THE BEAST'S IQ

-- A hidden dimension of intelligence

By Paul Pietsch, Ph.D.,
Professor Emeritus
Indiana University

I did the operations and named the beasts, but the intellectual origin of Triclops belongs to Carl. He brought a cup of coffee into my lab one air-polluted Midland Michigan morning many years ago, squatted by the floor drain like a sailor, lit a cigarette and asked something to the effect of, "Say?" How hard was it to transplant the eyes of salamanders? He went into a coughing spasm, turned the color of borscht but managed amid drags to gasp out some rather interesting ideas.

What dictates the upper limits on learning? Is it how many vibes the sense organs pipe into the brain? Within its physiological limits, does the brain itself regulate learning. Maybe we could find out by adding and subtracting eyes?

I listened, hoped the live ash he was flicking into my drain wouldn't detonate sewer gas, wondered if what he was proposing went too far off my formal line of research (regeneration) and almost turned him down.

From the outset, Carl seemed utterly fascinated by my experimental animals, many of them recipients of transplanted organs. I can still recall his reactions to pictures of a particular larva, a little guy named Handy who sported a hand from one eye socket. Handy's transplant had been transferred as a blastema, or regeneration bud, from the stump of his right arm (which also regrew a new hand). The blastema had developed nicely in its new location, and eventually the little hand would wave in yoked concert with movements of his remaining eye. Carl laughed. I respected him from that moment on and relished what he had to say.

The project he was suggesting also held out one especially intriguing possibility, I thought. Even at the time there was quite a bit of evidence in favor of what I'll call here the One-to-One principle: Loosely put, this principle asserts that for every increase in a sensation there's a linear increase in perception. Also, there was some cogent speculation extant to the effect that adding a percept would linearly add another memory-bearing neural circuit to the brain.

I can't swear that, today, my id would let me consciously think my thoughts as I heard Carl out, what with political correctness and all. In those days, to me, "learn faster" translated into "higher IQ" (although in fairness to Carl, I must immediately insert here that he, the professional psychologist, would never have loosely tossed around such a term, even then; my excuse was, I'm an anatomist). I still naively regarded IQ as a neutral subject, interchangeable with intelligence. I believed intelligence could be objectively phrased and quantitatively measured, and that it was as amenable to the tools of science as a cadaver on a slab.

Numerous precedents existed for transplanting eyes. I'd transplanted quite few myself while trying to learn how to manipulate delicate things under a stereoscopic microscope without gushing them up. The late Roger Sperry, who eventually won a Nobel Prize (for split-brain research), became famous in the 1940's for transplanting eyes. Even before Sperry, Leon Stone up at Yale had manipulated amphibian eyes, and with the dexterity of a shell game operator. In the process he demonstrated the truly incredible regenerative abilities of salamanders' optic nerves. The optic nerve fibers originate in the retina and the donor's must re-sprout, grow into and find and hook up with the host's brain for vision to recovery. In one series, to punctuate his point, Stone swapped eyes between land-dwelling adult tiger salamanders and aquatic newts. Tiger salamanders often hunt by sight and require good vision. Newts, by contrast, have comparatively poor visual acuity. After Stone's animals recovered from the eye-swapping surgery, they not only regained vision but the tigers exhibited myopia while the newts saw better with the landlubber's eyes than they had with their own. (Predictably, Stone had his detractors. Using technology not available in Stone's day, Carl and I eventually showed that Stone was right. We published the data in 1988.[0])

Anyway, for an admixture of sentimental and scientific reasons, I ended collaborating with Carl.

Before we could swing into action, though, each of us had much prep work to do. He had to perfect the learning test and figure out which statistical routines to bring into the study. For my part, I had to guarantee the operations, which meant: work out a zillion technical details; figure out the most efficient overall surgical approach; articulate the specific experimental questions; from the latter, anticipate the variables we'd have to control. Then, once I designed the operations, I'd need to practice and practice until every phase was as automatic as blowing my nose. Statistics demanded large numbers of subjects, which meant many operations, performed fast, with minimal trauma to the host and with uniformity, volley after volley.

Most of my transplant work is with larvae, instead of adults. The big guys don't bite your fingers off or anything like that, but they're hard to keep healthy and happy in large numbers and, when injured, die in larger numbers than the little fellows. Larvae heal quickly and predictably; their sluggish immune system makes them permissive recipients of grafts an adult would quickly reject; the larval brain (which I'd be exposing) recovers from unbelievably drastic surgical procedures.[1] Also their skull cap is only a connective tissue membrane (it ossifies into bone, later in development); the cranial cavity can be laid wide open with a few clicks of iridectomy (iris) scissors and flicks of watchmaker's forceps (Swiss, Dumont et fils No. 5, carbide steel). Small size does demand the use of a stereoscopic microscope, and working in fluid is a 3-dimensional affair. The water-soluble anesthetic, MS 222, is also employed to quiet sharks.

Asleep, motionlessly respiring through bushy external gills, the larva rests, gently trussed, against a soft cushion of marble clay from Proctor, Vermont. In the illuminated and magnified miniworld, the larva's tissues range from translucent to transparent. Pulsatile rushes of brilliant red corpuscles differentiate the arteries from the veins, in which blood races back to the heart without pauses. It is a peaceful scene. Like the deep woods, it evokes a sense of privilege for just being a witness.

My preliminary experiments indicated that the extra eye was best mounted a tad behind where some of our three-eyed ancestors wore a third eye: above the exposed midbrain, the salamander's optic lobes, using the pineal gland, as an anatomical landmark. As embryos, our own pineal gland (our vestigial third eye) and midbrain lie in roughly the same position as in the larval salamander; ours become buried deep by the explosive overgrowth of the embryonic rudiments of the cerebral hemispheres.

The surgical field prepared, I'd aim the stump of the optic nerve at the midbrain's roof (at a part called the optic tectum) and orient the cornea straight up. As I'd removed the donor eye, I'd leave attached a generous apron of skin, whose sticky inner surface I'd smooth down onto the equally sticky host site, thus sealing off the wound and loosely holding the graft in place for the final phase of the operation. (The diaphanous larval skin won't take stitches.) I soon realized during preliminary experiments that, after I took an eye out of the orbit, I couldn't tell its anatomical up from down, unless I drew a little sketch of the remarkably unique pigment pattern of the iris. That was nice but it slowed me down and eventually drove me nuts. I also had found in those preliminary operations that, by cutting the skin flap cockeyed, I could maintain my bearings on what was where even with the eye floating in the fluid. Therefore, I could prescribe (and thus reproduce) the anatomical configuration of the graft, one operation to the next. (Years later, this persnicketyness paid off.) Finally, with the eye positioned on the target, I would apply a homemade graft cover, called a Stultz Brucke (said brooky), or straddle bridge, made of plastic and partially unbent safety pins. For the crosspiece I used a segment cut from the wall of soft Tygon tubing. When immersed, Tygon becomes completely transparent (technically its refractive index approaches that of the MS 222 solution) and it is possible to see the graft right through it. The genius (Walter Stultz's) of the Brucke is a pair of parallel studs (the pins) that run through the crosspiece, straddle the animal and anchor in the clay on either side. The operator can custom fit a Brucke by adjusting the distances between the studs and also by how far they jut out from the distal, or far, side of the crosspiece. The heads of the pins serve as handles to set the Brucke in place.

I initially elected Tygon tubing in truth because I had a lot of it lying around the lab and was too lazy to go down to the stock room for thin polystyrene, which I then would have had to take over to the shop, and... (my patience extends only to living creatures).

I soon discovered, though, that the slight curvature of the down side of the crosspiece was a lucky gift (from Heaven or wherever the deity abides): The bridge would progressively ride forward onto the transplant, and I could make minor but critical adjustments as a result. When, with gentle nudging on the studs, I'd get the eye perfectly aligned on the vertical axis (directly up into my microscope), its crystalline lens would suddenly glow like a diamondin the sun. This critical effect allowed me to reproduce similar optical conditions, operation after operation.

Psychologists like to call their animals "subjects"; and I picked up the habit listening to Carl talk about behavior. Ours included: Normal -- animals with their two natural eyes intact, but larvae from the same hundred-egg clutch as the Triclops (and thus nth-tuplets); Normals underwent anesthesia during the operations but otherwise were "normal"; a group we called Cyclops (not a great name, I must admit, but try saying "monoclops" or "unclops" without swallowing your tongue) -- like Triclops but with the two natural eyes removed just before I transplanted the top-mounted eye; One-eyed, normal animals with the right eye removed but the left undisturbed. We also had an Eyeless group not as a hedge against amphibian Ouji board or herpetological ESP, but because of the ever-present possibility in vision research of non-visual light perception. Although the latter is not at all as not as wacky as it may sound, Carl did find that Eyeless could not learn the visual tasks he used.

When could Carl start the training? Cyclops supplied the answer. Two weeks after surgery, the cyclopean subjects began to act as though they could see. To put it like this: suspend a thread-like tubifex worm above the water and the single-eyed salamander would zoom up, in the words of a pharmacologist friend of ours, "Like a submarine surfacing to salvage a barge load of free beer."

We waited an extra two weeks, to play it safe (what if recovery turned out to be reversible!). During the interval, I just could not stay away from the circus the cyclopes were putting on over on the far side of my lab, near the sink. A tubifex worm on the floor of the polystyrene dish would lie mainly below the typical Cyclops's field of view. Now a salamander can sense the undulations of a worm, both from touch, if it's close enough, and, at a distance, from sonar via its lateral line organs. However, if the larva can see at all, and it picks up sonar or tactile vibes, it'll opt for a good look at the quarry before launching an incredibly violent and persistent attack. To aim, a Cyclops went through acrobatics: twisting, ducking, angling, arching, hand-standing up onto its snout, trying to place the eye in line with the lascivious worm. Sometimes, the salamander would use its eye in the manner of a prod and would thrust and poke at the worm, reminding the pharmacologist with the beer of a rhinoceros chasing the Marx Brothers around a mimosa tree.

After I turned the animals over to Carl, he sequestered them in a darkroom built within my lab. There, he could regulate temperature as well as lighting conditions.

Although he's worked with aquatic salamanders for thirty years, and may know more about their psychology than anybody in the world, Carl still regards them as a sideline. Early on in our collaboration, he became a master of the larva's behavior. Even before Triclops and Cyclops, he'd published the first carefully controlled investigation of the their response to light versus darkness. He was always inventing some amazingly simple yet utterly ingenious gizmo to find out what they could and could not do. For our studies, simply by inverting a smaller straight-walled evaporation dish inside a somewhat larger one, he created a circular alley just wide enough to accommodate a subject, but an alley of virtually uniform geometry, in which the animal could swim around and around and around without Carl's having to catch it and drag it back to a starting line point, as in a maze or a shuttle box. "It's much easier to move the light," he said about the cue for the test. Carl outfitted the walls of the alley with platinum electrodes. Working in a dimmed room, he would shine a spot of low-intensity light on the animal and wait for up to 10 second. If the animals left the light within the 10 seconds, nothing happened to it. If it stayed beyond 10 seconds -- zappo! It got a mild but effective goose of electricity. The animal quickly got the point, if it had eyes. It associated the light with the impending shock and learned to learn to scram to avoid punishment. In "Light/Shock Avoidance Testing," as Carl named it, the big question was how many? How many trials out of the 25 administered during a session did the little beast escape the shock heralded by the light? He gave each animal two 25-trial sessions a day for four consecutive days. It was a grueling interlude in his life.

Carl usually worked by himself, but there were a few experiments in which I had to assist.

In the safelight of the darkroom, ambient illumination was only enough to cast shadowy hints of the work area. Salamanders waited in stacks of plastic dishes, one per dish, the training bouts their only break from an amorphous daily routine. An amber indicator light signaled the location of the punishment switch. An oversized air conditioner with a baritone hum cooled the room to the temperature of the salamanders' native woodlands. Carl's breathing was deep, slow, regular. Stopwatch: set and cocked. Starch in Carl's white lab coat crackled: a bout momentarily would begin for one of the inmates of the plastic tiers. Soundless transfer of dish to work area. Isometric wavelets washed the animal aboard a scoop miniaturized to the scale of things here. Into the training alley on an invisible cascade; then a pause for the salamander to adjust, if adjust it must.

Like an unheralded slap in the face, on snapped the spotlight. A narrow shaft of light now coursed through the mini-universe, catching in transit random eddies of moon-like dust and ending as a golden halo around the salamander's little head. The sweep second was already sprinting around its track toward the finish line, as if endowed will, a will against all blasphemy such as this. How can a dumb salamander really learn anything, anyway, the anatomist laments to himself. Carl's fingers inched toward the punishment switch, partially occluding the amber indicator light. But the salamander swam forward, out of the light, avoiding the shock only a fraction of a blink under the allotted 10 seconds. The spotlight went off. Carl's hand withdrew into darkness. A silent, indeterminate pause ensued. Then, without warning, another round began. Again light. Again moon dust. Again halo. Again torture inflicted on a shaky faith by the relentless stopwatch. Again, escape before the sweep second hand devoured the last precious fraction of short-rationed time.

At the end of the 25-round bout, the beast back in stir, the steel springs in Carl's armless swivel chair squealed under the full welter of his suddenly relaxed weight. He laughed in high F sharp and, like a proud Pee Wee League coach declared, "Those little shitasses! They really make you sweat out those last few seconds!"

The theories we proceeded from treat not flat-footed absolute values but on relative amounts -- change ! In any physical circumstance, there's always uncertainty about so-called "initial conditions" (such as overcoming inertia). Once things do get rolling, then it's possible to be rather precise about what an extra little jolt will do. In our experiments we were asking about change in learning -- how much, if anything, would the extra eye add to Triclops's learning rate? We predicted, first of all, that One-eyed would not learn as fast as Normal. (Because of initial conditions, we had no way of knowing in advance by how much.) Then, if we took whatever that difference was (if any) and added it to Normal, we ought to come close to Triclops's score -- if the One-to-One theory held up.

Now the surest way to figure out how hard an apple will zonk Sir Isaac Newton on the head is with the calculus he and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz invented. Calculus will tell you (by differentiation) the precise rate of change at any point from bough to pate. You can also calculate the gain in speed -- the acceleration (by differentiating the differential), a measure that tells you how much faster the apple's getting. Differential calculus (with the computer, of course, doing the hard part) is how we judged the performance of our animals and the way we finally published the results in the journal Brain Research.[2]

For the sake of perspective, though (and to reflect what I had on my mind at the time), I've converted the values to the relative scale used with IQ. Call Normal 100. One-eye's IQ dropped IQ to 80. The Triclopes showed an IQ of 117 -- just what the One-to-One theory predicted: That is, if we add the 20-point difference between 1-eyed and 2-eyed animals back onto the normal 100 IQ, we end up with 120 points, which was statistically the same as the 117 we did observed.

But wait! There's more. There's Cyclops. And Cyclops really complicated what would have been a straightforward, linear story. The cyclopes average IQ was 173. That's right, "A hundred and seventy f---ing three points," as I once declared. "And statistically, of very highly signif..." Carl tried to insert but collapsed in a paroxysm of laughter at what seemed, at first, like Mother Nature playing a practical joke on us smart aleck savants. And statistically significant, at that.

I mean, 173 IQ is what geniuses are supposed to exhibit. It's like a 200 pound tackle bulking up to 346 -- Ivy League to the NFL. Yet Cyclops had only one eye!

But wait again! The plot got even murkier. Consider this. It is the Cyclops score we should really add onto Normal to come up with Triclops's theoretical IQ. Or we should add 173 (the unbiased value of the topside eye) onto the Normal 100 to predict Triclops's IQ -- 273, not the measly 117 we did observe.

By right, the Cyclops IQ should have been close to One-eye, plus or minus a skoshi for the weird visual field; but certainly not more than the beast with three eyes, let alone two. Was Cyclops merely a fluke? Couldn't we just toss out the Cyclops data? "Damnit!" Our findings were too hard, too clean, too consistent, too carefully controlled and too numerous to play those games with. We were morally obliged to figure out what the data meant, come up with a plausible discussion and then publish them.

Our findings didn't make common sense. Philosophically, that was the soul of the problem.

I recalled (and reread) a discussion of common sense in a 1942 philosophy book, Man's Way, by Henry Van Zandt Cobb I'd picked up for quarter in a New York used bookstore on Thanksgiving vacation during my sophomore year in college. It's something every budding scientist ought to ponder, early on.

"The failure and confusion which follow common-sense judgment under new and unfamiliar conditions suggest that it is necessarily limited to the familiar and common place. It is apt to be filled with a kind of local pride and devotion to its own accustomed ways; and, consequently, it is at a loss outside its familiar environment and unable to deal comfortably with the changing future."

Look at the theoretical 273 (almost 3 fold) as if it were a measure of your own auditory awareness. Suppose in the morning you awaken with hearing 2.73 times as discriminating as when you went to bed? What would traffic noises do to breakfast and the morning paper? Suppose the cat's meow summoned you with the authority of a famished tiger? What then of the pat of a rat? What would happen if every rustle, rumble, whistle or whine distracted you from book, meal, lover?

Or suppose your nose gave you 2.73 times your present olfactory cognition. Imagine then a whiff of onion breath on the subway or a fart in crowded elevator.

Or 2.73 times your current tactile sensitivity. Would you have to undergo anesthesia for a hair cut? Would the rubbing of underwear induce an orgasm? A sad line of graffiti I once saw sums it up, I believe: "Every blip a blop/And me a flop!"

I doubt that we'd make it with a particular modality of perception cranked up to triple that of normal. Nor would a salamander out in the woods packing around 273 visual IQ points. Not out in nature where too quick a response to a silvery glimmer might draw the egg-heavy female too soon from her courting mate and into the awaiting jaws of a trout -- and before she contributed to next year's crop of salamanders. No, a 273 IQ wouldn't be very smart where life and death constitute reward and punish.

Triclops wasn't really dumber than Cyclops. He'd learned less. He had a lower IQ is all. And there's a difference! A universe of difference! Triclops had his two natural eyes to cue his brain and apprise his mind through windows on the world Cyclops simply lacked. Properly cued, Triclops's brain made an active decision to not score as many points as he theoretically might have. Even in this primitive intelligence we're dealing with one or more negative dimensions: active-negative dimensions we'd inadvertently come across but could never have measured with tools that, like common sense and IQ test, work exclusively in positive coordinates, in our own realm of the here and the now; but not where the whole intelligence abides.

Cyclops? We couldn't stay mad at him for very long. Indeed, we'd become old men following his long trail far into the future. Yet without the data from the Cyclops group we would have convincingly argued that the One-to-One law extends directly and unambiguously to learning and memory. Of course, we would have been dead wrong.

Did our data say that we should junk the One-to-One law? Not at all. Although we had a long and tortuous way to go before fully appreciating Triclops's extra points, we were able to say this: Within a range, One-to-One applies to perception and extends to learning, all right, but as a by-product not a governing principle; it's an effect rather than a cause. Somehow Triclops's brain automatically knew "with integrative precision," as we wrote, exactly where to insert minus signs and correctly balance his mental accounts, adding only a little more (exactly one natural eye's worth) to what he showed and we observed.

Maybe Triclops tells us why virtually all true three-eyed vertebrates slithered into evolutionary quicksand, extinct. Maybe they couldn't --or wouldn't -- recognize the distinction between maximum and optimum. Maybe our three-eyed ancestors so glutted themselves on photic vibes that, in the end, they flunked Mother Nature's real test of intelligence: survival of the species.

Triclops, of course, doesn't resolve the nature-nature controversy about IQ. (I personally doubt that any number of facts really would.) The experimental facts do tell us dramatically how misleading surface events can be in the quest of wisdom about even humble minds. Triclops forced my retreat from an arrogance science sometimes engenders among its practitioners and forced me to admit something Carl had espoused long before: Nature is bigger and grander than science. Maybe I would have said as much earlier, but Triclops made me believe it.

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