Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (6 page)

The above passage, from science writer Carl Zimmer’s
Soul
Made Flesh,
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describes one of philosopher René Descartes’s lesser-known projects: to figure out the workings of the human machine. One of the specific things Descartes was doing with his carcasses was looking for the soul. He assumed it resided somewhere in the brain, and so his most well-thumbed “books” took the form of cow heads. One paragraph up, Zimmer writes that Descartes spent much of that period of his life in self-imposed exile, “craving solitude.” The carcasses surely helped.

Descartes is one of the few early philosopher/scientists to have physically searched for the soul, actually opened up bodies and looked for it. He eventually nominated the pea-sized pineal gland. To those who know the gland’s actual function (it regulates melatonin production), it may seem an unlikely choice. Descartes was swayed by the gland’s position at the center of the head, and by dint of its being one of the few brain structures that don’t exist in pairs. He didn’t think the ugly little gland
was
the soul per se; more that it was a sort of hub, a meeting point for sensory information and the flowing streams of spiritus (akin to Aristotle’s pneuma) that carried out the self ’s higher functions.

Descartes dreamed up an elaborate model of the nervous system with strings and valves and tiny bellows. He described spiritus flowing through the nerves—which he envisioned as tubular—and into the muscles, causing them to contract by inflating parts of them. In a paper called “On the ‘Seat of the
Soul’: Cerebral Localization Theories in Mediaeval Times and Later,” neurologist O. J. Grüsser writes that Descartes’s model for this system was the organ, then in its heyday as a popular musical instrument. Fifteen centuries earlier, Grüsser adds, the Greek physician Galen based his system of spiritus flow on the mechanics of Roman bathhouse heating systems. Meanwhile, the philosopher Albertus Magnus found inspiration in the equipment used to distill brandy. And so it went, on into the twentieth century, when tape recorders and computers took hold as the working models of consciousness.

A couple years back, I corresponded with a computer professional named Betty Pincus, who has been in the industry some forty years. “It always interested me the way some of my colleagues would use the technical vocabulary to describe how their minds worked,” she wrote. “In the sixties, they talked about ‘running out of tape’ or ‘her accumulator overflowed.’ As the technology changed, it became ‘running out of disk space’ or ‘multitasking.’ I’ve often wondered whether the inventors of these machines created them in their own image of how their minds worked or if they related the machine to the mind after the machines were created.”

I managed to find only two other references to scientists rummaging around in corpses looking for souls. One comes from the Midrash, a collection of ancient rabbinical commentaries on the Torah. The Midrash makes reference to a single indestructible bone, called the luz. The luz is shaped like a chickpea (or an almond, depending on which rabbi you listen to) and located at the top of the spine (or the bottom, depending on which rabbi you listen to). From this bone, the Midrash states, a person is reconcocted after death. It’s the soul bone.

The Midrash includes a description from the Torah of an experiment to prove the unique indestructibility of the luz.
The project was carried out by Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah upon being confronted by the Roman emperor Hadrian. “Prove it to me,” Hadrian is quoted as saying. So the rabbi did. “He had one brought….” (Like he just turned to some underling:
Smetak! Fetch me a luz!
) “He put it in fire, but it was not burnt, he put it in a mill but it was not ground. He placed it on an anvil and struck it with a hammer; the anvil split and the hammer was broken but all this had no effect on the luz.”

Needless to say, there was much chatter about the luz over the centuries, and when the science of anatomy began to gain momentum in the Middle Ages, its practitioners sought to find it. They nominated, among other bones, the coccyx, the sacrum, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, the wormian bones of the skull, and the tiny sesamoid bones of the big toe. Of course, these bones are all easily destroyed, and the anatomists eventually decided it was a matter best left to the philosophers. The famed Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, having spent an afternoon mucking around with a set of sesamoid bones, more or less laid the matter to rest: “We should attach no importance whatever,” he wrote in
De humani
corporis fabrica
, “to the miraculous and occult powers ascribed to the internal ossicle of the right great toe.”

Contemporary rabbinical discussion of the luz is harder to come by. On the website Ask the Rabbi, a mohel from Paris posted an e-mail seeking information about the luz. The rabbi’s reply confirmed the bone’s alleged indestructibility and added that it has been described as “having within it many intertwined spider-like blood vessels.” He referred the mohel to a Dr. Eli Temstet of Paris for more information. I e-mailed the mohel to see what he’d found out. “Dr. Eli Temstet of Paris has gone to a better world,” came the reply. “Now, he sure knows where and what exactly is the luz.” I sent an e-mail to Ask the Rabbi. Was there a paper on the spider-like blood vessels of the luz? The rabbi did not Answer the Writer. I consulted
a book on Talmudic medicine, but no mention was made of the spidery veins of the soul bone.
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The very first person to poke around for a soul in a human cadaver was the third-century B.C. physician Herophilus, of Alexandria. Herophilus is thought to be the first person in history to have dissected human cadavers for the purpose of scientific enlightenment. As such, he bagged a lot of anatomical discoveries. One of these was the four chambers, or ventricles, of the brain. He believed that the soul was headquartered in the fourth one. Why was Herophilus looking around for a soul inside a dead man, especially given that Egyptians believed in an afterworld
†
for souls to retire to? I can’t tell you for sure, but I can tell you that Herophilus was rumored to have dissected live humans as well. Two colleagues accused him of vivisecting hundreds of criminals. Perhaps his soul-related aspirations explain his poor table manners.

If your goal was to pinpoint the soul, it obviously made
more sense to experiment on the living than on the dead. The simplest plan of action would be to systematically scramble, excise, or otherwise disable the likely structures and watch to see if the lights went out. And this, more or less, is what got done. Like Descartes, most scientists had zeroed in on the brain. (From early on, observations of personality changes caused by head injuries suggested a link between brain and self.) Galen was one of the earliest of the neuro-vivisectors; he experimented with cutting (and getting on) the nerves of his neighbors’ pigs. Based on this work, he decided that the soul was situated in the substance of the brain and not, as Herophilus had maintained, in the ventricles.

Leonardo da Vinci further narrowed it down. In 1996, McGill University professor of neurosurgery Rolando Del Maestro curated an exhibition called “Leonardo da Vinci: The Search for the Soul.” In the materials for the exhibit, Del Maestro describes a 1487 manuscript in which Leonardo made notes about a passage he had read in a book about the Carthaginian War. The passage describes the quickest way to kill an injured elephant: by pounding a stake between the animal’s ears at the top of the spinal column. Intrigued, Leonardo took to pithing frogs in a similar manner. “The frog instantly dies when its spinal medulla is perforated,” Del Maestro quotes Leonardo as having written. “And previously it lived without head, without heart or any interior organs, or intestines or skin. Here, therefore, it appears, lies the foundation of movement and life.” (I think that what he meant is that the skinned, gutted, headless, heartless frogs lived
for a little while
.)

Only one soul-seeking man of science carried out this sort of cavalier slice-and-see experimentation on a living human being. As the king’s surgeon and the founder of France’s Royal Academy of Surgery, Gigot de La Peyronie could pretty well do what he felt like. In 1741, he published a paper entitled
“Observations by Which One Tries to Discover the Part of the Brain Where the Soul Exercises Its Functions.” The subject was a sixteen-year-old boy whose skull had been cracked by a rock. After three days of worsening symptoms, the youth fell unconscious. La Peyronie “opened up his head” and found a suppurating abscess deep down inside the brain, at the corpus callosum. He drained the wound, taking care to measure the runoff, which amounted to “about the volume of a hen’s egg.” As soon as the pus
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that had weighed upon the corpus callosum was drained, he wrote, the coma lifted. La Peyronie noted that when the cavity had refilled with ooze, the youth fell unconscious again. He reemptied it, and again the boy awoke. The corpus callosum, he reasoned, must be the seat of the soul. Just to be sure, La Peyronie decided to undertake a little experiment. He filled a syringe with saline and injected it directly into the newly drained wound. As predicted, the boy lost consciousness. And was brought back to his senses when La Peyronie pumped the water back out.

La Peyronie found confirmation of his conclusions in three patients who had lost consciousness and died following head injuries and then been found during autopsy to have abscesses in the vicinity of the corpus callosum. One of the abscess pockets, that of a soldier whose horse had kicked him, was here again described as being “of the size and shape of a hen’s egg”—clearly the “bigger-than-a-breadbox” of its day.

Autopsies also enabled La Peyronie to rule out Descartes’s competing claim that the soul hung its hat in the pineal gland. La Peyronie had autopsied patients discovered to be missing
the gland entirely or in whom it appeared to have petrified. “
Elle ne réside
pas dans la glande
pinéale,” he declared. I find a certain arrogance suffuses both La Peyronie’s writing and his deeds. If only he could know that today, as regards historic Frenchmen known to Americans, La Peyronie doesn’t hold a flame to Le Petomane,
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the Moulin Rouge “fartiste,” whom no one should hold a flame to anyway.

La Peyronie was the last of a breed—a lone holdout in the anatomical search for the soul. Most of the early neuroanatomists had come to see that the self was too complex, too multifaceted, to be housed in or operated by a single biological entity. Like the Soviet Union after Gorbachev, the once broad and uniform-seeming soul began to splinter into dozens of smaller republics. Through a combination of unpleasant and often contradictory animal studies—living brains pokered, ablated, and hacked—and autopsy studies that sought to match brain abnormalities with dominant personality features, the men of science began mapping the specialized duties of the brain’s real estate, a project that continues to this day.

Of all the brain’s early cartographers, none was quite so thorough as Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed to have located twenty-seven distinct “organs” of the human brain, each corresponding to a specific trait or faculty. By all accounts a gifted physician and anatomist, Gall succeeded in pinpointing the brain’s language center and that of our memory for words.
His other “organs” were rather more questionable. For instance: The Organ of Poetical Talent. The Organ of Metaphysics. And, my personal favorite: The Organ for the Instinct for Property-Owning and Stocking Up on Food. Gall’s organs landed him in hot water with the church, which labeled him a heretic for teaching that man had multiple souls, a charge Gall denied.

Gall was led astray in part by his unconventional methodology. The swift decomposition of brains precluded their lengthy study, so Gall took to examining skulls, both of the living and the dead. He reasoned that if an organ of the brain was particularly well developed, it would put pressure upon the cranium and raise a bump that could be seen or felt through the hair. (Phrenology—a mass-market popularization of his theories—had the masses feeling each other’s heads and galling Gall for decades to follow.) Gall amassed a collection of 221 skulls, which traveled with him on his lecture circuit, exasperating porters and alarming nosy bellhops. He also owned, at last count, 102 plaster casts of human heads, many of which he’d made himself. The heads were casts of people he met in his travels whose character seemed obviously dominated by one or two strong traits and whose skull bore a bulge in the appropriate spot: evidence for his theories. Skull #5491, for instance, belonged to a Mr. Weilamann, the director of a portable hydrogen gas generator
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company, and showed a notable bump over the Organ for Mechanical Sense, Construction, and Architecture.

Gall was quite devoted to his collection. To track down examples of the Organ of the Penchant for Murder and Carnivorousness, for instance, he took to wandering through prisons, looking for murderers with ridges above the ears. Lunatic asylums were another fruitful stop for Gall and his plaster craft. The catalogue of Gall’s collection contains dozens of items like #5494: “Copy in plaster of the skull of a total idiot.”
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For the Organ of Poetical Talent, Gall resorted to fondling marble busts of the great poets. As evidence for the location of the Organ of Belief in the Existence of God, he cites a series of Raphael paintings in which Christ appears to have a noticeable rise at the crest of his cranium, as though Satan had bopped him over the head with his trident. Had Gall gone potty? Possibly. Here is his evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation. He knew of a young clockmaker who, when he “ejaculated by onanism,” would lose consciousness for an instant and suffer convulsive movements of the head and a violent pain in the back of the neck. “The idea couldn’t escape me,” writes Gall in
Sur les fonctions du cerveau
, “that there must be a connection between the functions of physical love and the cerebral parts in the nape of the neck.” Then again, perhaps there is a connection between violent convulsive head movements and neck pain.