooperation. That women are less brain-lateralized than men would appear to excite less hemispheric conflict, unless the psychic cause of the conflict was not in a prominent aspect of laterality, that is, not in speech or handedness. I have noted that a mother and daughter suffering migraine were, respectively, rigidly conscientious and slackly rebellious, opposites in temperament. Perhaps the source, then, is in a general neurasthenia, a question-begging word, but at least meaning a genetic lability with respect to brain-transfer under stress and hence a potential responsiveness to fear-reduction therapy. To the genetic lability is added the ambiance, the mother in the case cited, who demonstrated the model and earned emulation by identification [43] . Homo schizo does not possess psychic command of himself. It is rare that a person will acquire a strong, united selves-image and be able to play the game of countering one anxiety with another, each in a positively desirable guise, and come to do this so habitually that one's whole character appears to be instinctively balanced. Whereupon, if anything goes wrong, one may correctly say "it's not my fault," and "Bad luck;" or a bacterium, or a structural genetic effect is a sufficient explanation of the evil. As for the brain tissue, it is a "no-fault" system. It moves in remorseless neutrality. Sensory data, whether endocorporeal or exocorporeal, turn on and off the same kinds of gestalts, stimulate the same score of hormones. The body system is more passive, it carries on by means of a skin, the animal distinction between an inner and outer world, but the human has in his nature to evade this skin-deep difference, to shame the snake and shed his skin a thousand times a season.