Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (29 page)

Alonzo Clemons on the other hand has an IQ of 50, the result of a severe brain injury as a child. Strangely, though, Alonzo developed a talent for creating marvelously accurate animal sculptures out of clay, even if he had only caught a glimpse of the animal or seen a photo or drawing of it in two dimensions. His works have sold for tens of thousands of dollars. When looking at Clemons’s works, it’s difficult not to think of the fluid, breathtaking artwork in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux. Were these the works of a Cro–Magnon savant, someone seemingly endowed with magical talents, and magical ways of representing the world?

Seth F. Henriett is another savant blessed with a high IQ like Matthew Savage, and a marvelously broad array of talents. Though Henriett suffered from severe social problems and autoimmune disorders early in her life, she also revealed aptitudes for music and art. She played flute at the age of seven and contrabass at the age of eleven. By age thirteen her abstract and surrealistic paintings were gaining attention. Shortly afterward she wrote two books about her experience as an autistic and won several international writing competitions with her stories, essays, and poems.

Despite these staggering skills, each of these people has difficulty relating to others. They shun making eye contact or being touched; they often prefer to be alone and struggle with even basic personal interaction. Yet don’t all of us exhibit a quirk or two, or three? Phobias, preferences, habits, interests, even obsessions? Various experts have speculated that some well–known people in history were autistic to some extent, or another, including Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, Isaac Newton, and Wolfgang
Mozart. How much emptier would human civilization be had it been bereft of the genius of these minds?

On the other hand, 90 percent of autistics do not become savants, though a significant number are highly functional. Again the affliction is not binary, one or the other, all on or all off. You and I might have smidgens of autism and not realize it, especially if you happen to be a man. Scientists have sometimes described autism as an extreme version of the male brain. And in truth, of all the world’s autistics, only one fifth are female.
³
This may be because women have more axons and dendrites, which are the pathways in the brain that enable it to work as a unit. Men’s brains have more neurons. In effect, this makes male brains less networked than women’s, but outfitted with more processing power, largely focused, it seems, on spatial and temporal capabilities. This doesn’t make one sex smarter or more talented than the other, simply different. It also helps explain, at least according to some scientists, why men are sometimes less socially tuned in than females, and why women are superior, generally, at reading social cues.

The issue with autistics isn’t so much with the number or the function of their neurons, but that they suffer from a dearth of connections between them. What would cause this scarcity? Neoteny, or more accurately the processes that make neoteny possible.

Remember, complexity creates more opportunity for something to go wrong. During the crucial first three years that follow birth, when the brain triples in size and personal experience so strongly shapes the billions of pathways between neurons in the brain, cerebral development may mysteriously go awry in people who grow up autistic. Connections may be delayed, accelerated, or stunted. Studies show that different sectors of the brain develop in ways that keep them more separated from one another than normal, like islands in a sea, out of touch and segregated. Yet, some modules may become overwired, which could help explain remarkable feats of memory, mathematics, music, or art and views of the world so different from those of the rest of us.

The downside, of course, is that the segregations also make it more difficult to be socially sensitive and tuned in to other people’s nonverbal communications—their smiles, tones of voice, body language—the little things we unconsciously and effortlessly do that grease the skids of human relationships. These create a deficit of a Theory of
Mind, a brain largely incapable of symbolizing its owner as a self to itself, let alone symbolize others. Rather than symbolization going rampant and boisterous as it does in schizophrenia, in autism it is reduced, stunted, and balkanized, with the manifold human genius for socialization sometimes being abandoned in exchange for a single, condensed, but breathtaking talent.

Why, if evolution so ruthlessly discards traits and behaviors that undercut a living thing’s ability to survive and mate, have mental illnesses like these and others survived? Can they serve a purpose? Or did they once? In a study published in
Nature
in 2007 researchers led by Bernard Crespi and Steve Dorus analyzed human DNA from populations around the world as well as primate genomes dating back to the shared ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees to get a handle on what genes led to schizophrenia, why they evolved, and why the illness is still among us. They were astonished to find that of seventy–six gene variations known to be strongly related to schizophrenia, twenty-eight showed sturdy evidence that they were favored by natural selection when compared with other genes, even those associated with the most severe forms of schizophrenia. In other words, the genes weren’t randomly repeated accidents; the forces of evolution were actively selecting them and passing them on. Why?

It could be that they are bound to other genetic talents that are extremely important to human survival, like speech and creativity, for example. One current theory is that schizophrenia is a “disorder of language” that represents a trade–off some
Homo sapiens
made in exchange for the remarkable gift of speech and consciousness the rest of us enjoy. Says Crespi, “You can think of schizophrenics as paying the price of all the cognitive and language skills that humans have.” That may explain why 1 percent of the human race suffers from some form of schizophrenia.

Multiple theories connect schizophrenia and autism to the evolution of our ability to symbolize others and model their behavior in our minds; and our unique talent for symbolizing ourselves by using systems like language to talk to ourselves, imagine what others are thinking and intend, and envision events that haven’t yet happened and never may.

Individually, the origins of both illnesses may be the result of brain development in childhood that misfires. Since the prefrontal cortex
is, ultimately, a consequence of neoteny, the precise timing that the development of a modern human brain requires may be the source of both disorders. Some scientists have speculated that in schizophrenics, neoteny is retarded, or processes it sets in motion aren’t completed. It’s interesting that in most schizophrenics severe symptoms don’t show themselves until around eighteen years of age, or older, when the brain has placed the majority of its design in order.

In the case of autism the complex cerebral structures and relationships that make Theory of Mind, language, and symbolization possible could all be affected early in development. We already know the brains of autistic children grow significantly faster and larger than normal between the ages of one and sixteen months of age and remain larger until ages three to four. Researchers have also found that children with autism develop 67 percent more neurons in their prefrontal cortex and have heavier brains for their age compared to typically developing children. It’s almost as if connections made prior to birth and early in life arrive before they can be properly deployed.

With both illnesses something like a genetic wrench seems to have been thrown into the complex developmental processes that construct the foundations of a human mind during those long childhoods that neoteny has made possible. The timing and expression of genes that catalyze the cerebral alchemy of human behavior falter somehow, and once they do, it changes the brain in ways that aren’t easily repaired, at least not based on what we know today.

Still there is a larger point to all of this. Mental illness, a state in which the mind is unable to get a solid handle on what the rest of us generally agree is “real,” could not exist until nature first created a brain that could model the thing we call reality in the first place. That means it takes a human mind to suffer mentally. Cats, dogs, and other primates may endure depression or grow sad, they may develop lifelong fears and strong addictions, but they don’t hear voices, imagine alternate realities, or suffer from an inability to speak or empathize. And they don’t because they never enjoyed those capabilities in the first place and never will.

Further advances in genetics and brain imaging may reveal exactly how mental illnesses like these work and in the process expose to us some of the slick tricks the brain plays to create the illusions of self and reality. These advances already hint that the borders between reality and delusion are slim. Or more accurately, that reality
is
an
delusion, just an extremely useful one. In some ways the brain is like the Wizard of Oz, standing hidden behind a curtain, spinning the wheels and operating the levers that create the illusory symbols that make our “I’ and our reality possible.

All of this happens because of the elegant physical, pharmacological, and electrical interactions of the three pounds or so of wetware you currently tote around in your skull. These trillions of cerebral interactions know nothing of jealousy, love, passion, creativity, or sadness, and yet out of them emerge the threaded experiences we perceive as ourselves living a life connected, to varying degrees, to all the other humans that we encounter every day, day in and day out, until the brain that makes it all possible finally ceases to function.

Once the human brain materialized in the form that we now know, outfitted with its genius for creating and shuffling the symbols that make language, imaginary worlds, and, above all, that phenomenon Hofstadter calls the “anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I,” creatures emerged that could dream, act on their dreams, and share them with the other “I’s” around them. And that changed the world.

Our special talent isn’t simply that we can conjure symbols or even weave elaborate, illusory tapestries of them, but that we can share these with one another, roping together both our “selves” and our imaginings, linking uncounted minds into rambunctious networks where thoughts and insights, feelings and emotions, breed still more ideas to be further shared. Creativity is contagious this way, and once a light emerged, it must have gone off like fireworks.

This has made every human a kind of neuron in a vast brain of humans, jabbering and bristling with creativity, pooling, pulling, and bonding ideas into that elaborate, rambling edifice we have come to call human civilization. In this way
memes
^h
have traveled along the transit lines of our relationships, some of them seeing their way to reality, others run aground for lack of interest or use, selected out and gone extinct as surely as dodos, dinosaurs, and the flightless crake.

The wheel is a great example of a meme. So are the arch and the soufflé and a catchy tune like “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” or plumbing, sanitation, myths, and the Pythagorean theorem. Once
upon a time, someone conjured up a large, circular thing that helped move heavy loads when paired with other similar circular things, and the idea stuck and was shared—wheel!

As memes spread, they mutate and combine with other memes and snap together in our social worlds as neatly as genes do in the molecular one. They breed only because we humans have the ability to both conceive and duplicate them, using all of the symbols we so ardently exchange.

The voice we had begun to hear in our heads—perhaps fifty thousand years ago—was a harbinger and a catalyst, the first step we needed to take before we could attempt to direct our own lives, fashion memes, and then transform them (for better or worse) into reality. At first the sharing must have been slow. It takes time for ideas to be passed along and built upon in a world where only a few tens of thousands of symbol–making creatures live. Still, compared with the geologic and genetic measures of time that preceded it, these changes came swiftly, and they gathered speed exponentially. Inside of forty thousand years agriculture and animal domestication were widely adopted, then came settlements, villages, and towns. Cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East arose a mere nine thousand years ago. Despite wars, famine, disease, and natural disasters, we have surged forward since, inventing science, a global economy, vast communication systems that exchange thick streams of media, immensely complex governments and businesses, all of them, in their way, ceaselessly shuttling the proliferating agglomerations of human thinking around the globe every day—a humming and titanic network consisting of seven billion symbol–makers busily exchanging their symbols. Thanks to us they move from one mind to another as surely as genes move and mutate from one person to another.

Was the emergence of a brain—shaped in childhood and capable of symbolizing its owner—the final piece in the human puzzle, the last brick that completed the construction of what we today call truly “human”? Was this the evolutionary act that made civilization possible? We will never know for certain because we weren’t around at the moment of modern human awakening.

Trying to figure out how that white light of the first symbolic insight came together is a lot like reverse engineering some alien engine we have found in a desert, fully operational, but without a manual. My guess is we will never fully comprehend how we turned the corner to
become the human beings we are today. The brain itself may be the issue. Maybe the mind that it makes possible will always find itself just short of grasping how it creates its illusions, or why. Too much is at work in the unconscious, too much unavailable mystery. It doesn’t mean we can’t try, though, the way phycisists have tried to approach absolute zero. By definition it is impossible to get to a place where there is nothing, but we can keep working to get closer. As with the quest to reach absolute zero, maybe we can only ride upon the illusions it conjures and see where they lead. At least until a new kind of human evolves.