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Introduction
True artists and true scientists have firm confidence in themselves. This confidence is an expression of inner strength which allows them to speak out, secure in the knowledge that, appearances to the contrary, it is the world that is confused and not they. The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place. In that moment of insight he, and he alone, sees the obvious which to the uninitiated (the rest of the world) yet appears as nonsense or, worse, as madness or heresy.Gary Zukav
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
It is, so say humans, the most important thing in the world, but it looks as interesting as intestines, and indeed was frequently drawn formerly as if intestinal, a tube from start to finish. Our forefathers were more intrigued by the pulsing heart, the moody spleen, the color-changing liver, the wandering and peristaltic gut. Even urine, in their opinion, held more excitement than the brain.Anthony Smith
The Mind
Sometimes you are a brain-snatcher.
You imagine yourself the Chief Curator of a futuristic museum of brains. You walk down fluorescent corridors filled with gray, wrinkled brains stored in formalin-filled jars to prevent decay.
On your left are the brains of the brilliant writers, artists, and composers who had bipolar disorder (manic depression), a genetic illness characterized by states of depression and mania that may alternatecyclically: Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Cole Porter, Anne Sexton, Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Mahler, John Berryman, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Herman Hesse, Mark Rothko, Mark Twain, Charles Mingus, Tennessee Williams, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ezra Pound. In one smaller bottle are some fragments of Ernest Hemingway's manic-depressive brain — all that is left after he shot a bullet through his skull.
You give a little tap on the jar marked "Poe." His cerebrum jiggles. Never more, never more. Genius and insanity are often entwined. You put Poe back in his place.
Today you are not interested in the artists and writers but in the strange brains of great scientists. Instead of having bipolar disorder, many great scientists in your collection were obsessive-compulsive — they felt compelled to commit meaningless repetitive acts such as excessive hand washing, collecting, or counting.
You walk a little further, wrinkling your nose at the strange chemical odors.
On your right are a few clear jars. You reach for the one marked "Isaac Newton," open it, and drag your fingers over his gray-white frontal lobes. Might there be remnants of his genius preserved in his neuronal networks: the time he formulated the law of gravitation or studied the nature of light? Could some fossil of his hatred toward his father and mother be buried within his brain's strata like an ancient ant trapped in amber? How could this great scientist have been such a suspicious, neurotic, tortured person? There were so few students going to hear Newton's lectures at Cambridge that he often read to the walls.
The brain: three pounds of soft matter that can take a split second of experience and freeze it forever in its cellular connections. A 100 billion nerve cells are the architecture of our experience. Recent studies have even shown that human talents are reflected in our brain structure. As just one example, consider the dendrites — tiny branches that convey signals to nerve cells. It turns out that machinists have more dendrites in certain areas of their brains than salesmen, who are less clever with their hands.
Is Newton still here in the wet organ draped by your palm? Could we reconstruct his memories? Would Newton approve such a breach of privacy?
You return Newton's jar and glance longingly at some of the other scientist brains in your possession: Oliver Heaviside, an eminent, brilliant Victorian mathematical physicist whose nails were always cherry pink; Henry Cavendish, one of the greatest scientists in British history who made discoveries in diverse fields of chemistry, electricity, and physics but who was so shy that he ordered his female servants to remain out of sight or be fired; Sir Francis Galton, distinguished British explorer, anthropologist, and eugenicist known for his pioneering studies of human intelligence, who once resolved to taste everything in the hospital pharmacy in alphabetical order. He got as far as "C" and swallowed some castor oil. Its laxative effects put an end to his gastronomical experiments.
Heaviside, Cavendish, and Galton are perhaps better preserved than Newton. Their brains are perfused with glycerol and frozen to — 320 degrees Fahrenheit with liquid nitrogen. Your cryonicist friends refuse to give up hope that memories still reside in the brain cell interconnections and chemistry, much of which is preserved. Maybe they are right. After all, far back in the 50s, hamster brains were partially frozen and revived by British researcher Audrey Smith. If hamster brains can function after being frozen, why can't ours? In the 1960s, Japanese researcher Isamu Suda froze cat brains for a month and then thawed them. Some brain activity persisted. Even as far back as 1891, Dr. Varlot, a surgeon at a major hospital in Paris, developed a method for covering people with a layer of metal in order to preserve them for eternity. This approach, however, probably did not appeal much to those hoping for eventual resurrection.
But what if there is an afterlife? You bang on the giant thermos bottle containing Oliver Heaviside's brain, causing the brain to splash, sounding like a drunken fish. When he died Heaviside's brain was immediately frozen. Therefore, if there is an afterlife, he must have already experienced it by now. What would happen if his brain were revived?
You shake your head to change your direction of thoughts.
There is one gem missing from your collection: Nikola Tesla, a visionary genius, a great electronics inventor, a man disturbed by round objects, particularly the pearls in women's jewelry.
You press a time-travel button on...
Strange Brains and Genius. Copyright © by Clifford A. Pickover. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
