AS I WAS SAYING
The distressing truth about our nocturnal lives
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
I disagree. At least some Spectator read- ers buy it in the hope of escaping through its pages into a different world from the one encountered in the daily press; a world more of thought than action, more of ideas than sensations, more of argument than assertion. For such readers, I believe, an article of continuous prose• enabling the important person to give considered opin- ions is more valuable — if much less read- able — than off-the-cuff clangers dropped in the course of lunches or dinners. I know the results would be infinitely less likely to attract tabloid notice, but a failure in that respect should surely redound more to the editor's credit than discredit.
So my particular plea is that the new edi- tor should put a notice above his desk say- ing: `Dare to be dull'. In the present climate, there could be no more heroic course for him to take, by comparison with which defy- ing the Official Secrets Act, for example, would be the cowardly option. Who am Ito give this advice, having never actually prac- tised it myself — until now? For my column this week is indeed going to be dull. It is an attempt to explain a revolutionary new theo- ry of consciousness, recently published in a small book of 150 pages, which just might prove the keynote scientific work of the mil- lennial year. Being a scientific illiterate I have no way of knowing whether the theory stands up, any more than I would have had any way of knowing whether Einstein's theo- ry of relativity did. But what has convinced me of its authenticity is the quality of writ- ing, which has an angelic innocence about it that invites belief.
So here goes. Several decades ago the author, Paul Ableman, awoke one morning and recalled that in a dream he had been able to see himself from a point of view outside his own body. Having once per- ceived that this rather uncanny perspective is possible, he later found that this kind of dream occurs quite often and not only to him, but to many of his friends. For exam- ple, he might wake up and remember that he had just dreamed that he was eating a meal in the company of several other peo- ple; and seeing himself at the table along with the other diners. In other words, in the dream he had managed to be both himself and the observer of himself, something which in waking life is possible only by using mirrors or other optical devices. Gradually, and over a period of years, these recurrences of the out-of-body point of view acted on his curiosity, and one day he put to himself a crucial question: `If some of my dreams seem to involve two quite separate and distinct "Is" — one of whom is the observer of the other — then which is the real "I"?' This question immediately suggested another which had rather an eerie tone to it: assuming that one of the Is is the real I, then who exactly is the other?
It took Ableman five years to learn enough about mind and brain function to find the answer. Each question that he asked himself bred a new one. The initial `self-visu- alising' dream led him, once he had estab- lished that such dreams were common, to speculate on what the function of dreams in general might be. Until then he had vaguely thought of them as being based on earlier experiences which had been preserved in a short-term memory system. But he had also been aware of the bizarre quality of dreams and their huge spread in time and space. How could these possibly stem from actual experiences?
Brooding on the problem suggested that dreams might be the result of the brain cross-referencing the events of the preceding day among all similar items stored in memo- ry. Satisfied that this notion must contain at least part of the truth, Ableman next had to ask himself what was the purpose of this noc- turnal filing and cross-referencing system. The answer, he perceived, could only lie in the daytime activity of the brain.
Ableman had already made one observa- tion which provided a clue. He had long since noticed that thoughts that were quite unconnected with the rest of his thinking might at any moment appear in his mind. He called these thoughts `rogues'. He now began to take note of their appearance and to try to explain why they had appeared. He soon concluded that while such rogue thoughts were indeed rare, thoughts that were only slightly out of harmony with the rest of his mental activity were more common.
He had by this time abandoned the classi- cal notions of the subconscious or uncon- scious minds as inadequate for describing the dynamic thought-processes his subjective researches were revealing. He therefore coined the term 'archival memory' to replace them. However, this posed a new problem. Since the memory archive, even of quite young children, must hold thousands of items of data relevant to each moment of waking experience, why was it that normal daytime thought was not swamped by tor- rents of memory? The solution proved to be the hypothesis, again later confirmed, of a graded series of streams which allowed only relatively few thoughts, on a strictly `need to know' basis, to pass through them into con- sciousness at any given moment.
In this way, step by step, and over a period of many years, Ableman developed his theo- ry of consciousness, and very strange, in its mature form, it turned out to be. It explains consciousness by describing it as the turbu- lent meeting of the stream of information entering the brain from the five senses with the stream of data evoked from the archival memory, and the point of this mechanism is to provide each individual with all the stored wisdom of his or her past experience in order to take the most useful action in the present.
At night, however, something strange happens. During sleep, the brain no longer generates the mind. The individual human being, therefore, ceases to exist. Very sun- ply, `no one is at home' to learn anything. In other words, a peacefully sleeping child becomes distressingly transformed by Able- man's theory into an electro-chemical automaton engaged in relentless and auto- matic data-processing.
Although in the scientific world this rivet- ing book is creating ripples — having been debated at the Science Museum and made the subject of Anthony Clare's radio series — nothing that begins to do it justice has so far appeared in print. So, in a way, the above is indeed a Spectator scoop. Hallelujah.
The Secret of Consciousness by Paul Able- man is published by Marion Boyars.
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