In the nineteenth century, phrenology was not the quackery it later became, but the cutting edge of neuroscience. Phineas Gage’s disaster allowed nineteenth-century medical science to refine the phrenological map. To this end, Dr John Harlow conducted an experiment to test the damage to his Organ of Comparison, which was close to the Organ of Veneration and as such lay in the tamping iron’s flight path.
Finding Phineas playing catch with a handful of pebbles, Dr Harlow offered to buy four of the pebbles from him for one thousand dollars. Gage politely declined the offer, possibly fearing that the doctor had suffered irreversible damage to his Organ of Comparison.
For great apes dollar bills and pebbles are equally meaningless. The Organ of Comparison lay in the part of the forehead that apes do not have. Dr Harlow is literally seeing how far from the human state into apehood Phineas has fallen. He is playing a kind of Ker-plunk of the brain: how many phrenological sticks can be removed before humanity falls away completely and we have a bipedal ape? Phineas Gage offered a particularly good starting place for such an inquiry by dint of his profession, because even in full health, the navvy was popularly, if half-seriously, describe as the missing link between apes and humans:
With fury and frenzy and fear,
That his strength might endure for a span,
From birth, through beer to bier,
The link ‘twixt the ape and the man.
‘The Navvy Chorus’, Songs of a Navvy (1912).
What did Dr Harlow make of Gage’s waving away a grand? Did he take it to prove that, whatever else the tamping iron wrecked, at least Phineas’s fundamental decency was still intact? Was this evidence that the accident hadn’t damaged his patient’s Organ of Conscientiousness (which was located halfway between the Organs of Sublimity and Firmness)? Alas, no. What Dr Harlow concluded was that Phineas Gage’s refusal to trade gravel for dollars demonstrated an inability to compare worth and worthlessness, which therefore proved that the Organ of Comparison was destroyed by the tamping iron, which means it must be just where the phrenological map said it was. One of the crucial barriers between ape and man was down.
Even allowing for the fact that phrenology – or Bumpology as its detractors called it – was considered by advocates such as Dr Harlow to be The One True Science of the Mind, I find this a puzzling conclusion. If Phineas Gage doesn’t know the meaning of money, if he thinks gravel is as good as gold, then why travel sixty-five miles to Montpelier for that job interview? Why get any kind of job at all, for that matter, when there’s so much valuable gravel lying about all over the place, just there for the taking?
How I wish Phineas Gage had pocketed those ten green hundred-dollar bills, tapped the side of his nose, and said: ‘And there’s plenty more where these pebbles come from, Doc!’ At that point Dr Harlow, blinking down at his palm and the four $250 dollar pebbles he now owned would say:
‘Actually it was just a test, Phineas.’
‘Say what?’
‘Please can I have my money back?’
‘You know, Doc, ever since the accident, if someone vexes me by like, fucking with my mind, I just go apeshit. Just lose it. Go fucking mental. I can’t keep a lid on my temper any more cos now I ain’t go no lid. Accident blew it off, know what I mean? I’m a fucking apeman, a wild man. So if someone like you was to, you know, say one thing and then the complete opposite? Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be the only man in town with an iron bar in his head, you know what I mean? Now get off my property and take your mini fucking rockery with you!’
Nothing in the Phineas Gage story makes sense except in the light of phrenology, but phrenology is played down in popular retellings because Gage’s accident is supposed to represent a decisive break with the past. With a big bang and a cloud of smoke the new science of cortical localisation is born. A couple of years later in 1861 Paul Broca publishes ‘Sur le principe des localisations cérébrales’, in the Bulletin de la Société dAnthropologie, in which he announces to the world how reason and emotion are divvied up in the brain:
The most noble cerebral faculties have their seat in the frontal convolutions, whereas the temporal, parietal and occipital lobe convolutions are appropriate for the feelings, penchants and passions.
Broca’s schema betrays how both the new science of cortical localisation and the old science of bumpology share a common ancestor in the ancient Greek idea that Reason is a charioteer controlling the wild beasts of Passion. A line straight as a tamping iron runs from this Greek idea, through Broca relegating emotion to a penchant, and all the way to the Myth of The Supermax Brain. This tradition, I think, helps explain why Ramachandran bares his canines in such a ferocious snarl at the ‘worthless vagabond with absolutely no moral sense.’
Incidentally, no-one ever accuses the Rutland and Burlington Railroad Company bosses of having absolutely no moral sense, even though they never paid Phineas Gage one red cent in compensation. But that’s probably because rail bosses destitute of human decency were seen as just one more occupational hazard in the working life of a railway navvy, as this nineteenth-century American railroad song makes clear:
Last week a premature blast went off,
A mile in the air went Big Jim Goff.
When the next pay day came round
Jim Goff a dollar short was found.
When he asked what for, came this reply:
‘You’re docked for the time you was up in the sky!’
The benchmark for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the famous Turing Test. Alan Turing’s 1950’s thought-experiment states that if a robot can convince you that you’re talking to another human being, then that robot can be said to have passed the Turing Test, thereby proving that there is nothing special about the human brain that a sufficiently powerful computer couldn’t do just as well.
Except the Turing Test proves no such thing. All it proves is that humans can be tricked, but everyone knew that already … except Alan Turing, alas, who in the last week of his life – and this is a true story – went to a funfair fortune-teller on Blackpool promenade. Nobody knows what the Gypsy Queen told him, but he emerged from her tent white as a sheet and killed himself two days later. But funfairs have had centuries of practice in the art of tricking punters.
Weirdly, a funfair nearly did for Isaac Newton. In a posthumous biographical sketch, his friend John Wickens says that when they went to Sturbridge County Fair, Newton had a complete meltdown, and was close to jettisoning his whole theory of how gravity acts on every object in the universe, after what Wickens describes as: ‘a frustrating hour at the coconut shy’.
In an interview with The Times about Artificial Intelligence, Brian Cox said:
There is nothing special about human brains. They operate according to the laws of physics. With a sufficiently complex computer, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t build AI. We’ll soon have robot co-workers, the difference is we’ll even be taking them to the office party.
I wrote a letter to The Times. They didn’t print it. I don’t why. It was quite short. It just said: ‘No we fucking won’t’.
Emotional robots are a vision of the future to be found in the Gypsy Queen’s crystal ball but not in science. Not least because of these two uncontroversial scientific facts:
1. We are not machines, we are animals.
2. No experiment performed by anyone anywhere in the whole world at any time has found a shred of evidence to suggest the remotest possibility that a ‘sufficiently complex computer’ will ever be able to do literally the first thing that a mammalian brain does, and experience