Science Nonfiction

One afternoon when I was in the Netherlands in late 1994, I stood at the front end of a somewhat crowded train car on the outskirts of Amsterdam facing the seated passengers, all of whom seemed content and settled in their separate private selves. Some were absorbed in a newspaper or magazine, many were gazing out of the window as the sun-filled afternoon rolled by. As background for this little story I must tell you that I had been reading about neuroscience and consciousness studies for the last year or so---a sort of hobby of mine.

As I stood there mildly envying those seated passengers, I noticed particularly a slight middle-aged woman just a few rows from where I stood as she glanced out of the window, turned her head and looked at her watch, gazed at the back of the seat in front of her, and then looked through the window at the outside world again. She was just sort of looking around, here and there---when suddenly as though something underlying my consciousness had shifted, I was startled by a new perception. As I watched, her eyes---those windows of the soul---had become for me twin halves of a ‘mechanical’ binocular apparatus controlled by her hidden brain. Her brain was ‘doing’ the scanning and the zooming, choosing the visual input from moment to moment, aiming, focusing. I don’t mean that such were my thoughts, I mean suddenly I saw what was really happening---to me her eyes had become the functional equivalent of a pair of surveillance cameras connected to a remote source, which was her brain just a few inches away---the three-pound wizard perched behind and just above her eyes and hidden by a curtain of skull and hairdo and a little pill-box hat.

This sudden vision of mine had some of the entertaining flavor of a science-fiction movie in which a human face or torso is peeled back and the robot or insectoid alien is revealed as the true reality behind the illusion. And although I couldn’t see this lady’s brain, I could imagine it---as one imagines a bed behind a closed door of a bedroom, quite realistically. But the most interesting, the most fun of all of this was the way I actually saw the woman’s eyes as a remote-sensing device as they darted here and there, a totally-controlled monitoring device slaved to neural headquarters behind the scenes. And it was particularly amusing to know that this living science-nonfiction show was actually true, more accurate than would be the customary perception of just ‘a woman looking out of a window’.

In any case, on a whim, as a sort of game, I began trying to regard everyone in the car in this new way---as individual brains encased and protected, camoflouged as it were, by faces and expressions and hairdos that were all show, just facades, proxies for an organ whose internal connections numbered in the tens of trillions (some estimates up to 500 trillion).

My private little game worked wonderfully: I saw a train car full of faces that now seemed like mere surfaces, show pieces of illusion--although usually one tends to see a face as identity itself, as though to look at the face of Bill is to look at ‘Bill’. Those individual identities before me, with all their histories and memories and thoughts and emotions, were each packed somehow in a community of a hundred billion neurons (and at least ten times that number of glial cells) between the ears of each person I saw.

But what’s most amusing to me is that probably for most people, looking at strangers (or mates, relatives, friends, anyone) in this way, even briefly, would be bizarre, weird, loony. Shortly before he died, Buckminster Fuller said that the most important thing for parents was to teach their children that the sun doesn’t rise and set, it’s the earth that’s moving, with us on it. He thought that to pay some attention to the truth of the way things work was a good idea. I say take a look, they’re your eyes.