Consciousness, Conspiracies, and the Vanishing Researcher
I’m just not willing to go down this rabbit hole, but I can’t resist describing it, however briefly.
It’s introduced in Living on Earth, a fascinating book by the Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. Godfrey-Smith is discussing the emergence and functioning of consciousness, and he discusses rather briefly research involving what’s known as hyperscanning, when researchers use scanning technology to observe brain activity in two different people as they interact — or, in some cases, as they’re not directly interacting. The latter research investigates whether one person might somehow replicate another’s brain activity even when the two people are isolated from each other.
One early example is the work of two ophthalmologists in the 1960s, using EEG technology. “In the test, one twin would close their eyes in a lit room. Closing the eyes tends to initiate a particular kind of rhythm (alpha rhythms) in the brain. Might the other twin, in a separate room, enter the same brain wave pattern also? They reported that in some cases, the answer was yes” (p. 181). Godfrey-Smith offers more detail in a footnote. He reports some problems in the research, and notes that many scientists are not convinced. The subjects included 15 pairs; 13 of the pairs gave negative results (i.e., one person’s brain waves weren’t replicated in the other person). But two pairs showed positive results, in every instance, moving in both directions.
Interesting, but that’s not the rabbit hole I’m resisting now. The next paragraph points toward that hole:
A few other studies of this kind followed, including a much more technically sophisticated one, not using twins, led by a Mexican researcher whose career bridged scientific and shamanistic approaches, Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. This 1992 experiment, using EEG scans, reported success in transmission across nearby but shielded rooms. Grinberg-Zylberbaum disappeared, in a still-unsolved mystery, two years later (p. 181).
And Godfrey-Smith moves on. That’s all? Grinberg-Zylberbaum simply disappeared?
Of course, we have the internet, and Wikipedia confirms the gist of the story, including the point that there are many “conspiracy theories” supposedly explaining the scientist’s disappearance. There’s also an essay written by a distant relative, who says that a person reported seeing Grinberg-Zylberbaum climbing into a “spaceship made of three perfectly delineated spheres.” I don’t think so. Another story, more credible to me, is that he ran afoul of some powerful people in Mexico.
That’s the rabbit hole – the matter of Grinberg-Zylberbaum’s disappearance – I’m refusing to enter, at least for the moment. I’m definitely not inclined to accept the story of the spaceship. I’m intrigued by the mystery. More than that, though, the world I’m living in now has me wondering just why so many people are willing to construct and/or believe what I see to be fantastical accounts of the world.
For what it’s worth, earlier in his chapter on consciousness, Godfrey-Smith describes some research into the human split brain that could be helpful here. The brain has two hemispheres. Some of our cognitive activity is spread over both hemispheres, though there’s also some specialization. It seems that the left hemisphere is interested in narrative unity – in fact, this side of the brain is so invested in finding narrative unity in experience that it’s perfectly willing to make something up in order to make sense of things, without telling us (whoever “we” are) that’s it’s doing that. “We tie old memories into a story and try to make sense of continuity through change. … When we do this, some of what we arrive at is ‘cooked up,’ to various degrees — it introduces fictions, and smooths over rough patches” (p. 175).
That makes some sense to me. (Though how would I know if that sense-making were simply the left hemisphere of my brain “smoothing things over,” things that are otherwise inexplicable?) As my current reading list suggests, thinking about larger questions about the evolution of the world in general and the emergence of life and of consciousness are occupying many of my brain cycles these days. That’s a rabbit hole I’m willing to crawl into. If and when I crawl back out, perhaps I’ll be saying more about it here.