One week after taking part in the experiment to discover the neurobiology of romantic love, I met up with Glynis in a cafe near UCL.
‘Do you still persist in your obstinate refusal’, she asked me, ‘to accept the fact of cortical localisation?’
‘There has been movement on that’, I told her.
‘Glad to hear it.’
‘I do now concede that different bits of the brain do different things – I just don’t believe they do it on their own.’
‘You’re still wrong’, she said. ‘And you’ve been wrong since 1848, and the famous case of Phineas Gage.’
As readers may deduce, we fell into a big row about Phineas Gage, in the course of which I put forward my argument about how the conventional tellings of that accident are based on the melodramatic fallacy of the Jekyll and Hyde brain, which is a profoundly un-Darwinian idea.
‘And that, Glynis, is why I do not wish to take part in your experiment to find the neural basis of guilt, because I believe that neuroscience, as presently construed, is predicated on a version of evolution that owes but little to Darwin.’
‘Oh, really? Un-Darwinian? Me? If that’s what you think then it is time for me to show you my treasure.’
She took me round to her flat. From a glass display cabinet she produced a terracotta tree frog that had once belonged to Charles Darwin. She told me he was given it during the voyage of the Beagle in Patagonia by indigenous Tierra del Fuegians. Upon his return to England he placed this terracotta tree frog on the corner of his desk in Down House in Kent, where it remained to his dying day. Glynis subsequently won this terracotta tree frog as first prize in a science competition.
I was very touched that she’d wanted to show me her treasure, and as we left the flat I slipped it into my pocket – because I’d had a great idea for a visual gag.
‘You know there’s a legend’, I told her as we walked to the park, ‘that those Tierra del Fuegian terracotta tree frogs sometimes come to life.’
We reached a cafe in the park and sat on a terrace underneath a giant hornbeam tree. While we were sitting there having tea and sandwiches, I asked her a question which had been on my mind for quite a while.
‘Why do you think people who write about brain science are such misery guts?’
‘You seem to be labouring under a complete and utter misapprehension as to what the job of a scientist is’, she replied. ‘You seem to think a scientist should be like a comedian, and give everybody uplifting, cheery thoughts and send them on their way with a smile on their face.’
‘I have never believed that to be the job of a comedian.’
‘The job of a scientist’, she said, ‘is unflinchingly to report the facts without fear or favour, and without any regard as to whether the results happen to be edifying or not.’
‘I quite agree, but that’s not what’s happening here, is it? This is a pre-emptive pessimism in search of its own corroboration. This is pessimism as a starting place, pessimism as a manly occupation. It’s perfectly respectable for pessimism to be where you end up, but not to be where you start from. A friend of mine is of a naturally sunny disposition but she lives on a very polluted road opposite a petrol station, and is convinced her twin toddlers will both grow up with major respiratory ailments. This always makes me feel very guilty by the way because I grew up in a little village, in a quiet cul-de-sac. Every morning my mum used to put me in the pram, and push me out onto the front garden. At lunchtime, she’d bring me in, feed me, and then push me back out onto the front garden again until it grew dark. My mum always said that this daily regimen of continual fresh air is the reason I enjoyed excellent health as a child – although I didn’t actually learn to walk until I was ten years old.’
It was Glynis’s turn to get the tea and cakes in. I waited until she’d gone into the cafe building, and then I climbed up the hornbeam tree, propped the terracotta tree frog in one of its branches, then climbed back down again and sat at the table as if nothing had happened.
Just as Glynis was coming out of the cafe – and luckily she was looking down at her tray – a gust of wind blew the terracotta tree frog off its branch. It fell and shattered on the patio. I just had time to kick the smithereens into a storm drain before she returned.
What made it even worse is that over the coming days and weeks she suspected everyone except me. Because I was new on the scene, I was the one in whom she confided her suspicions. I saw her accuse her flatmates of stealing it, then her flatmates’ boyfriends. I was feeling just dreadful. I thought I couldn’t feel any worse until she started spending all her time trawling through online antique trading sites. So much so, in fact, that her work began to suffer. It got to the point that she was in danger of losing her project’s funding because she hadn’t set up any experiments.
‘Glynis,’ I told her, ‘I just want you to know that I am now willing to volunteer for your experiment into the neural basis of guilt.’
Visibly moved, her voice breaking with emotion, she replied: ‘You’ve no idea how much this means to me right now. You’re the only person I can count on in this difficult time. You are wonderful.’
‘Yeah’, I replied weakly.
The next day we were back to University College London’s Galton Lab, where we first met.
‘Okay, pop this electroencephalograph on you head,’ she told me, ‘while I go into the control booth.’ I heard her distorted metallic voice coming through the headset attached to the electroencephalograph. ‘Can you hear me all right?’
I spoke into the mouthpiece attached to the EEG: ‘Loud and clear.’
‘What I want you to do now’, she said, ‘is to think about something really bad you did quite recently, something which caused someone you care about a lot of grief.’
I heard the EEG hum and whir. I saw her face in the control booth lit up by flashing coloured lights of her instrument panel.
‘That’s odd’, she said. ‘Instead of one bit of the brain lighting up, points of light are flashing all over both hemispheres.’
‘Well, it’s like I’ve been trying to tell you, there’s more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe.’
‘Keep thinking about that really bad thing you did to someone not so long ago’, said Glynis.
I focused. The machine hummed. I heard her exclaim: ‘Wow! It’s the same dots of light all over both hemispheres all in exactly the same places. Let me freeze the frame, join these dots with a felt-tip and see if they make any sort of pattern.’
Then there was silence. When she next spoke her voice was at half speed.
‘That’s very strange … They appear to be in the shape of a tree frog.’