The scientist who lobotomised 225 people in 12 days
a hundred billion signals to the brain every second. But that’s only part of the story.
When you ‘see’ something, only about ten per cent of the information comes from the optic nerve. Other parts of your brain have to deconstruct the signals – recognise faces, interpret movements, identify danger. In other words, the biggest part of seeing isn’t receiving visual images, it’s making sense of them. For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time – about one-fifth of a second – for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required – to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head.
To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like one-fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present.
That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet. THE BRAIN TRICKS YOU AND IS VERY UNRELIABLE THE brain tricks you in a lot of ways for your own good. Sound and light reach you at very different speeds – a phenomenon we experience every time we hear a plane passing overhead and look up to find the sound coming from one part of the sky and a plane moving silently through another.
In the more immediate world around you, your brain normally irons out these differences. What you see is not what is, but what your brain tells you it is, and that’s not the same thing at all.
Consider a bar of soap. Has it ever struck you that soap lather is always white no matter what colour the soap is? That isn’t because the soap somehow changes colour when it is moistened and rubbed. Molecularly it’s exactly as it was before. It’s just that the foam reflects light in a different way.
You get the same effect with crashing waves on a beach – greenish-blue water, white foam – and lots of other phenomena.
That is because colour isn’t a fixed reality, but a perception. Your brain does all these things for you because it is designed to help you in every way it can. Yet paradoxically it is also strikingly unreliable.
Some years ago, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, discovered that it is possible through suggestion to implant entirely false memories in people’s heads – to convince them that they were traumatically lost in a shopping mall when they were small or that they were hugged by Bugs Bunny at Disneyland – even though these things never happened. (For one thing, Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character and has never been at Disneyland.)
She showed people pictures of themselves as a child in which the image had been manipulated to make them look as if they were in a hot air balloon, and often the subjects would suddenly remember the experience and excitedly describe it even though in each case it was known that it had never happened.
Now you might think that you could never be that suggestible, and you would probably be right – only about one-third of people are that gullible – but other evidence shows that we all sometimes completely misrecall even the most vivid events.
In 2001, immediately after the 9/11 disaster at the World Trade Center in New York, psychologists at the University of Illinois took detailed statements from 700 people about where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the event.
One year later the psychologists asked the same questions of the same people and found that nearly half now contradicted themselves in some significant way – put themselves in a different place when they learned of the disaster, believed that they had seen it on TV when, in fact, they had heard it on the radio, and so on – but without being aware that their recollections had changed. (I, for my part, vividly recall watching the events live on television in New Hampshire, where we were then living, with two of my children, only to learn later that one of those children was in fact in England at the time.)
The upshot is that memory is not a fixed and permanent record, like a document in a filing cabinet. As Loftus told an interviewer in 2013: ‘It’s a little more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, and so can other people.’
Fundamentally memories come in two principal varieties: declarative and procedural. Declarative memory is the kind you can put into words – the names of capital cities, your date of birth and everything else you know as fact. Procedural memory describes the things you know and understand but couldn’t so easily put into words – how to swim, drive a car, peel an orange.
It used to be thought that every experience is stored permanently as memory somewhere in the brain, but that most of it is locked away beyond our power of immediate recall.
The idea arose principally from a series of experiments in Canada from the 1930s to the 1950s by the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. While carrying out surgical procedures at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Penfield discovered that when he touched a probe to patients’ brains it often evoked powerful sensations – vivid smells from childhood, feelings of euphoria, sometimes a recol
Our eyes can distinguish between 2 million and 7.5 million colours We shed 25,000 flakes of skin a minute, over a million pieces every hour
The electricity in the cells that make up your body is 1,000 times greater than the electricity within your house
lection of a forgotten scene from very early life.
From this it was concluded that the brain records and stores every conscious event in our lives, however trivial. Now, however, it is thought that the stimulation was mostly providing the sensation of memory and that what the patients were experiencing was more like a hallucination than a recalled event.
What is certainly true is that we retain a great deal more than we can easily summon to mind. You may not recollect much of a neighbourhood you lived in when you were small, but if you went back and walked around it you would almost certainly remember very particular details you hadn’t thought about for years.
With sufficient time and prompting, we would probably all be astonished by how much we have stored away inside us.
The person from whom we learned a good deal of what we know about memory was, ironically, a man who had very little of it himself.
Henry Molaison was a good-looking young man of 27 in Connecticut who suffered from crippling episodes of epilepsy.
In 1953, inspired by the efforts of Wilder Penfield in Canada, a surgeon named William Scoville drilled into Molaison’s head and removed half of the hippocampus from each side of his brain.
The procedure greatly reduced Molaison’s seizures (though it didn’t entirely eliminate them) but at the tragic cost of robbing him of the ability to form new memories.
Molaison could recall events from his distant past but someone who left the room would be immediately forgotten.
Even a psychiatrist who saw him almost daily for years was a new person to him each time she came through the door. Occasionally, and mysteriously, Molaison was able to lay down just a few memories.
He could recall that John Glenn was an astronaut and Lee Harvey Oswald an assassin (though he couldn’t recall whom Oswald had killed) and learned the address and layout of his new house when he moved. But beyond that he was locked in an eternal present.
Poor Henry Molaison’s plight was the first scientific intimation that the hippocampus has a central role in laying down memories.
But what scientists learned from Molaison was not so much how memory works as how difficult it is to understand how it works. DOCTOR LOBOTOMISED JFK’S SISTER ROSEMARY FOR all its marvels, the brain is a curiously undemonstrative organ. The heart pumps, the lungs inflate and deflate, the intestines quietly ripple and gurgle, but the brain just sits blancmange-like, giving away nothing. So it is hardly surprising that our understanding of how the brain functions was slow in coming and largely inadvertent.
One of the great events in early neuroscience occurred in 1848 in rural Vermont when a young railway builder named Phineas Gage was packing dynamite into a rock and it exploded prematurely, shooting a two-foot tamping rod through his left cheek and out the top of his head before it clattered back to Earth about 50ft away.
The rod removed a perfect core of brain about an inch in diameter. Miraculously, Gage survived and appears not even to have lost consciousness, though he did lose his left eye and his personality was forever transformed. Previously happy-go-lucky and popular, he was now moody, argumentative and given to profane outbursts.
As often happens to people with frontal lobe damage, Gage had no insight into his condition and didn’t understand that he had changed.
Gage’s misfortune was the first proof that physical damage to the brain could transform personality, but over the following decades others noticed that when tumours destroyed or impinged upon parts of the frontal lobes the victims sometimes became curiously serene and placid. In the 1880s a Swiss physician named Gottlieb Burckhardt surgically removed 18 grams of brain from a disturbed woman in the process turning her (in his own words) from ‘a dangerous and excited demented person to a quiet demented one’. He tried the process on five more patients, but three died and two developed epilepsy, so he gave up.
FIFTY years later, in Portugal, Egas Moniz, a professor of neurology at the University of Lisbon, decided to try again, and began experimentally cutting the frontal lobes of schizophrenics to see if that might quieten their troubled minds. It was the invention of the frontal lobotomy.
In the US, a doctor named Walter Jackson Freeman heard of Moniz’s procedure and became his most enthusiastic acolyte. Over a period of almost 40 years Freeman travelled the country performing lobotomies on almost anyone brought before him. On one tour, he lobotomised 225 people in 12 days.
Some of his patients were as young as four years old. He operated on people with phobias, on drunks picked up off the street, on people convicted of homosexual acts – on anyone, in short, with almost any kind of perceived mental or social aberration. Freeman’s method was so swift and brutal that it made other doctors recoil. He inserted a standard household ice pick into the brain through the eye socket, tapping it through the skull bone with a hammer, then wriggled it vigorously to sever neural connections. The procedure was so crude that an experienced neurologist from New York University fainted while watching a Freeman operation. But it was quick: patients generally could go home within an hour. It was this quickness and simplicity that dazzled many in the medical community.
Freeman was extraordinarily casual in his approach. He operated without gloves or a surgical mask, usually in street clothes. The method caused no scarring, but also meant he was operating without any certainty about which mental capacities he was destroying. What is perhaps most remarkable is that Freeman was a psychiatrist with no surgical certification, a fact that horrified many other physicians. About two-thirds of Freeman’s subjects received no benefit from the procedure or were worse off. Two per cent died.
His most notorious failure was Rosemary Kennedy, sister of the future President. In 1941 she was 23 years old, a vivacious and attractive girl, but headstrong and with a tendency to mood swings. She also had some learning difficulties. Her father, exasperated by her wilfulness, had her lobotomised by Freeman without consulting his wife.
The lobotomy essentially destroyed Rosemary. She spent the next 64 years in a care home in the Midwest, unable to speak, incontinent and bereft of personality. Freeman continued to perform lobotomies well into his 70s before retiring in 1967. But the effects that he and others left in their wake lasted for years.
I can speak with some experience here. In the early 1970s, I worked for two years at a psychiatric hospital outside London where one ward was occupied in large part by people who had been lobotomised in the 1940s and 1950s. They were, almost without exception, obedient, lifeless shells.
In surely its most questionable entry, the 2001 Oxford Companion To The Body says: ‘For many people the term “lobotomy” conjures up images of disturbed beings whose brains have been damaged or mutilated extensively, leaving them at best in a vegetative state without a personality or feelings. This was never true.’ Actually, it was. © Bill Bryson, 2019
Abridged extract from The Body: A Guide For Occupants, by Bill Bryson, which is published by Doubleday on October 3, priced £25. Offer price £20 (20 per cent discount) until September 30. To pre-order, call 01603 648155 or go to mailshop.co.uk. See Bill Bryson live on stage in a new theatre show. For information and tickets, go to lateralevents.com.