THINK MONKEY

Some beasts are good to eat, some are good to live with, but all are indispensable for thinking with. We think about ourselves with the help of other animals—we are mulish, catty, busy as bees, cold fish, small fry, dogs in the manger, doves, hawks, bearish, bullish, sheepish, cowed, elephantine; we ferret or worm things out; we horse around, clam up, get crabby; some of us are paid moles, and I, personally, am a real bitch. Lacking a beast that precisely suits the purpose, sometimes we have to invent one. Such is Think Monkey.

Think Monkey is the reason why we are not conscious of our inmost thoughts; and why genius, as a poet said, is a secret to itself. She is known to neuroscience by the name of “homunculus,” or “little person.” I have reason to believe she is a ho-monkey-lus, or more concisely, Think Monkey.

Hey!—you might object—I am conscious of my inmost thoughts.

Well, no. Think it over. Am I conscious of my basic sensory activity, even? Do I feel a hundred billion calcium concentrations dropping inside my neurons, a hundred million sparks merging in wave fronts? No. What I get, as a result of all that frantic activity, is a banana. My banana is yellow and freckled, smells terrific, tastes the way I remember from my last banana, and that’s what I’m conscious of. My conscious mind is a representation of the brain’s activity. This representation exists so that I can handle the unexpected, which always comes along to threaten a life form. Handling the unexpected is what nerve cells doing automatic processing jobs can’t do. They can’t reflect on what they’re doing. But I, being conscious, can.

I can do all sorts of things with my beautiful conscious mind: I can deliberately tear off two more bananas and juggle them—well, no, I can’t juggle them. But it was a conscious act while it lasted. Now, these notions passing through my mind are not my inmost thoughts. Those are inaccessible to my conscious mind. My inmost thoughts are massive computations performed by gelatinous giant molecules like alien spaceships bumping and docking and linking with other kinky, slobbery, organic molecules, inside billions of neurons, all of them simultaneously hammering at trillions of specialized, cross-indexed and crisscross-indexed, and you’ll-never-live-through-it-indexed, sorts of jobs. That, thankfully, is not what I’m conscious of, when I think.

I am conscious of my self. I can sit here humming cogito ergo sum and peeling this yellow, ripe banana, enjoying the creamy ribbed texture where the peel strips off, mmm . . . and when I’ve taken a resilient, not mushy, first bite, I consciously look forward to seeing whether the banana’s cross-section shows the lucky brown Y or the unlucky three brown dots because I am superstitious . . . Oh I do love my banana thoughts! Three cheers for the representation! That’s what it is, you know. I am not conscious of my inmost thoughts—and who the hell wants to be? Slimy neurons, yecch. Computational functions, brrr. I experience a glorious representation of my inmost thoughts. I experience this—

BANANA!

Anyway.

Now, somebody, some agency or other, must be arranging and taking care of my inmost thoughts, since I certainly can’t, I’m totally in the dark about them. Some agency certainly operates my frontal lobe which is responsible for various higher—or more frontal—mental functions. That agency is Think Monkey. Here’s what the brain scientists say about her:

Think Monkey creates my intentions, my concepts, and all the treasures of my human intellect. Now, don’t go objecting that Think Monkey has to have its own Think Monkey, because as the scientist says, Think Monkey is not conscious and so does not require a counterpart. Think Monkey makes thoughts but does not think. My Think Monkey sleeps, while her dark clever fingers, toes, and prehensile tail operate, at frantic speed, the jungle-cockpit of neuronal computations. She does everything in a sleep that lasts my whole life long. Not even death will wake her; death, least of all. It seems so unfair. Poor Think Monkey! For an entire lifetime she performs such important work, round the clock, without once being able to reflect and say to herself, “I adore bananas.”

Maybe I’ll have another one, just in case.

As I said earlier, Think Monkey has no conscious thoughts: she only makes conscious thoughts, but—paradoxically—she makes conscious thoughts about herself. This is one of the spookier aspects of a human mind. I once read a haunting story about an animal researcher who studied cotton-top Tamarin monkeys, a cute species the size of squirrels, with amber-eyed, squashed, grave little mugs, feverish hands, and fluffy white manes. One female Tamarin liked the researcher very much and always cooed at him. We don’t know why. Sometimes that worried him. One night, he dreamed that his little friend skipped over and offered him, in her needling fingers, a book. It was a clothbound textbook, titled on its spine Dictionary of the Tamarin Language. This was the Holy Grail of his research—a key to primate communication!—so he was very happy to see it. But when he opened it, it was blank.

Think Monkey, the sleeping simian in our brains who performs our higher mental functions, is also responsible for our dreams. It’s a strange thing to imagine. Think Monkey, in her dreamless sleep, without a flicker of consciousness, like a shut-eyed Buddha enthroned among a billion exploding lotus blossoms and lilies of perception and computation, sends down to us a dream, through the long, weird chute that travels between the actual inaccessible and the conscious (although slumbering) mind. People used to think that gods visited them in dreams, taking the form of their lost friends or loves to get their attention, saying Gather your maidservants and wash the laundry in the river, or, Sacrifice a snow-white bull immediately. It would have been blasphemy to suggest that these dear ones, so precious to dreaming eyes, were the handiwork of a monkey perched inside the brain. But in Think Monkey’s sleep, our thinking is woven, and when its representation comes in dream images, we had better pay attention.

The animal researcher’s dream tells the most intimate of truths. Think Monkey—i.e., his conceptual process—weighed his knowledge of cotton-top tamarins and communication, and made a prediction: he would write a book. But Think Monkey also weighed the concept of consciousness itself, which was inevitably part of this researcher’s questions. And in answer, Think Monkey sent an image of herself: a monkey holding up a blank dictionary—a representation of the very fact that she has nothing to say. Only our conscious minds speak, though our thoughts come straight from the monkey’s hands. I can think of no more eerie paradox . . . rather, my Think Monkey can create no more eerie paradox, for me to become conscious of, and speak of . . .

No image captures more surely the intermediate place of our conscious minds, looking around with wonderment between the superb blank of our inmost thought activity and the stupendous blank of our sensory activity. Is there anything quite like the amazing and paradoxical Think Monkey?

There is. The neuroscientist whom I quoted in the last section yearns for new experiments. Neuroscience is so new! Great discoveries await the experimenter who can decode the chattering of a hundred thousand neurons instead of the few used in most experiments. He urges more experimentation on animals in a duly humane manner, using of modern anesthetic technology that permits the monkey to be rapidly and reversibly put to sleep while the electrode stays in place.[2]

I can see them now, all those sleeping primates: the limp chimps and conked-out macaques, the gibbons’ faces fringed in pale fur like ash-encircled coals. All our cousins getting their beauty sleep, sprouting electrodes for our benefit. A bit pathetic, a bit clownish—but mostly eerie, because Think Monkey’s functions also include human creativity. We know that the creative thought process is hidden from the conscious mind. Genius is a secret to itself. Out of nowhere, an idea pops into your head, or makes you sit bolt upright at four in the morning. The procedure that evolved it is hidden; that’s the monkey’s job. Think Monkey, the universal Muse, creates the flash in which a scientist sees the light. So it is at her prompting that we fill our laboratories with unconscious primates, the living images of Think Monkey herself, as we struggle to fulfill that darkly humorous imperative, Know Thyself.

Notes

1. Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts & Co., 2004), 298.

2. Koch, 312.