The Ocean of the Mind

The human brain is like the ocean in more ways than one. Both have a titanic capacity for good and evil; both have surface waves and unplumbed deeps. What Rachel Carson wrote of the ocean (in The Sea Around Us) is as true of the brain: "The largest and most awe-inspiring waves ... are invisible; they move on their mysterious courses far down in the hidden depths . . . rolling ponderously and unceasingly." This week there was a flurry of medical news made by researchers probing the dark unfathom'd caves of mind.

Convinced that surface brain waves, picked up by electrodes pasted on the scalp and recorded by the electroencephalograph, reveal little of what is happening below, the researchers had been plumbing the deeps with electrodes planted several inches down in the living brain. They hoped thus to learn where the controls are located for reflexes and instincts, emotions and reasoning. From this, they could go on to the diagnosis and treatment of physical disorders in the brain, and eventually, perhaps, to solving the riddle of mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

Monkey Business as Usual. From Yale Medical School to Chicago went a young Spanish physiologist to tell of what he has learned from monkeys. Dr. Jose M. Rodrigues Delgado has drilled holes in the skulls of anesthetized rhesus monkeys, jabbed fine electrodes (1/200 of an inch in diameter) deep into their brains, and carried connecting wires out to a tiny socket of the type used in midget radios. The sockets are attached at the back of the animal's head. The monkeys recover quickly from the operation, appear to feel no discomfort, and go about their monkey business as usual. Then, by plugging into the sockets and making connections with electrical instruments, Dr. Delgado can either record the animals' normal brain waves or modify them by running a tiny current through their brains and watching how this affects their behavior.

With as many as 40 leads into the brain of a single monkey, Dr. Delgado has found that by passing a current through different parts of the cortex, he can stimulate a resting monkey to raise his paws, scratch himself, turn around, yawn, or start trying to catch imaginary insects. In some monkeys he stimulated the lateral hypothalamus for an hour a day, and the animals ate up to ten times as much as usual. A few days after stimulation is stopped, the monkeys' appetites go back to normal. The seat of a monkey's love for bananas evidently is deep in the frontal lobe of the brain: current applied here will make him refuse bananas.

Applied to most parts of the brain, electric stimulation has no effect on the monkey's emotions, but the hippocampal region (midway between the ears) is an exception. An electric tickle there turned a ferocious rhesus into a macaque Milquetoast; he even let Dr. Delgado take the liberty of stroking his face. The moment the current was turned off, he tried to bite.

From monkeys, and eventually from human subjects, Dr. Delgado hopes to find precise spots in the brain where electrical stimulation or destruction can be used as a refined form of surgery, instead of the drastic lobotomy (TIME, May 28, 1951), for victims of schizophrenia. Dr. Delgado and some other researchers have already gone on from animals to men as subjects for studies in deep electro-encephalography.

An Occasional Tingle. Tulane University investigators who have worked with Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath were also due in Chicago this week to tell more of their specialized study of schizophrenics. While teammates work on the patients' body chemistry, including metabolism and hormones, Dr. Heath wires their brains.

Dr. Heath has drilled into the skulls of 32 schizophrenics, planted electrodes deep in the forebrain of each, and fastened the wire leads to a plastic plate mounted on the skull. In one particular part of the forebrain, Dr. Heath has found what he believes to be abnormal, "spiking" brain waves of a type peculiar to schizophrenia. This is one of the research avenues he is following. He has also found that schizophrenics who seemed hopelessly withdrawn and deranged sometimes show a striking outward improvement after they have carried the electrodes around in their heads for a few weeks and have received an occasional electric tingle. More than that he will not say.

"I Can See Joe." From the Mayo Clinic came a comprehensive report of elaborate investigations there by a distinguished team, one of whose stars is British-born Physiologist Reginald G. Bickford. The Mayo workers have placed electrodes deep in the brains of 13 patients at Rochester (Minn.) State Hospital to study schizophrenia, epilepsy and related seizures and brain tumors, always as a means of deciding exactly what surgery will be best. They have found that the deep brain waves make it possible to locate a tumor more precisely than ever before, and also to spot the damaged region which is causing epilepsy. These are then cut out by standard surgery. Schizophrenics get a selective form of lobotomy.

Dr. Bickford and his colleagues have also turned up some fascinating sidelights which may mean much to the eventual charting of all the brain's currents. One epileptic patient, when a particular spot was stimulated, suddenly said, "I can see Joe." He soon explained that often, before a seizure, he had a mental picture of himself bathing with his friend Joe. The electrical stimulus had flashed that picture on his mind's screen. What may be just as important was the researchers' letdown: they could never get that picture back again.

In a schizophrenic subject, they were able to get sharply defined brain waves of his sense of smell, indicating the intensity of the smell when they gave him a whiff of tincture of valerian. To their surprise, they found that whereas most sensory perceptions are transmitted by a frequency-modulation system, the sense of smell appears to work by amplitude modulation. In the oceans of the mind, it seems, there are both hidden waves and different types of current.

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