Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part Three - Mind

6 - Signs Of Mind

In 1957, following a series of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, concern began to grow about the dangers of radioactive fallout. The World Health Organization issued a warning in March that year about the genetic effects of radiation, and very soon afterward medical physiologists in several places reported with horror that the white-blood-cell count in a very large number of patients was undergoing a rapid and possibly damaging change. As it happened those effects were being produced by radiation from nuclear reaction--but not in the Pacific. The years 1957 and 1958 were ones of tremendous activity, but of a type beyond the controls of any test-ban treaty, because the explosions that irradiated earth were taking place in the sun. (300)

This discovery is now included in a growing body of knowledge that demonstrates the sensitivity of life to subtle stimuli, but time and again we still make the mistake of assuming that only the dramatic and obvious events around us can be of any importance. This kind of myopia has come to be known as the 'Clever Hans' error in honor of a famous problem-solving horse who mystified scientists in nineteenth-century Europe. They believed that the animal was solving problems set out on a blackboard in front of it, while it was actually getting the information it needed for correct answers by watching the involuntary gestures made by the scientists themselves in expectation of these answers. A large part of animal communication is based on the interpretation of very slight manifestations of mood in others of its kind, and the horse simply responded to the gathering of very distinguished scientists as though they, too, were horses.

In physiological terms, the gulf that separates us from other animals is not a wide one, and despite the fact that we now have an elaborate vocal language and other sophisticated communication systems, our bodies continue to show external signs of our inner feelings. Instinctively we continue to respond to these signals. We can listen to a discussion on the radio and understand exactly what the speaker is trying to communicate, but where more spontaneous, emotional material is involved, we find the lack of vision a serious handicap. Anyone who has ever used a telephone knows how difficult it is to convey really complex feelings with the voice alone and how comparatively easy it is to tell lies to someone who cannot watch you while you do so. Deaf people, who miss the information provided by the voice, learn again to communicate by gesture alone, and now this old talent has been made a new psychoanalytic and research tool by students of body language, or kinesics. (100)

Laboratory and clinical studies of body language have shown that it often directly contradicts verbal communication and that the person who says 'I am not afraid' will at the same time be sending out automatic signals that betray his fear. This outward manifestation of an inner feeling is by no means restricted to the long muscles; it shows up even in the eyes. (147) Eckhard Mess at the University of Chicago discovered that there was a direct relation between pupil size and mental activity. In a series of tests in which subjects' eyes were photographed as they watched changing pictures, he found that the pupils expanded when looking at something interesting or appealing, and contracted when exposed to anything distasteful or unappealing. And the fact that we automatically respond to these changes in another person was demonstrated by showing a group of male subjects two pictures of an attractive girl that were identical except that her pupils in one of the pictures had been retouched to make them larger. When questioned about these photographs, the subjects reported that they could see no difference between them, but their eyes showed that they responded very much more strongly to the girl with large pupils. They presumably found her more attractive because unconsciously they were reading her signal, which says 'I am very interested in you.'

It is not surprising that the response of the pupil should be connected directly with mental activity. Embryologically and anatomically the eye is an extension of the brain, and looking into it is almost like peering through a peephole into a part of the brain itself. The reflex action of the eye in response to light is determined by the parasympathetic nervous system, and the emotional response is brought about by the sympathetic system. So both branches of our autonomic nerve network are involved, and we can expect to find that other parts of the body supplied by these systems are also going to show signs of mind.

In emotional situations, pupil reactions are connected with an increase in the heart rate and blood pressure, more rapid respiration, and greater sweating. One of the first places in which sweat appears is on the palms of the hands, in what is known as a psychogalvanic response. This is an electrical storm in the skin that suddenly breaks when the owner of the palm becomes anxious. It is used extensively in the socalled lie-detector tests, which measure the electrical resistance of the skin. The results of the tests are not usually acceptable in a court of law, because they give no indication of truth or falsity, but they do provide a measurement of emotional stress. Often this state is apparent from a distance when a nervous man rubs wet palms together or wipes them down his thighs to dry them. It is also of course immediately apparent when shaking hands, and this offers an explanation for the origin of the custom, which makes more iological sense than the traditional one of indicating a lack of weapons.

The reason for sweating on the palms of the hands rather than on the elbows or behind the ears seems to be connected with another kind of signaling from a distance: communication by smell. Most mammals mark out their territories with the secretion from special scent glands. Some antelope have glands in their feet and leave distinctive tracks wherever they go; others have to trample in their dung and carry the smell of this around with them on their feet. Tree shrews first prepare a little puddle of urine, trip about in it, and then scamper around, leaving smelly footprints everywhere. Bushbabies and lemurs urinate directly onto their hands before the leap, so every handhold becomes an advertisement for the occupier as distinctive as the nameplates we put up on our office doors and gateposts.

In a primate the most obvious areas for spreading smell are the hairless palms and the soles of the feet. Most of the higher primates have developed a sense of sight at the expense of their sense of smell, but they still seem to use their noses a great deal. None of the great apes urinate on their hands, but all of them have well-developed sweat glands on the palms, and these seem to carry a smell that is distinctive for every individual. One does not have to be a chimpanzee to appreciate the differences. Part of the palm smell is produced by food--just try smelling your hands a few hours after eating asparagus and you will find that the distinctive smell comes right through the pores of your skin. But part of every smell is also sexual in origin. Internal physiology is regulated by hormones, and it is now known that similar chemicals are secreted externally for communication and the regulation of the physiology of others. These are pheromones; migratory locusts secrete them to accelerate the growth of their young, ants use them to lay trails to and from the nest, female moths use them to attract males from a great distance. In man, striking sexual differences have been found in the ability to smell certain substances. (343) A French biologist has reported that the odor of a synthetic lactone can be detected only by mature females and is perceived most clearly at the time of ovulation. Men and young girls cannot smell this substance at all--unless they first have a huge injection of the female hormone estrogen. It seems that a chemical very like this one is part of man's natural bouquet and is secreted through sweat glands, largely in the palms of the hands.

So the palm not only becomes moist in moments of emotional stress, but in doing so it also communicates intentions, sex, and individual identity.

Palmistry

Apart from a unique smell, each person also carries an exclusive pattern in his hands. The dermis of the skin has a distinctive assortment of loops, whorls, and arches in the fingertips and on the palm. This is unlike any design ever borne by any other person. There is no authenticated case of indistinguishable patterns, even in socalled identical twins, so the shapes have been used for identification purposes ever since the Chinese perfected a system of classification in AD 700.

Dermatoglyphics is the study of the ridge and furrow patterns on the palms and on the soles of the feet. These are the designs that have always been used in police work and as such have been the subject of serious statistical study in several countries for a long time. More recently the patterns have become of interest to geneticists, because they show hereditary characters and, forming during the third or fourth month of fetal development, persist unchanged throughout life. The distribution of the ridges is determined by the arrangement of sweat glands and nerve endings and is so firmly established that it is impossible to destroy or change the patterns permanently. They reappear as healing brings the natural skin to the surface again after severe burns and even after skin grafting.

There is little controversy surrounding the ridges, as these are not the marks used by gypsy fortunetellers. Jan Purkinje, a Czechoslovakian physician, was the first to describe the patterns, and his classification and interpretation are still followed. In London, a Society for the Study of Physiological Patterns in the Hand has begun to collect data in an attempt to establish connections between distinctive patterns and certain pathological conditions. So far the results look promising, but far more are needed for statistical significance.

Superimposed on the art-nouveau background of finely etched designs in the hand are the more obvious lines and creases. These are the stuff of the fairground palmist, and surprisingly, it is with these lines that we find some exciting biological correlations. Anatomists describe the creases in the palm as 'lines of flexure', but there is no good functional reason for these lines to fall in one position rather than another. Every hand seems to have its own idiosyncrasies, and the palmists insist that these mean something.

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was one of the first reputable scientists to take the idea of palmar diagnosis seriously. He made a collection of palm prints and presented them to the University of London at the same time that he endowed a professorship there and founded the science of eugenics. The Galton Laboratory has carried on with these studies and in 1959 showed that Mongolism was due to a chromosomal abnormality that also produced a characteristic line, known as the 'simian crease', across the top of the palm. (158) Since then, about thirty different congenital disorders have been connected with particular patterns in the palm, some of which are apparent even before the disease appears. In 1966, abnormal palm prints were linked for the first time with a virus infection. Three New York pediatricians palm-printed babies born to mothers who had caught German measles during early pregnancy and found that, even if the babies were not affected in any other way, all had a characteristic and unusual crease in their hands. (306)

In 1967 a team of Japanese doctors extended their system of baby identification to include patients of all ages admitted to an Osaka hospital. After collecting over two hundred thousand prints and their relevant case histories, they discovered that there were many correlations between the patterns and the diseases treated. They claim that not only is the position of a particular line important, but that its length, breadth, the degree to which it has been broken up into islands or triangles, and even its color have diagnostic significance. They are now able to tell just by looking at a palm print, whether a patient is suffering or has recently suffered from organic diseases such as thyroid deficiency, spinal deformation, and liver and kidney malfunctions. They also say that it is possible to predict with a high degree of accuracy, whether a particular patient is likely to contract infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and perhaps even cancer.

There are an enormous number of nerves ending in the hand in sensors of heat and cold, pressure and pain. So many of these make direct connections with the brain and if human proportions were determined only by the nerve supply, we would have hands the size of beach umbrellas. If the palmists are right in asserting that these nerves carry a two-way traffic and that all internal physical conditions are mirrored externally in our palms, then it makes very little sense for a general practitioner to ask to see a patient's tongue. Even going on the evidence already clearly established, he could learn a great deal more by saying, 'Good morning. How are you? Please put out your hand.'

Fortunetelling by lines in the hand bears the same relationship to the serious study of chirology as newspaper horoscopes do to true astrology. Chirologists are concerned with the whole picture presented by the hand. They study the basic skin pattern with a magnifying glass to find changes in the texture and rhythm; they look at all the flexure lines and at the smaller lines that cross them, paying particular attention to the ways in which these are broken or intersect; they feel the underlying muscles and tendons and take note of the mounds and ridges these produce; they study the thickness and form of the palm, the relative lengths of fingers and thumb, the flexibility and shape of the joints, and the color and texture of the nails and skin. Only after making all these observations will a serious chirologist attempt to draw the threads together and make some assessment of the subject's physical and psychological condition.

The basic physiology behind their assumptions seems to be sound. The brain, the nervous system, and the sense organs are all derived from the ectoderm of the embryo at the same time as the skin. Their common origin means that they maintain very close connections throughout life, and it is not at all unreasonable to assume that many internal events will show up externally through the skin. Jaundice, a liver disease, typically shows up during the early states as a yellow discoloration of the skin. Rheumatoid arthritis, which attacks the joints of small bones, may also appear as dry, silvery scales on the skin. These are obvious, external changes, but a great number of other internal physical disorders could well produce more subtle effects that can be recognised only by careful study of sensitive areas of skin such as those of the hand.

There is certainly a very close connection between most skin diseases and mental states. Dermatitis, urticaria, acne, warts, and allergic reactions are all skin conditions that are produced almost entirely by anxiety and other types of emotional stress. So, theoretically there is no reason why it should not be possible to make judgments about a person's prevailing mental condition, and therefore about his personality, from signs appearing in the skin.

Most of these conditions affect only the general pattern and texture of the skin. The connection between internal physical and mental states and the crease lines of the palm is more difficult to establish. The lines do not follow the patterns of skeleton, muscles, tendons, blood vessels, nerves, or lymph or sweat glands. Anatomists claim that the creases are entirely random and concerned only with allowing the flesh of the palm to fold when the hand forms a fist. The characteristic and basic division of the palm by two roughly horizontal lines (the ones the palmists call Head and Heart) and two roughly vertical lines (those of Fate and Life), are almost certainly produced by the resolution of the various physical forces set up in the hand by flexion and tension.

There does, however, seem to be some other principle, which governs their exact shape and the continually changing appearance of the smaller creases. If physical forces alone were responsible, one would expect the lines to remain stable in the hand of a man whose way of life and work were relatively constant from day to day, but long-term studies show that there is a constant fluctuation in the palm patterns. There is one dramatic record of a house painter who fell from a great height and suffered such severe concussion that he remained unconscious for two weeks and had to be intravenously fed. After a week in this condition, all the creases in his hands vanished as though they had been wiped off with a sponge--and then, as he regained consciousness, the lines gradually reappeared. (158)

Death masks are often most unlike the living person. Throughout life, even in deep sleep, the many fine muscles of the face are in states of variable tension produced by constant stimulation from the brain. The total effect of these waves of activity is to produce a pattern of expression that gives each face its unique features. (344) It is likely that a similar supply goes out from the brain to all parts of the body and constantly reinforces form and function. The exact pattern of the palm print, like that of the heartbeat or the life field, seems to depend on the maintenance of these signals, because the lines in the hand begin to break down when the impulses cease, at the moment of death.

The signals from the brain also determine <how the hand will be used. In this, the science of body language is paralleled by an older one, in which the gestures are much more subtle, each one, however, being recorded at the time of performance in a written code that can be examined and analysed at leisure.

Graphology

Camille Baldo in 1622 published the first known book on the subject, which bore the title Treating of How a Written Message May Reveal the Nature of Qualities of the Writer. He was followed by Goethe, the Brownings, Poe, Van Gogh, Mendelssohn, and Freud. Today graphologists, like the serious chirologists, have quantified their science and lifted handwriting analysis out of its fairground atmosphere to make it a useful tool now widely used in psychoanalysis and in educational and vocational guidance.

There is nothing instinctive in handwriting; nobody is born with the ability to put pen to paper. It is strictly a learned pattern of behavior that has to be acquired over years of painstaking effort under the careful scrutiny of a teacher. So all written records show cultural and environmental patterns that depend purely on where and when a person learned to transcribe the traditional symbols. But after years of practicing the skill it becomes mechanical, and the automatic actions are influenced more by personal factors. In an adult, the pen places one letter after another almost unconsciously, while the mind moves around the sound of the word. Between the thought and the final result there is ample room for the expression of character, and there can be very little doubt that the shape of each line in every letter carries the mark of the author.

There are many examples of animals that show individual differences in learned patterns of behavior. Young squirrels encountering a hard-shelled nut for the first time make indiscriminate scraping patterns on it with their teeth until at last the nut yields and breaks open. As they gain more experience, they learn how best to apply the minimum effort for the maximum return by following the fibers in the shell and not working against the grain. Techniques differ in that some individuals gnaw a piece out of the apex of the nut, some make furrows running up to meet at the apex, some circle the apex and lift off the lid, and some slice the nut neatly and completely in half. (337) Each squirrel leaves a pattern so distinctive that an expert can go into a forest and tell, just by looking at the shells, how many animals were involved. If he happens to be a good game ranger, then he can file 'toothprints' of all the squirrels living in the area and not only keep track of their development and whereabouts but even get an idea of each individual's state of health.

There is a definite connection between handwriting and health. Some analysts claim that they can detect specific sicknesses from the script. It is true that loss of coordination due to something like Parkinson's disease would certainly produce gross deformation in writing. The American Medical Association reports, 'There are definite organic diseases that graphodiagnostics can help to diagnose from their earliest beginnings.' (158) They list anemia, blood poisoning, tumors, and various bone diseases among these, but add that old age can produce substantially the same signs. A few skilled geriatricians believe that it is possible to use handwriting as a sort of X ray to distinguish between actual mental unbalance and normal senility. The general disruption of handwriting patterns that occurs in both emotional and physical disorders is clearly recognisable and almost impossible to disguise.

Like the serious astrologer or chirologist, a good graphologist is concerned with details. Before making an assessment, he collects several samples of script produced at different times, preferably with different pens, and never works with material specifically written for analysis. He examines the slant and weight of the writing; looks at margins, spacing, rhythm, and legibility; watches punctuation and the way in which t is crossed and i and j are dotted; studies the shape of loops and the way in which strokes begin and end. With all these characters, repetition is considered to be important; the more often a trait is recorded in the script, the stronger it is thought to be.

The relative frequency is also measured, so patterns that indicate contrasting traits can be reconciled. If only a limited amount of script is available for analysis, graphologists can get most information from the signature of the subject. This is something that is written so often and with such specific reference to self that it becomes a stylised representation of the writer as unique as a fingerprint. Hence its use for the purposes of identification.

In the assessment of all behavior patterns, it is necessary to decide how much is determined purely by functional requirements, and once this quantity has been subtracted, the rest can be used as an indication of cultural and personal preferences. An aboriginal tribesman puts on as much clothing as is necessary to protect him from the sun or the cold, and whatever is worn over and above this must be there for other reasons; but great care should be exercised in attributing value to the extra items. They may be worn for traditional and cultural reasons, for the sake of convention and modesty, or there may be religious or magical significance in the garments, or perhaps social values, such as status or position, may be involved. Only when all these possibilities have been exhausted can we pick out, say, a necklace of cowrie shells, and say that these express the individual's personality and that he must be an outgoing character with a fine appreciation of nature. Then we discover that cowries are the local form of currency and that he was just on his way out to buy a new harpoon. This kind of pitfall is common to the life sciences and applies directly to studies such as graphology.

In writing, the letters and words are symbols of language and ideas. They are functional signals that have been dressed up in patterns with a variety of traditional and cultural nuances. With experience it is possible to strip away the well-rounded curves; long sloping up-and-down strokes; and the liberal ornamentation that are affirmations of national identity and indicate only that the writer learned to use his pen in France. It should also be possible to recognise the fact that heavy lines may be caused by nothing more than the poor quality of the paper in an undeveloped country or the current fashion for felt-tipped pens in a prosperous one. This kind of preliminary scrutiny is not always done with the necessary care, but beneath all the misleading surface details there seem to be a number of basic patterns in graphology that can be used as a valid scientific means of assessing individual character.

I believe we all respond to subtle signals in other people's script even without training, and that a letter from a loved one carries an unconsciously coded message in every line and flourish that is quite distinct from the sense of the words involved. Why else should we be upset by a typewritten letter from a close friend, unless the machine comes between us and destroys the chance of reading the lines themselves?

An American psychologist says, 'How long you make your strokes, how wide your loops, where you put the dot over the i, isn't a matter of chance. It's governed by the laws of personality; ... the movements you make while writing are like gestures--they express what you feel. Anything that moves you, disturbs you or excites you--either emotionally or physically--shows up in the marks you make with your pen.' (158) So now General Motors, General Electric, US Steel, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company all employ full-time executives to do nothing but watch these marks--and they seem to be earning their salaries.

The hand and its behavior provide one of the most sensitive external measures of the workings of the brain, but there are other outward signs of mind.

Physiognomy

Most amoebae multiply in the immortal manner--splitting down the middle to form two daughter cells and then doing it again and again as necessary. But there are some species that go in for communal reproduction, getting together in groups of up to half a million that form a special sexual organism. Dictyostelium discoideum is normally an independent single cell that flows around in the usual erratic amoeba way, but whenever food is in short supply and there are a number of other amoebae around, the cells get together at central collection points and build towers that grow until they topple over into a small, glittering mass.

The blob takes on a bullet shape and becomes a slug with a distinct front and back end, shows a communal sensitivity to heat and light, and migrates as one purposeful being to the most favorable environment. There it stands on end, forms a long, thin stalk, and lifts a spherical mass of cells up into the air like a balloon on a string. The separate amoebae making up the structure take on different functions, some forming the supporting stalk and others becoming spores that will be wafted away to liberate new free-living amoebae somewhere else.

This joint effort in a single-celled organism is a remarkable development. John Bonner has discovered that it is made possible by the fact that all amoebae are not created equal. There are visible differences between those that are destined to become the stalk and those that will be spores: the stalk makers are slightly larger than the others and move more quickly. So even in a society as old as this slug it is possible to pick out individuals on the basis only of their appearance and to use this to describe their behavior patterns and to predict their destinies.

In more complex organisms there are even more clues to work with; whole branches of science, such as paleontology, are forced to draw inferences about diet, habitat, and behavior directly from what is known about the structure of species long since extinct. Collaboration between engineer George Whitfield and zoologist Cherrie Bramwell at the University of Reading has produced new deductive information of this kind about Pteranodon ingens, the largest flying creature ever to exist. (340) Working from scattered pieces of skeleton, like a team rebuilding a crashed airliner, they estimate its wingspan at twenty-three feet and total weight at only thirty-five pounds--and from this information deduce that it was poor at powered flight, but was a very efficient glider with an extremely low rate of sink and a very low flying and stalling speed. These clues, together with a study of the teeth, suggest that this vulturine gliding reptile lived at sea, soaring in the rising air where the wind blows over the waves and diving to snatch fish off the surface.

They also suggest that it nested on cliffs facing the sea and the prevailing wind, and returned to its home by soaring up the face and flopping down gently on the top. Putting a fossil head into a wind tunnel, they discovered that the long, thin, bony blade projecting from the pack of Pteranodon's head was an aerodynamic fin that balanced the loads on the beak when the head swung from side to side in its search for prey. And that this development allowed the animal to economise on the weight of neck muscles and made it even better suited to the light winds and warm, shallow seas of the Cretaceous.

Similar feats of scientific detection play a large part in the search for man's ancestors. Dubois, who discovered the famous fossil man in Java in 1891, had nothing but a few teeth to start with, but using these together with the skullcap and a piece of thighbone, he was able to predict that Java Man was primitive, with a brain midway in size between man and gorilla, and that he walked erect. Later and more complete finds showed that this diagnosis was correct. (346)

If reasoning of this kind is capable of producing verifiable results with fossil forms, there is no reason why it should not apply equally well to living ones. We know that the physique of many men is directly related to the climate in which they live. The Dinka people of Africa are tall and thin, because this gives them the greatest possible surface area for their body weight and helps them lose heat most effectively, while the Eskimo are comparatively short and padded with fat to conserve heat. The faces of Mongol people from northeast Asia are flat, which reduces frostbite; have fat-lidded eyes, which are thus protected against glare and snowblindness; and are smooth-skinned, which reduces the risk of condensation on hair around the mouth.

Equatorial people tend to be dark-skinned, with a pigment that protects deeper layers from the sun, while Nordic people are very fair and able to take maximum advantage of occasional sunlight to promote the formation of vitamin D in their skins. (15) This sort of climatic engineering makes it possible to look at man's shape and deduce something about his, or his ancestors', habitat and way of life. To a certain extent, this knowledge will tell us a little about his character, but it may be possible to tell quite a lot about personality types by looking directly at physical appearance alone.

Aristotle and Plato considered the idea, but the first scientific work on physiognomy--'knowledge from the body'--was produced by Johann Lavater, a nineteenth-century Swiss mystic. Charles Darwin included similar ideas in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and pointed out that special body structures were evolved to signal certain emotions and that it would be reasonable to deduce from the presence of these structures that the relevant emotion played a large part in that animal's life. In more recent and less scholarly works on physiognomy, writers have tended to make rather fanciful generalisations such as 'an indented chin is a certain sign of a warm, loving disposition', which, if they have any meaning at all, can only be applied to small, localised groups of people. And yet, if one wades through the literature on physiognomy, there is a germ of truth that makes biological sense.

Taking man as a single species, it is possible to see certain basic patterns of shape and proportion. The height of a man is usually six times the length of his foot; the face from the top of the forehead to the point of the chin measures one tenth of the height; the hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is usually the same as the face from the hair line to the chin; the distance from the hair to the eyebrows is the same as that from the eyebrows to the nostrils and from the nostrils to the chin; and the height is normally equal to the distance between the fingertips with arms extended sideways. It is interesting that these world-wide human 'norms' are exactly the proportions considered most harmonious by the classic Greek sculptors.

There is naturally a tremendous variation over the world, but national, racial, and cultural averages can be established, and if an individual varies significantly from these standards, there must be a good biological reason for the deviation. William Sheldon in 1940 worked out a system of somatotyping that recognises three extremes of body shape: The endomorph is essentially rounded, with a round head, a bulbous stomach, a heavy build, and a lot of fat, but he is not necessarily a fat man and does not change to another category when he loses weight - he just becomes a thin endomorph. The mesomorph is the classic sculptors' model, with a large head, broad shoulders, a lot of muscle and bone, not much fat, and relatively narrow hips. And the ectomorph is all sharp corners and angles, with spindly limbs, narrow shoulders and hips, and little muscle, so that even when fattened up he does not become an endomorph. (306)

Everyone has a little of all three in his makeup, and a random group of people, say those called up for jury duty or traveling in the same train, will show all possible combinations, but a group chosen for particular physical prowess will favor certain shapes. Olympic athletes are seldom endomorphic. There does not, however, seem to be any correlation between shape and intelligence--a group of university graduates show a completely random pattern of combinations.

Phrenology

Franz Gall, an anatomist working in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, made a special study of neurology and decided that the brain was responsible for producing the phenomena of mind. For this heresy he was expelled from Catholic Austria. He continued with his work in exile and decided that not only were emotions produced in the head, but that different ones arose in different parts of the brain. (226) This was an astute and revolutionary idea at a time when the orthodox view was that the brain, whatever it did, worked as a whole. Up to this point Gall was absolutely right, but then he went off at a tangent and began to ascribe functions to parts of the brain on the flimsiest evidence. He remembered that two of his school friends with good memories also happened to have bulging eyes, and concluded from this that the faculty of memory must be located in the frontal lobes of the brain, just behind the eyes.

He chose sites in the cerebral hemispheres for the functions of language and calculation on similarly vague grounds and published all his theories in a book that, much later, gave rise to the craze of phrenology. European society discovered it with delight, and 'bumps on the head' became a fashionable parlor pastime in London and Paris. Life-size, bald, china heads were produced as guides, suitably inscribed with a patchwork labeled 'sublimity', 'ideality', 'benevolence', and that splendid Victorian substitute for sex --'philoprogenitiveness'. The subject quickly fell into disrepute, and serious anatomists ignored it altogether, which was a pity, because it embodies a useful idea that was lost for 150 years.

The phrenologists made two basic mistakes. They assumed that, if a faculty was particularly well developed in someone, then that part of the brain in which it was thought to be located would also be large and well developed; and they thought that these bulges in the brain produced corresponding bumps and indentations on the surface of the skull. Today we know that the volume of the brain has little to do with its effectiveness (Byron had a very small brain) and that bumps on the head are produced by thickening on the outside of the skull. There is no similarity between the ripples on the inside of the brain case and the bulges outside. But the phrenologists were right about functions being localised in certain areas of the brain--there is a center of language and another that controls sexual activity. It was not until 1939, when experiments were done on monkeys with parts of their brains removed, that science really grasped the fact that character and personality were localised in specific areas. In one operation, alterations were made to only one side of the brain, so that, with the left eye open, the monkey was violent and aggressive, and looking only through its right eye, it became indifferent and docile. Which, incidentally, provides an anatomical basis for the old belief that witches have one 'evil eye', whose powers differ markedly from the other one.

While there may not be bumps of aggression on the head, the brain areas responsible for initiating aggressive behavior do set up patterns of muscle action that usually follow the same paths. A baboon has a repertoire of three basic facial expressions that accompany attack, aggressive-threat, and scared-threat behavior. In all these expressions, the eyes are open wide, and, depending on the level of aggression, the eyebrows move from a lowered frown up into a raised position. Constant repetition of these patterns by an individual in an insecure hierarchical position leaves its mark on his face. Vertical and horizontal lines begin to appear permanently on the forehead and produce a visible, external sign of a prevailing emotional state. Physiognomy works to the extent that it is possible to look at such an animal or man and predict that he will probably be more than ordinarily aggressive.

In apes and man a state of pleasure is indicated by a relaxation of the eyes and, at a high level, by an automatic inflation of small pouches on the lower eyelid. This response cannot be faked; it appears only in genuine happiness, and if it takes place often, leaves the pouch in a permanent state of partial inflation. This character has only recently been recorded by physiologists and ethologists, but it is well described in all the works on physiognomy.

The connection between other internal states and external appearance is less obvious. Physiognomists traditionally equate the round-faced, endomorphic type with a personality involving good humor and adaptability; the mesomorphic face, with the strong bone and muscle structure, is said to indicate an energetic and forceful character; and the slender, pear-shaped, ectomorphic face is supposed to show imagination and sensitivity. Broadly speaking, most psychologists agree with this assessment as applied to the extreme examples of the three types, but it is a generalisation of little real value. Another criterion often used is the position of the ear: the farther back on the head it lies, the greater the intellect is said to be.

Embryonically its position is determined by that of the auditory nerve, which will sometimes be displaced if the cortical area of the brain is well developed--so there may be something in this belief. The unsubstantiated idea of a strong, hooked nose being the sign of a leader probably originated in Roman times, when people with such noses did lead, but it would be fruitless to look for a nose of this shape among the very capable Asian and African leaders of the present. Many other physiognomic characters, such as red hair, brown eyes, and thick lips are similarly associated with racial stereotypes and mean nothing. Birds of prey kill for a living, and so we associate hooked beaks with violent and aggressive behavior, and we contrast this with the stereotype of the soft-billed, gentle dove. Nothing could be further from the truth. The social life of most birds of prey is quiet and well ordered, whereas there are few things more bloody and destructive than the battle between rival male doves.

We tend to make the same sort of mistake in our estimation of human character and behavior.

The small strengths of physiognomy lie partly in physiology and partly in behavior. There are medical conditions, such as hyperthyroidism, that result in an excess of the thyroid hormone and produce overactivity and excitability--and one of the classic symptoms of the disorder is bulging eyes. There are external characters that can be acquired by the constant repetition of a muscular act that is directly connected to a particular mental state. These correlations are probably statistically significant, in that a large number of people who have a certain appearance will also behave in a predictable way, but comparisons should be made with care.

There are several offshoots of physiognomy--one of the most fanciful being 'moleosophy'--the interpretation of moles on the body, the theory being that the shape and color of the mole and its position are indications of character. These marks on the skin are often congenital and hereditary, often occurring in exactly the same place on a child as in one of its parents, so their position is not determined by chance, but there is nothing to support the idea that a mole on the ankle indicates 'a fearful nature' or that one on the ear will bring 'riches far beyond expectations'.

So much of our character is determined by learning and experience that any system of interpretation that relies on permanent physical features is likely to be inaccurate. People change, and transient patterns are far more effective indications of mood, because the best signals are those that, like the flashing light, produce a sudden and dramatic change. Blushing is one of these. Basically it is a reddening of the skin produced by dilation of the blood vessels and is most common in young females, but it seems to occur in all humans no matter what their sex or color and can almost be considered as a biological character of our species. Records show that girls who blushed freely fetched the highest prices in old slave markets, so there seem to be both sexual and submissive factors involved in the signal. Desmond Morris suggests that it is a powerful invitation to intimacy. As such, it probably serves the same function as breeding plumage in many male birds, which appears only at certain times and, when it does, it indicates a willingness and intention to breed.

All in all, it seems that there are limits to what one can learn about an individual's mental state, from observation only of the external signs of mind. Sensitive equipment such as electroencephalographs and life-field detectors give a closer view of the outward parts of internal processes, but even these are measuring only the fringes of the phenomenon. In order to really appreciate the potentials of the brain, it is necessary to learn new techniques of self-control and contact with others. A few of these keys to Supernature have already been discovered.

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