The Future of the Mind (22 page)

THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY

Some scientists have pondered the ethical implications of this technology. Almost every new medical discovery caused ethical concerns when it was
introduced. Some of them had to be restricted or banned when proven harmful (like the sleeping drug thalidomide, which caused birth defects). Others have been so successful they changed our conception of who we are, such as test-tube babies. When Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born in 1978, it created such a media storm that even the pope issued a document critical of this technology. But today, perhaps your sibling, child, spouse, or even you may be a product of in vitro fertilization. Like many technologies, eventually the public will simply get used to the idea that memories can be recorded and shared.

Other bioethicists have different worries. What happens if memories are given to us without our permission? What happens if these memories are painful or destructive? Or what about Alzheimer’s patients, who are eligible for memory uploads but are too sick to give permission?

The late Bernard Williams, a philosopher at Oxford University, worried that this device might disturb the natural order of things, which is to forget. “
Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess,” he says.

If memories can be implanted like uploading computer files, it could also shake the foundation of our legal system. One of the pillars of justice is the eyewitness account, but what would happen if fake memories were implanted? Also, if the memory of a crime can be created, then it might secretly be implanted into the brain of an innocent person. Or, if a criminal needs an alibi, he could secretly implant a memory into another person’s brain, convincing him that they were together when the crime was being committed. Furthermore, not just verbal testimony but also legal documents would be suspect, since when we sign affidavits and legal documents, we depend on our memory to clarify what is true and false.

Safeguards would have to be introduced. Laws will have to be passed that clearly define the limits of granting or denying access to memories. Just as there are laws limiting the ability of the police or third parties to enter your home, there would be laws to prevent people from accessing your memories without your permission. There would also have to be a way to mark these memories so that the person realizes that they are fake. Thus, he would still be able to enjoy the memory of a nice vacation, but he would also know that it never happened.

Taping, storing, and uploading our memories may allow us to record the past and master new skills. But doing so will not alter our innate ability
to digest and process this large body of information. To do that, we need to enhance our intelligence. Progress in this direction is hindered by the fact that there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence. However, there is one example of genius and intelligence that no one can dispute, and that is Albert Einstein. Remarkably, sixty years after his death, his brain is still yielding invaluable clues to the nature of intelligence.

Some scientists believe that, using a combination of electromagnetics, genetics, and drug therapy, it may be possible to boost our intelligence to the genius level. They cite the fact that random injuries to the brain have been documented that can suddenly change a person of normal ability into a “savant,” one whose spectacular mental and artistic ability is off the scale. This can be achieved now by random accidents, but what happens when science intervenes and illuminates the secret of this process?

The brain is wider than the sky

For, put them side by side

The one the other will contain

With ease, and you beside.

—EMILY DICKINSON

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

6
EINSTEIN’S BRAIN AND ENHANCING OUR INTELLIGENCE

Albert Einstein’s brain is missing.

Or, at least it was for fifty years, until the heirs of the doctor who spirited it away shortly after his death in 1955 finally returned it to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in 2010. Analysis of his brain may help clarify these questions: What is genius? How do you measure intelligence and its relationship to success in life? There are also philosophical questions: Is genius a function of our genes, or is it more a question of personal struggle and achievement?

And, finally, Einstein’s brain may help answer the key question: Can we boost our own intelligence?

The word “Einstein” is no longer a proper noun that refers to a specific person. It now simply means “genius.” The picture that the name conjures up (baggy pants, flaming white hair, disheveled looks) is equally iconic and instantly recognizable.

The legacy of Einstein has been enormous. When some physicists in 2011 raised the possibility that he was wrong, that particles could break the light barrier, it created a firestorm of controversy in the physics world that spilled over into the popular press. The very idea that relativity, which forms the
cornerstone of modern physics, could be wrong had physicists around the world shaking their heads. As expected, once the result was recalibrated, Einstein was shown to be right once again. It is always dangerous to go up against Einstein.

One way to gain insight into the question “What is genius?” is to analyze Einstein’s brain. Apparently on the spur of the moment, Dr. Thomas Harvey, the doctor at the Princeton hospital who was performing the autopsy on Einstein, decided to secretly preserve his brain, against the knowledge and wishes of Einstein’s family.

Perhaps he preserved Einstein’s brain with the vague notion that one day it might unlock the secret of genius. Perhaps he thought, like many others, that there was a peculiar part of Einstein’s brain that was the seat of his vast intelligence. Brian Burrell, in his book
Postcards from the Brain Museum
, speculates that perhaps Dr. Harvey “
got caught up in the moment and was transfixed in the presence of greatness. What he quickly discovered was that he had bitten off more than he could chew.”

What happened to Einstein’s brain after that sounds more like a comedy than a science story. Over the years, Dr. Harvey promised to publish his results of analyzing Einstein’s brain. But he was no brain specialist, and kept making excuses. For decades, the brain sat in two large mason jars filled with formaldehyde and placed in a cider box, under a beer cooler. He had a technician slice the brain into 240 pieces, and on rare occasions he would mail a few to scientists who wanted to study them. Once, pieces were mailed to a scientist at Berkeley in a mayonnaise container.

Forty years later, Dr. Harvey drove across the country in a Buick Skylark carrying Einstein’s brain in a Tupperware container, hoping to return it to Einstein’s granddaughter Evelyn. She refused to accept it. After Dr. Harvey’s death in 2007, it was left to his heirs to properly donate his collection of slides and portions of Einstein’s brain to science. The history of Einstein’s brain is so unusual that a TV documentary was filmed about it.

(It should be pointed out that Einstein’s brain was not the only one to be preserved for posterity. The brain of one of the greatest geniuses of mathematics, Carl Friedrich Gauss, often called the Prince of Mathematicians, was also preserved by a doctor a century earlier. Back then, the anatomy of the brain was largely unexplored, and no conclusions could be drawn other than the fact that it had unusually large convolutions or folds.)

One might expect that Einstein’s brain was far beyond an ordinary human’s, that it must have been huge, perhaps with areas that were abnormally large. In fact, the opposite has been found (it is slightly smaller, not larger, than normal). Overall, Einstein’s brain is quite ordinary. If a neurologist did not know that this was Einstein’s brain, he probably would not give it a second thought.

The only differences found in Einstein’s brain were rather minor. A certain part of his brain, called the angular gyri, was larger than normal, with the inferior parietal regions of both hemispheres 15 percent wider than average. Notably, these parts of the brain are involved in abstract thought, in the manipulation of symbols such as writing and mathematics, and in visual-spatial processing. But his brain was still within the norm, so it is not clear whether the genius of Einstein lay in the organic structure of his brain or in the force of his personality, his outlook, and the times. In a biography that I once wrote of Einstein, titled
Einstein’s Cosmos
, it was clear to me that certain features of his life were just as important as any anomaly in his brain. Perhaps Einstein himself said it best when he said, “I have no special talents.… I am only passionately curious.” In fact, Einstein would confess that he had to struggle with mathematics in his youth. To one group of schoolchildren, he once confided, “No matter what difficulties you may have with mathematics, mine were greater.” So why was Einstein Einstein?

First, Einstein spent most of his time thinking via “thought experiments.” He was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental one, so he was continually running sophisticated simulations of the future in his head. In other words, his laboratory was his mind.

Second, he was known to spend up to ten years or more on a single thought experiment. From the age of sixteen to twenty-six, he focused on the problem of light and whether it was possible to outrace a light beam. This led to the birth of special relativity, which eventually revealed the secret of the stars and gave us the atomic bomb. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-six, he focused on a theory of gravity, which eventually gave us black holes and the big-bang theory of the universe. And then from the age of thirty-six to the end of his life, he tried to find a theory of everything to unify all of physics. Clearly, the ability to spend ten or more years on a single problem showed the tenacity with which he would simulate experiments in his head.

Third, his personality was important. He was a bohemian, so it was natural
for him to rebel against the establishment in physics. Not every physicist had the nerve or the imagination to challenge the prevailing theory of Isaac Newton, which had held sway for two hundred years before Einstein.

Fourth, the time was right for the emergence of an Einstein. In 1905, the old physical world of Newton was crumbling in light of experiments that clearly suggested a new physics was about to be born, waiting for a genius to show the way. For example, the mysterious substance called radium glowed in the dark all by itself indefinitely, as if energy was being created out of thin air, violating the theory of conservation of energy. In other words, Einstein was the right man for the times. If somehow it becomes possible to clone Einstein from the cells in his preserved brain, I suspect that the clone would not be the next Einstein. The historic circumstances must also be right to create a genius.

The point here is that genius is perhaps a combination of being born with certain mental abilities and also the determination and drive to achieve great things. The essence of Einstein’s genius was probably his extraordinary ability to simulate the future through thought experiments, creating new physical principles via pictures. As Einstein himself once said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.” And to Einstein, imagination meant shattering the boundaries of the known and entering the domain of the unknown.

All of us are born with certain abilities that are programmed into our genes and the structure of our brains. That is the luck of the draw. But how we arrange our thoughts and experiences and simulate the future is something that is totally within our control. Charles Darwin himself once wrote, “
I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.”

CAN GENIUS BE LEARNED?

This rekindles the question, Are geniuses made or born? How does the nature/nurture debate solve the mystery of intelligence? Can an ordinary person become a genius?

Since brain cells are notoriously hard to grow, it was once thought that intelligence was fixed by the time we became young adults. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear with new brain research: the brain itself can
change when it learns. Although brain cells are not being added in the cortex, the connections between neurons are changing every time a new task is learned.

For example, scientists in 2011 analyzed the brains of London’s famous taxicab drivers, who have to laboriously memorize twenty-five thousand streets in the dizzying maze that makes up modern London. It takes three to four years to prepare for this arduous test, and only half the trainees pass.

Scientists at University College London studied the brains of these drivers before they took the test, and then tested them again three to four years afterward. Those trainees who passed the test had a larger volume of gray matter than before, in an area called the posterior and the anterior hippocampus. The hippocampus, as we’ve seen, is where memories are processed. (Curiously, tests also showed that these taxicab drivers scored less than normal on processing visual information, so perhaps there is a trade-off, a price to pay for learning this volume of information.)

“
The human brain remains ‘plastic,’ even in adult life, allowing it to adapt when we learn new tasks,” says Eleanor Maguire of the Wellcome Trust, which funded the study. “This offers encouragement for adults who want to learn new skills later in life.”

Similarly, the brains of mice that have learned many tasks are slightly different from the brains of other mice that have not learned these tasks. It is not so much that the number of neurons has changed, but rather that the nature of the neural connections has been altered by the learning process. In other words, learning actually changes the structure of the brain.

This raises the old adage “practice makes perfect.” Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered an important fact about the wiring of the brain: the more we exercise certain skills, the more certain pathways in our brains become reinforced, so the task becomes easier. Unlike a digital computer, which is just as dumb today as it was yesterday, the brain is a learning machine with the ability to rewire its neural pathways every time it learns something. This is a fundamental difference between a digital computer and the brain.