The Tannhauser Gate
Chapter 5
“The area dividing the brain and the soul is affected in many ways by experience: Some lose all mind and become soul — insane. Some lose all soul and become mind — intellectual. Some lose both and become accepted”. Charles Bukowski
I sat on the porch, looking up at the cold starlit sky above, trying to figure out how the constellations would look different back home while pondering on the mysterious concept of infinity. It was hard to grasp that it had no end and was expanding.
I got up and walked around the porch looking at the construction exploring what fascinated me with porches. They simply appealed to me, maybe owing to my American passion through their almost cliche-like role in American culture. Suddenly my eyes caught something stuffed in between the boards. It was unmistakenly a pack of cigarettes tugged between the fencing of the scaffold.
My heart started pounding as I grasped them. I hadn’t had a smoke since Vic was born. His birth collided with a European-wide ban of my favorite click cigarettes, which had a delicate flavor combining apple and mint. The ban covered adding any compounds that would make smoking more accessible. As reasonable and logically as it sounded, I did miss them. But I had decided back then to quit. It felt like a call from above “Vic being born, plus the ban equals now its time to quit Hermann Cy Hasting.” Looking at the cigarettes before me, I couldn’t believe it.
Here they were, returned from the God above. Apple and mint. I had decided to smoke them at the first glimpse. I was surely going to smoke them as my little testament to the growing body of evidence already back then, of the illusion of free will and conscious decisions. I knew that any rejection would merely be a postponement of the inevitable.
I sat down and leaned back while I lighted one. As I exhaled, I looked up and watched the smoke leaving my mouth. It created clouds in the cold night before me, while sitting here enjoying the soothing effect in my body and mind. I took another hit. As I exhaled, I closed my eyes, and it felt like the clouds of my mind vanished. My consciousness became crystal clear. Like I had just woken up here in the middle of the night. On our Boston porch, our home for the next half year. Anne and Vic asleep inside. Me sitting here in an enlightened state of pure joy.
After my buzz vanished, reality and its practicalities rejoined the party on the porch. I contemplated going to the lab tomorrow, where everybody would be there, McAllan included. I had mixed feelings about meeting him. I recalled our first encounter. It was a couple of years before I had met Anne, and I was traveling with friends and colleagues to the annual conference for attention and consciousness in Naples, Florida. I remember arriving late, running into the auditorium of the Naples Grand Resort after a hectic two-hour drive from Miami airport through Alligator Alley, barely making Stuart Bradley’s keynote.
Bradley was a behaviorist from Harvard, trained on the tracks of positivism by professors before him. He kicked off his hallmark intro about how the reductionistic approach would leave us victorious at the last frontier of neuroscience — consciousness — as it had so many times before in other branches of the neurosciences. I found an empty seat in an otherwise packed auditorium and looked around. Aircon was running full speed, and I praised the organizers. It was burning hot outside, and I operated best in temperatures below 25 celsius. McAllan sat close to the podium, strategically well placed for the QnA round. I knew there would be a brawl between them for the duration of the conference that likely would be kicked off here during the keynote.
Bradly presented groundbreaking results, back then, successfully isolating a single brain site active only during conscious perception. He concluded that this was the beginning of an era in brain science where consciousness was finally identified and could be encompassed by the neuron doctrine — completing a circle and a lineage of dedicated research efforts that started centuries ago.
After a long round of applause, McAllan marked to get the microphone. He asked a question that marks the inception of a new path in the trajectory of my own scientific work. It was not until the next day that I fully grasped its implications. But when I did, it rearranged my thinking and became a frequent source of inspiration and pondering about life and how to understand it from a scientific perspective.
McAllan moved to the microphone in his tedious, slow almost dragging form. It was not an arrogant performance, it was simply how he was. I was always rushing through life, felt I couldn’t make it otherwise. With all McAllan had going and ambitions for how to conclude it, he should have been running to the damn mic. Later I found a certain peace, and calmness in his approach that could only come if you really knew you were on the right track of things. — “How about the experience of the color red that participants were conscious about [red. in the experiment]. Is the identified area’s functionality such that it can encompass the experience of red, and what is that in scientific terms? — are there even such experiential neurons, like we have neurons that code for visual, auditory, and olfactory signals, etc., or does that belong elsewhere?”.
The latter part of his question led to his theory and drew strong ties to the hard problem of consciousness. The brain processes and networks that account for perception and actions do not seem compatible with an explanation of the observer of it all. Bradley thought he had nailed it by isolating specific brain areas related strictly to consciousness. McAllan felt we were as far away from a meaningful description as before. It had developed, as usual, into a heated debate of increasing esoteric nature until the poor chair for the session finally could interrupt them to make time for the next speaker on the podium.
After my morning reflection the next day, I sited with McAllan. I was ambivalent about it since his theory was somewhat flawed and was more a framework that contrasted the existing one. It could even be considered borderline scientific, but he did have a central point justifying a dramatic shift in the scientific paradigm — when it came to understanding consciousness. It happened in other branches of sciences as well. Experiential Medicine was a growing concept that was changing therapeutics after nearly two centuries of trying to correct behavior by adjusting a molecular imbalance. Now behavior and experience were considered determining factors that conditioned everything else. It started in the early 20th century with increasing reports of the powerful placebo effect. For many years, there was no rational explanation for this impactful effect. As such, any experiment had to control for the placebo effect with little interest in how to exploit it. Eve Benzon, a UCSF professor finally connected the dots in her research lab, expanding therapeutics into psychedelics. She reformulated the causality between behavior and the neuronal structures it relies on by showing that it was the experienced behavior and not the compounds that afforded the effect. It had started similarly. Something was missing from the working explanations. Something very critical.
For Bradley, paradoxically, his groundbreaking results also shed light upon the shortcomings in the approach. It now seemed irrational that we could explain experience through the existing paradigm. Something had to be changed. The experiences we have, the human consciousness, cannot be reduced to the neurons it relies on, regardless of how precise it was. It simply lacked the content of what it meant to experience something as a human. That our personal subjective experiences unique to us should be catered for by a pool of proteins seemed as far away as ever before. I was thrown off a cliff from my current base of understanding and started to lean more into the phenomenological theories and McAllan’s ideas on integrating them with the Neurosciences.
Chapter 6 coming soon…
