Life

[spectre 633]

Continuing my old thread

 

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The Body-Mind Relation

 

If there really is such a thing as a noosphere, it seems to me that, as it is composed of many minds, its relation to the Earth with her many bodies must be closely analogous to the general relation between mind and body.  And this being so, the body-mind relation is a key question for any student of life and the universe - something he must deal with in reconciling the worlds of the concrete and the abstract, the seen and the unseen.

 

With this thought then we come to take a close look at the brain, the mind's most accepted tool, which, being the body end of the body-mind connection, seems the obvious place to begin. The brain of course is the exchange center of the nervous system, the place where sensations generate ideas and ideas are expressed in action. Its importance to the boyd is suggested by the fact that, while it has only 2 percent of the body's weight, its operation uses 20 percent of the body's oxygen and blood. Its form, curiously enough, is like that of a resting bird with folded wings, for its hundreds of billions of cells correspond to the barbs, barbules and mircroscopic barbicels of feathers which, like neurons, fit together exactly, compactly and so intimately coordinated as to make the whole thing workable in shape and size. Perhaps that is why brain tissue is wrinkled and dense like a walnut or a bowl of spaghetti. And also why one must visulaize th e wings outspread if one is even to begin to understand the complexity and potentiality involved, a complexity that in a single human brain is comparable to all the telephone switchboards, exchanges and wiring patterns of computers, radio, TV and other electric equipment on Earth.

 

It used to be thought that the intelligence of animals was proportional to the size or weight of their brains. This would make the sperm whale with his twenty pound brain the most intelligent of earthly creatures, with no real rival on land but the elephant with his 13 pound brain. So someone propsed a new criterion; not brain weight alone but brain weight as a percentage of total body weight, which had the efect of promoting the marmoset and other small monkeys to the top in intelligence with the genus Homo only a bright second.

 

However, further research, you may be relieved to know, has indicated that neighter the relative weight nor size of the brain is a reliable clue to intelligence, nor even the size of the cells, but rather it turns out to be the number of cells that counts.  A critical experiment in this field was performed at Princeton University in 1955 in which normal salamanders (called diploied because they have two sets of chomosomes in each cell) were pitted against triploid salamanders (3 sets per cell) to see which could learn to thread a maze the fastest. Both are the same size despite the fact that triploid cells are proprtionately larger, because triploid salamanders for some reason compensate by producing fewer cells (including brain cells) in the same ratio.  So evidently  it must have been their advantage in cell numbers that enabled the diploied salamanders to master th emaze in less than a third the average number of trials required by the triploid ones.  Not that this should surprise anyone though, since the same principle clearly holds for telephone exchanges and computers, whose potency or value derives not from their size but almost solely form the number and interconnectability of their units.

 

 

 

The Sense of Fear

A hunted animal is commonly assumed to be very frightened when his pursuers close in on him. Yet his understandable urge to escape is not necessarily based on actual fear - at least not on "fear" in the human sense. Take a running antelope overtaken and killed by a lion. There can be no doubt that he suffers a severe shock, but it is a natural shock which may involve little or no pain or fear. The normal kind of pain that forces an animal to reduce activity until his wounds heal has obvious "survival value" in evolution, and so does his reasonable fear, but what could be the survival value of pain or fear in a mortally wounded creature who is soon to be out of the living world? I can't think of any value beyond the warning of danger in his despairing last cries, cries which, however, could be just as effective if produced by painless shock.

 

Studies of predation sugges that the prey usually behaves as if stunned, once the predator has seized him. He rarely struggles significantly and often does not even protest the fait accompli that has overtaken him. He may indeed be anesthetized by the shock if not the inevitability of being devoured by his natural superior. A case in point is the story of Major Redside, a British hunter in the Bengal jungle some fifty years ago, who had stumbled when crossing a swift stream, dropping his cartridge belt into the water. His companions happend to be beyond earshot and , now out of ammunition, he advanced in their general direction until he noticed a large tigress stalking him.  Turning pale and sweating with fright, he began retreating toward the stream.  but it was already too late.  The tigress charged, seized him by the shoulder and dragged him a quarter of a mile to where her three cubs were playing. As he recalled it afterward, Redside was amazed that his fear vanished as soon as the tigress caught him and he hardly noticed any pain while being dragged and intermittently mauled when the tigress played "cat and mouse" with him for perhaps an hour.  He vividly remembered the sunshine and the treeds and the look in the tigress's eyes as well as the intense "mental effort" and suspense whenever he managed to crawl away, only to be caught and dragged back each time while the cubs looked on and playfully tried to copy mama. He said that, even though he fully realized his extreme danger, his mind somehow remained "comparatively calm" and "without dread."  He even told his rescuers, who shot the tigress just in time, that he regarded his ordeal as less fearful than "half an hour in a dentist's chair."

 

Something of the kind also occurs during battle and on other occasions of severe stress and danger.  And it indicates that the more active the role one plays th eless one feels afraid. Soldiers in World War I, for example, often said that staying still in a trench under bombardment was harder on the nerves than going "over the top" to fight in the open; that, although it took guts to expose yourself, once you did so, the excitement of the action almost always made you forget the danger.  Or, as a physiologist might say, the adrenalin flow that triggers fear is greatly influenced by the state of the mind.

 

 

 

to be continued...

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,453]

Interesting read, looking forward to more. 

[spectre 633]

thanks bud

[spectre 633]

sense of fear added

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,453]

Nice update.  I'm really digging this thread.