Thirteen Seconds, or Intelligence Without Brain
Thirteen seconds - slime & reason - yuck, bodies
Thirteen seconds
Joseph Ignace Guillotin was an 18th-century French physician who opposed the death penalty1. In his day, the streets of Paris regularly curdled with the screams of people being executed by hanging, decapitation by sword or axe, being boiled, and other unpleasant methods.
Perhaps realizing that full abolition was a step too far too soon, Guillotin focused on proposing a more ‘humane’ method of execution. What about a machine that neatly separates head from body? A sharp blade that, thanks to gravity, would result in a fast, clean death? There were already precursors of such machines, but under Guillotin’s impetus (and the French Revolution), they were further developed and renamed guillotines.
‘Off with their heads’ had never been easier.
The question on everyone’s undecapitated mind, of course, is, “Do the executed people feel it? Are they still conscious for a brief moment?”
Reasonably, you would assume that the rapid exsanguination of the head would mean immediate lights out, but in 19052, a Dr. Beaurieux decided to do a case study because, you know, science. The conclusion of his report reads,
… once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.
I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds.
Are ‘undeniably living eyes’ enough to assume someone’s looking through them, though? What if we look at brain activity? Studies in rats find about 10-15 seconds of EEG activity ‘consistent with discomfort and pain’ after decapitation, with one (1975, so apply a few tablespoons of salt) study settling on 13.6 seconds of ‘something going on’ in rat brains after decapitation.
Thirteen seconds sounds perfectly ominous as the time during which some spark remains after the head and the rest of the body say goodbye to each other. Then, the brain winks out and everything fades.
Wait…
Who needs a brain anyway?
All you need is slime.
Slime & reason3
This beautiful creature hugging a tree is the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, affectionately known as the blob.
Slime molds are a diverse group of organisms straddled across different taxonomic groups (so on different threads in the web of life). Our beautiful blob Physarum is a plasmodial slime mold, which means that the entire yellow network you see in the picture is a single multi-nucleated mass4 called a plasmodium. Plasmodial slime molds play an important ecosystem role by breaking down organic matter and recycling nutrients.
But, for a blob without a nervous system and brain, it also exhibits behavior that seems remarkably clever. Decision-making, problem-solving, and learning are not a problem for our blobby friend.
A famous Physarum experiment showed how the slime mold could approximate the railroad network that connects Japanese cities. The slime molds can also solve the shortest path problem in a maze, efficiently search for multiple food sources and do so in a way that is the envy of all (human) diet gurus — Physarum manages to,
… grow to contact patches of different nutrient quality in the precise proportions necessary to compose an optimal diet.
Most humans can’t even cobble together a balanced diet.
Our slimy friends also balance speed and accuracy in their decisions, learn to anticipate recurring events, and make decisions about preferential growth by using their bodies as,
…both a distributed sensor array and computational substrate…
In a way, slime molds are body and brain.
Aw, like people.
Yuck, bodies
Once upon a time, before it turned on itself, I liked my brain5. The rest of me? Meh, meaningless meat. Stuff my blob into a robot and let me roam the world and the cosmos, please.
Then, I changed my mind. I began to notice, quite clearly, that my brain, my me, felt sharper, faster, and more resilient when the rest of my body was doing well. Mind and body are not separate entities. RIP Descartes.
Not only do you have a second brain in your gut (with roughly as many neurons as a cat’s brain and producing 95% of serotonin and 50% of dopamine in the body!), but a jumble of theories under the umbrella of embodied cognition propose that our being in and interacting with the world shapes how we think. Through using your body and interacting with the environment, you sculpt your brain6.
For example, action experiences improve learning, not just for toddlers putting stuff in their mouths to learn about the world, but for adults grappling with complex concepts as well. Or what about the link between mental body representations (how aware you are of your body) and empathy and theory of mind? Memory, too, seems affected by the sensorimotor processes of the body. Even something as simple as your posture might influence memory recall.
Dance is a wonderful test case for embodied cognition. Dancing requires strength, balance, and proprioception (awareness of your body in space). Lo and behold, dancing supports general creativity, beefs up the extended mirror neuron system (which helps you interpret the movements of other people), possibly boosts social cognition, and protects against cognitive decline.
The evidence for embodied cognition, no matter how intuitive it sounds, is not a slam dunk. There are many confounding factors and we can’t exactly use a control group without a body.
But you are not just a brain. You are a brain plus the smart interface (or body) it uses to interact with the world. The brain and (the rest of) the body are tied together by a bunch of feedback loops, which makes me wonder about mind upload or brain-in-a-vat scenarios. Sure, you can simulate sensorimotor input, but that would only confirm the relevance of a body for a mind.
Can there be a bodyless mind?
I still wouldn’t recommend a guillotine to find out.
Thanks for joining this whirlwind tour from the French Revolution to thinking blobs. Let your mind tell your body to click things. It helps keep this newsletter alive.
Legend has it that he was born prematurely after his mother caught a terrible fright hearing a man being executed on a breaking wheel.
If you’re into old-school British hip hop, you know where this comes from…
For your fancy word of the day, plasmodia are coenocytes, or cells with multiple nuclei following nuclear divisions. In plain language, that entire yellow blob is one giant cell with many cell cores!
I’m learning to like it again. Work in progress.
Back in ancient times, I wrote about embodied cognition in the context of AI.
Antoine Lavoisier, 18th century French chemist, as a final experiment told his colleague that he would try to blink as long as possible after being beheaded.
I'd heard about this before so apologies for the following link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1cj7h4l/antoine_lavoisier_18th_century_french_chemist_as/
But Google AI says: the execution site was too removed for such an experiment to be observed, and the story likely originated in a 1990s Discovery Channel documentary and spread online.
I claim this as the "Storey Effect": the things you remember as being interesting, were interesting because they were unlikely, which means they are probably made-up or simply wrong.
Merlin Sheldrake in Entangled Life explores the weird brainless intelligence of amoeba, fungi, octopuses and uses it as a springboard for us to question our feelings about our own identities. Have you read it?
I noticed his amazing dad, Rupert Sheldrake, just appeared on Substack!