Kitten

[James Brody]

Doing what worked yesterday can save you. It can also kill you. And whether for neurons, rats, humans, or cultures, doing what you once did but with too much speed or persistence can do the same thing.

He was skinny, hungry, and his eyes covered with dried mucus. A gray striped male, probably a refugee from across the street, now sat near my barn and meowed directly at me. And, maybe not so surprising, he wanted to be scratched before he would eat. So, I scratched his head, back, and belly, cleaned his eyes, and delivered food and water. His “thank you” was to meow some more and walk with me across my gravel drive but exactly on the same stones that I used but a quarter second before I got to them.

This stage was made nearly forty years ago, when I – a convinced “dog guy” - was a post-doc at Yale and listened to neurons in cat’s heads. The scheme was to find neurons in the cat’s brainstem that fired when I stroked hairs around the cat’s mouth. The cat purred and we became friends while I searched, sleepless and alert as if exploring a new universe. I usually found a defiant neuron that insisted on doing its own thing, firing regardless of what I did, unless my electrode approached too close. At that point, scattered, idling barks became first a buzz and then a machine gun and the neuron died like a star going nova.

I had seen a similar thing several years before. Train a different universe, a rat, to press a lever for food and establish a response speed of about once every second. Then, disconnect the gadget that spit out the pellets and rattus took off his gloves, hunkered up, and responded ten to twenty times per second for hours before giving up. (Psychologists called this process “frustrative nonreward” but missed its larger meaning.)

Decades later, I met a kindly businessman, a Rotarian who attended the required lunchtime meeting every week for thirty years - except once in Moscow where he was confused and took the wrong subway. (We gave him a dispensation!) He eventually had a heart attack but continued meeting with us afterwards in his usual way although, or perhaps because, he knew he was dying. He died about ten years ago but this afternoon I sit at a sidewalk cafe, sip tea, and, despite my own bypass twenty years ago, stubbornly eat his brand of strawberry ice cream.

Finally, Arnold Toynbee reported the rise and fall of civilizations and did so in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961. In his view, religion and innovation held hands during an empire’s growth. Stability and custom always developed but the civilization collapsed when invaders (or innovators already within the society) came along or in the face of plagues, droughts, or famines. If the culture insisted on doing what it had always done, the innovators, sometimes called barbarians, broke the empire into pieces, reassembled them, and sat on their new throne while codifying their ruts.

I found the kitten one morning, flat in his bed of leaves, his spirit gone. He’s buried not far away, in a secret place where I, too, may collapse into the leaves. After all, neurology tells us that old brains, like old cultures, are less innovative and bound up traditions defined by kings, clerics, and lawyers. And I will probably keep doing the things that I have done for decades before I fall over.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are shrill….