Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 25

The brain is a focus for the co-ordinating aspect of the body, just as the intestines are the main centre for digestion, or the legs of locomotion. But if you want to understand digestion or locomotion fully, you will have to take a systems view, and understand the role of the jaws, and of exercise, in digestion; or of the lungs and the spine in mobility. Just so, the brain plays a central part in integrating processes but the processes are themselves essentially bodily. ‘Mind’ is an aspect of an animal that is distributed throughout the body even though some facets of ‘mind’ are most closely associated with the nervous system. The unit of intelligence of an animal is its body, not its brain, just as the unit of ‘music-making’ is the orchestra, not the conductor. If the orchestra is big, and the music intricate, the conductor’s role is all the more important. But he never transcends his role as a valued member and servant of the musical collective. He never becomes a dictator.²⁰

For example the immune system is usually discussed in relative isolation from the CNS. However, some interesting recent research has revealed how ‘brain-like’ the immune system actually is, and has explored the ways in which CNS and immune system continually talk to each other. A class of messenger molecules from the peptide family has been shown by Candace Pert and others to mediate between the neural and immune systems, and thereby to co-ordinate, and effectively integrate, them. She goes so far as to say that: ‘White blood cells are bits of brain floating around the body.’²¹ Francisco Varela has referred to the immune system in a recent paper as ‘the second brain’, and has argued that the secret handshakes that enable the antibodies to recognize ‘friend’ from ‘foe’ also act as the basis for the body’s overall sense of identity. The immune system, like the CNS, is primarily a communication system, he argues; one which subserves the vital bodily feeling of ‘family’.²²

By taking an evolutionary perspective, we are forcibly reminded of the extent to which intelligence is a bodily, not purely (or even mainly) a mental, phenomenon. And just as most of the workings of the body are ‘dark’ to us, beyond the reach of conscious introspection, so we may begin to open up the question of how much of what we have thought of as our ‘intelligence’, our ‘cognition’, is also inaccessible to the conscious mind. Perhaps intelligence does not reside in consciousness. Perhaps consciousness no more shows us the workings of the mind than a television picture shows us the workings of the television.