Dublin Opinion

When I was in primary school I visited the Natural History Museum just off Merrion Square with my class – a not untypical experience of childhood. The museum was then – and is still probably now - dominated by a skeleton of a whale suspended from the ceiling in the main room.

The dust covered exhibits were the usual biological ephemera; different forms of organic matter preserved long passed their date of expiration by a variety of scientifically developed methods of preservation. Of all the potentially fascinating items vying for space in the brain stem dedicated to my long term memory there was only one that managed to be lodged forcefully enough to be recalled with particular clarity to this day. It was a rather small display, tucked away on a shelf on the first floor beside the back stairs.

As we filed down the wide steps to get back on to the coach I spotted a human brain floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

At least I presume it was a human brain; it could have been a monkey’s but the strength of my response suggests that I was sure it was human (not that in terms of size, colour and shape there is much difference – it’s hard to determined advanced intellectual ability and sophisticated motor skills when the cognitive organ is pickled in a dust covered jar. It’s more likely that it was simply labeled “The Human Brain”).

My immediate reaction was to think how similar it was to a cauliflower. While I thought this, I was also aware that this realization was being processed by an irregular mass in my head that was no grander than something that looked like an ugly white vegetable. I should mention at this point that, at the dinner table, I was never a great fan of the cauliflower.

Woody Allen said the brain was his second favourite organ. But in the innocence of my pre-pubescence the brain was closest to my heart.

The reason for my fondness is no doubt down to my own rapidly developing sense of self, an identity that I associated with the inner voice of consciousness, which, although I didn’t understand its circumlocutory ways, I understood to come from my brain. Of course, there are different theories about when self-consciousness begins. Lacan*, with his mirror stage, suggests that a notion of a self begins in infancy, when the young child recognizes themselves as a single joined up entity; a self (as opposed to a jumble of disjointed hands, arms, chubby thighs and black-toed feet) when they see themselves in the mirror for the first time.

So to me, at this point, the brain was pretty damn important. It was the god that dominated my every waking hour and although it let me down from time to time, especially when trying to learn French, it was still, within the circumlocution of my existence, the be-all and end-all.

To see that it was nothing other than an ugly lump of matter was a bit of a come down.

There was also a sneaking suspicion, which probably festered somewhere between the cerebral cortex and the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus, that my brain, in terms of it performance and ability, had more in common with the cauliflower than the brains hosted by many of my contemporaries.

I only bring this up now because, of late, my brain has felt about as useful as a cauliflower, particular when it comes to writing worthwhile blog posts on the issues of the day.

Because of my current circumstances, I’m too busy to consume by usual diet of articles and features that make putting together coherent, hopefully intelligent, blog posts possible. I’m not moaning but with a new child at home the only media I’m consuming comes from the livid flicker of the telly. And unless by blog posts are going to be about the cerebrally eviscerating porn that is celebrity big brother, (which is only taken in peripherally anyway – yes Dr. Ben, I’m one of those people who HATES Big Brother) I currently have very little to write about.

* Although Lacan’s ideas have feed directly into contemporary theories of structuralism and post structuralism, they are now considered by the scientific community to be nothing more than post-Freudian hogwash. But here are some more interesting theories of consciousness that I have come across. According to Daniel Dennett, there is no core self as such. This is an illusion created by the brain. Rather, the self is a product of a ‘centre of narrative gravity’, where the entire cerebral cortex draws together several parallel strands of narrative content. It works like a natural language that gives the appearance of a unified stream of consciousness generate by an apparent ‘unified intender’.

According to an article published in pubmed “neuroscientists believe that, in humans and mammals, the cerebral cortex is the “seat of consciousness,” while the midbrain reticular formation and certain thalamic nuclei may provide gating and other necessary functions of the cortex”. However the writer points out that science is limited in examining the subjectivity of the brain because the person trying to be objective, the scientist, is subject to the subjectivity of the subject, if you get me. Or to put it another way: “How can one be objective about the subjective? A stoplight emits electromagnetic waves in the 760-nm range; this tells us absolutely nothing about the redness of red. Redness is a quality known only through the subjective or first-person point of view. This is referred to as “the hard problem,” to distinguish it from easier problems of memory, attention, learning, and so forth.”

In his latest novel, The Echo Maker Richard Powers tackles the knotty problems of consciousness. The main character goes into a coma after an accident only to wake up with a rare form of schizophrenia. His condition means that he doesn’t acknowledge his sister as his sister. “She looks like his sister, talks like his sister, knows information only his sister could know, but he’s certain she’s merely an actor playing a role.” He effectively freezes her out of his life. Everything else in his life continues on as normal, his relationships with his friends and girlfriend, as these are based on memory. However, his sister is devastated, as her own identity has been completely bound up with saving him.

Through this narrative, Powers asks “are we who we are, intrinsic to a brain or even a soul? Or is there no intrinsic self, making us just clusters of cerebral nodules whose inter-relation may be damaged and altered at any time? Or are we how others define us? And if that definition changes, do we change as well? And where can love fit in all this? If love can’t help cure Capgras, Karin thinks, then maybe love itself is a form of the disorder, “making and denying others, at random”.

All interesting questions and of course, with a cauliflower brain I clearly don’t have the answer. All I know is that I still have Powers previous novel, The Time of Our Singing, sitting unread and gathering dust on my bookshelf.