Invisible Beasts (20 page)

Maybe I'll have another one, just in case.

A
S
I
SAID EARLIER
, T
HINK
M
ONKEY
has no conscious thoughts: she only makes conscious thoughts, but—paradoxically—she makes conscious thoughts about herself. This is one of the spookier aspects of a human mind. I once read a haunting story about an animal researcher who studied cotton-top tamarin monkeys, a cute species the size of squirrels, with amber-eyed, squashed, grave little mugs, feverish hands, and fluffy white manes. One female tamarin liked the researcher very much, and always cooed at him. We don't know why. Sometimes that worried him. One night, he dreamed that his little
friend skipped over and offered him, in her needling fingers, a book. It was a clothbound textbook, titled
Dictionary of the Tamarin Language
. This was the Holy Grail of his research—a key to primate communication!—so he was very happy to see it. But when he opened it, it was blank.

Think Monkey, the sleeping simian in our brains who performs our higher mental functions, is also responsible for our dreams. It's a strange thing to imagine. Think Monkey, in her dreamless sleep, without a flicker of consciousness, like a shut-eyed Buddha enthroned among a billion exploding lotus blossoms and lilies of perception and computation, sends down to us a dream, through the long, weird chute that travels between the actual inaccessible and the conscious (although slumbering) mind. People used to think that gods visited them in dreams, taking the form of their lost friends or loves to get their attention, saying:
Gather your maidservants and wash the laundry in the river
, or,
Sacrifice a snow-white bull immediately
. It would have been blasphemy to suggest that these dear ones, so precious to dreaming eyes, were the handiwork of a monkey perched inside the brain. But in Think Monkey's sleep, our thinking is woven, and when its representation comes in dream images, we had better pay attention.

The animal researcher's dream tells the most intimate of truths. Think Monkey—i.e., his conceptual process—weighed his knowledge of cotton-top tamarins and communication, and made a prediction: he would write
a book. But Think Monkey also weighed the concept of consciousness itself, which was inevitably part of this researcher's questions. And in answer, Think Monkey sent an image of
herself
: a monkey holding up a blank dictionary—a representation of the very fact that she has nothing to say. Only our conscious minds speak, though our thoughts come straight from the monkey's hands. I can think of no more eerie paradox . . . rather, my Think Monkey can create no more eerie paradox, for me to become conscious of, and speak of . . .

No image captures more surely the intermediate place of our conscious minds, looking around with wonderment between the superb blank of our inmost thought activity, and the stupendous blank of our sensory activity. Is there anything quite like the amazing and paradoxical Think Monkey?

There is. The neuroscientist whom I quoted in the last section yearns for new experiments. Neuroscience is so new! Great discoveries await the experimenter who can decode the chattering of a hundred thousand neurons instead of the few used in most experiments. He urges more experimentation on animals in a duly humane manner, using modern anesthetic technology that

permits the monkey to be rapidly and reversibly put to sleep while the electrode stays in place.
^*

I can see them now, all those sleeping primates: the limp chimps and conked-out macaques, the gibbons' faces fringed in pale fur like ash-encircled coals. All our cousins getting their beauty sleep, sprouting electrodes for our benefit. A bit pathetic, a bit clownish—but mostly eerie, because Think Monkey's functions also include human creativity. We know that the creative thought process is hidden from the conscious mind. Genius is a secret to itself. Out of nowhere, an idea pops into your head, or makes you sit bolt upright at four in the morning. The procedure that evolved it is hidden; that's the monkey's job. Think Monkey, the universal Muse, creates the flash in which a scientist sees the light. So it is at her prompting that we fill our laboratories with unconscious primates, the living images of Think Monkey herself, as we struggle to fulfill that darkly humorous imperative, Know Thyself.

*
    
The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
, Christof Koch, (Geenwood Village, CO: Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004) p. 298.

*
    
Koch, p. 312.

2

B
ecause of Fine-Print Rotifers, I used to believe in going paperless—in creating and storing all documents digitally. Then I learned Silicon Valley's best-kept secret, namely, that the bugs, viruses, and worms infesting the Web are by no means as metaphorical as one tends to assume . . . but that's another story
.

Fine-Print Rotifers

F
INE PRINT IS HARD TO READ
not only because of its painful smallness and dry subject matter. It is also the grazing ground of Fine-Print Rotifers. These microscopic animals are highly destructive. Had humanity never developed ink, then the FPRs, as I'll call them, would not have become pandemic; they would have remained a minor symbiont in plants, and the United States might never have reaped the grim results of the securitization of mortgages. As it is, a plague of protozoa thrives on our need to spell out everything in writing.

Lignin, the most abundant organic material on earth, comes from plants and contains pigments. We see these pigments in paper as it yellows over time. Plants use pigments for many purposes. But since too much of a good thing is always a bad thing, FPRs make themselves useful by ridding plants of surplus lignin pigments. They also kill harmful bacteria—in effect, marinating and cooking them. It is a simple life but elegantly arranged.

Rotifers, under magnification, look like wiggly electric
razors: they have one or two hairy, wheel-shaped organs that whirl food into their gullets. Imagine a wheel hung with fishing lines over a barrel full of fish. An FPR's wheel-hairs act just like that, hooking “fish”—tasty pigment molecules—which they yank off the lignin and drop into the rotifer's gullet, neat and sweet, and I'm sparing you much technical detail. As a by-product, FPRs also excrete a mild acid that softens up bacteria, as a marinade tenderizes meat, and, being slightly heated, cooks them as well. In their natural home on a plant, the rotifers wriggle along cooking and gobbling up any bacteria in their way, while they munch lignin pigments. I suspect that the pigment is a cherished condiment, and FPRs are eaters of the type who upend a bottle of mustard or ranch dressing over everything, and will even guzzle their favorite sauce unaccompanied, like those of us who privately eat maple syrup with a spoon. Be that as it may, plants and FPRs together are the picture of a perfect symbiosis . . . but paper and ink change everything.

P
APER CONTAINS
FPR
SPORES
, in the lignin. FPRs hibernate through hard times in spore form, reemerging when they sense the presence of plenty. As soon as ink hits the paper—zap! Invisible rotifers are all over every serif. The abundance of scrumptious pigment drives them wild with appetite, for synthetic ink is vastly more concentrated than lignin pigment—it's like fudge, sirloin steak, and triple
crème Brie rolled into one. I don't use the word
swarm
, however, since the rotifers don't move in loose swarms. Far from it. The most spectacular trait of this species is the deliberate route it takes while feeding—in other words, its foraging route.

W
E ARE TALKING OPTIMAL
foraging theory, which applies to all animal foraging, including your own shopping route. For instance: if you can't buy all your groceries at one store, you try to figure out the most efficient route between stores. This is your foraging route. All predators have one, because for most predators, the stores they patronize try to run away and hide. Think about it. What if you never knew which store would be open, or when? You would search your past experiences for the most common open times, and create a route based on that. Your route would take the shape of the optimal supply of open grocery stores. And where do FPRs find their tasty ink molecules? In letters and words.
So they develop foraging routes in the shapes of letters and words
.

T
HIS IS HOW AN INNOCENT BEAST
causes us misery in varying degrees from the nagging to the catastrophic. Not because the rotifers strip the ink off paper—though they do—but because, at the same time that FPRs remove the original printed words, they also wriggle over the paper in
their foraging routes, excreting a mild acid, slightly heated, as mentioned. Now, it just so happens that putting mild acid on paper, and then heating it, is the classic recipe for invisible ink. You can easily imitate the foraging routes of FPRs yourself. Just write a few words using lemon juice for ink, then heat the paper you've written on. Gradually, on the blank-looking sheet, you will see your handwriting appear. Now you can understand why, when fine print makes absolutely no sense whatever, in nine cases out of ten,
it is because instead of the original words, we are reading the foraging routes of Fine-Print Rotifers
.

T
HIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT
FPRs are writing to us. It would be fun if their routes spelled out “Wassup?” or “Go Mets!,” but that doesn't happen. They're eating, not writing. What's more, since the early nineteenth century (for reasons I'll explain) their foraging routes have become rigidly stereotyped, consisting of repeated groups of syllables. A typical example is one that I encountered during a dispute with my HMO. I'd had a operation on my eyes, and the HMO had denied my claim for the left eye. I called them and was told that they didn't pay for the same operation twice. I explained that it wasn't the same operation twice, but operations on two different eyes. I also explained that I used these two different eyes, “right” and “left,” for my bicameral sense of vision. No go. I hung up the phone. I laid my head on the paperwork, then
raised my head again, and tried to read
page 12
, section B, subsection B6.11, of my health insurance contract. Neither reading glasses, nor artificial tears, nor real tears, clarified
page 12
, section B, subsection B6.11, and in desperation I called my employer's benefits office.

“There's something wrong with my contract,” I told the clerk, who said there could not be anything wrong with an individual contract as everyone was sent the same contract. “But,” I told her, “I'm reading the terms of coverage right here, on
page 12
, section B, subsection B6.11, right at the bottom of the page?”