09/09/2022
In the 1960s, Western culture was far from accepting the importance of the mind-body connection. If you google mind-body connection (in quotes) over the last decade, there are hundreds of thousands of results. And if you enter the period 19611970, five references will come up. Two are in other languages. Of the 3 that are in English, one is an article on Jewish spirituality, the other a synopsis of a court session about some horrible murder. Against its avant-garde nature, some progressive scholars of the time have taken up the subject. One such scholar was George W. Hohmann, a psychologist at the Veterans Administration clinic in Long Beach, California. Hohmann was paralyzed from the lower body and fought in World War II and subsequently injured his spinal cord. Similar injuries can limit the ability to control muscles, but the spinal cord also transmits sensory signals, and therefore victims of such injuries sometimes do not feel the extremities of heat, cold, pressure, pain, as well as the posture and state of the body and even personal pulse. At the clinic, Hochmann routinely interacted with other patients with spinal cord injuries. Hochmann wondered: if the state of the brain affects the experience of emotions, does the weakening of feedback from the body reduce the strength of the emotions experienced by the patient, as was apparently the case with Hochmann himself? To find out, he interviewed twenty-six male patients at the clinic and asked them to compare some of their sensory experiences before and after trauma. In an article, now a classic, he concluded that paralyzed patients actually experienced a significant decrease in the emotions of anger, sexual arousal and nightmare. In recent years, the development of a sensory response in the paralyzed has reinforced this conclusion. Nowadays we know that the brain-body connection is so central to the human condition that if it were possible to cut the spinal cord and other nerve fibers and blood vessels that unite the head with the body, and then carefully stitch the head onto some other decapitated body, the severance of the feedback silhouette between the brain and the body would prove a serious threat to the survival of the new organism. This example seems unlikely and extravagant, in fact such trials have been performed for many years. In addition, head transplant trials have gathered such a long and rich history that one surgeon at Harvard Medical School briefly posted an article on the subject: History of Head Transplants. Overview. The article begins with an account of the first similar test with a dog: done more than a century ago by Drs. Alexis Carrel and Charles Guthrie. The dog could see, make sounds and move, but died a few hours later. Carrel received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in one thousand nine hundred and twelve years for his work on transplantation. Russian surgeon Vladimir Demikhov repeated this feat in one thousand nine hundred and fifty-fourth year, he had a dog lived twenty-nine days, but the Nobel Prize was not awarded. In subsequent years, similar operations were performed on mice and even primates. In 1970, the rhesus monkey with a transplanted head lived eight days, and it was considered typical in all respects. All of us have our own definitions of normal, and as someone who has had more than one surgery in his life, I know that when a surgeon promises you that after surgery you will soon be typical, it is better to clarify exactly what the surgeon means by that one word. I, in every case, believe he doesn't mean leaving the operating room as an amputated head. What that surgeon meant was that the monkey was capable of biting, chewing, swallowing, seeing a moving object through his gaze, and that he had an EEG in the image of a waking individual. That was it. All in all, she needed constant medication and constant mechanical ventilation of the lungs, so that the animal would not suffocate. No tree-jumping and no banana-hunting for this monkey, typical by all indications
