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10 Baboons, Hypnosis and Insanity

I want to tell you something of our work, if you have patience and are interested. I have never done so before, for the simple reason that we have never heard of anyone in South Africa who was interested in comparative psychology.

We set out to study the behaviour of our baboons, in the first instance. I had prepared myself by a three years' course in nervous diseases and abnormal human psychology. In Waterberg we lived among a wild troop for over three years. We realized at once that we had an opportunity which no previous observer of primate behaviour had ever had: for one great reason - our baboons had a home, i.e. slept in one place. We tamed them sufficiently to render the closest contact possible and safe. We named and numbered each adult of the troop, and knew each individually.

It was here we first came into contact with the communal mind. In time, we realized the troop was dominated by a psyche which resided in no single individual. It induced behaviour which, in the case of human society, we call ‘moral’ or ‘altruistic’. We could end this conduct by separating an individual

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from the troop. We saw, and demonstrated experimentally, that the ‘unselfishness of the moral law’ is in reality the intense selfishness of the communal mind, which, in its own self-defence, never hesitates to sacrifice a whole succession of individuals. (It was the study of this communal mind which directed us to the termites: the manifestation there is much more easily comprehended since it is not interfered with by the activity of the individual mind, and resides in a single individual.) It was interesting to note that, although in the case of the baboons the communal mind did not centre exclusively in a single individual, kingship was nevertheless essential to its functioning. In the majority of wild troops which we investigated there was a single leader, whose destruction dislocated the functions of the communal mind. But single leadership was not an invariable rule. Our own troop was dominated by a council of ten old males and one barren homosexual female (with secondary male characteristics).

In testing young baboons for hereditary memories (‘instincts’) we discovered a remarkable state of affairs. We found a large percentage were utterly devoid of them. A few, on the other hand, had hereditary environmental memories, but nothing like those found in the lower mammalia. It seems incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that a number of our young baboons, reared in captivity, had no ‘instinctive’ orientation of the sexual sense - the most persistent and universal of hereditary memories. They were utterly at sea, and even when all the conditions were supplied they did not know, without assistance and instruction, how to perform the sex act naturally. They invariably discovered unnatural means by accident. Masturbation was a common practice among the young males deprived of females, even under natural conditions. It is interesting to note that its effects, when long persisted in, were without question hygienically bad. The individuals became emaciated, ‘nervy’, quarrelsome and inclined to be solitary.

In the course of time it became quite clear that, psychologically, the baboon is in a state of transition. It is losing the mind of hereditary memory, and acquiring the mind of individual causal memory. There were two questions which demanded solution: (1) Why? What benefit is there in the new mentality that it should be selected? And (2) what becomes of the old mentality? Quite clearly the old mentality is associated with the older portions of the brain, just as surely as the new mentality is associated with the development of the cortex. It would take too long to describe by what steps we arrived at the solution of these two questions. I will merely give the results we arrived at:

With reference to the first question the solution is this: In all great continents - such as Africa and Central Asia - where there are frequently profound changes in natural conditions, it is of the greatest value to a species to be able to change its environment. It must be able to do one of two things: to emigrate to a

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new environment, or to adapt itself psychologically to the changed one. A species is quite unable to do this as long as it is chained by the mind of hereditary memory. (We saw the springbuck exterminated on the Flats in Waterberg because they could not acquire sufficient individual causal memories to enable them to live in the bushveld which surrounded them. A single geographic line separated them from absolute safety and they could not cross it.)

It will be quite evident that two things must happen to enable a species either to change its natural environment or to adapt itself to a changed one. First of all it must be able to acquire individual causal memories. But this alone is not sufficient. If race memories of the old environment persisted, there would be a continual and destructive psychological conflict. Therefore the mind of race memory must be obliterated. And this is what is happening to the baboon. This is why he has been able to penetrate and live in the most divergent natural environments, from the fertile mountains of the Cape to the barren hills of the Kalahari, and in the great forest centres where he is purely arboreal. In each environment he has highly specialized habits. This is why man has been able to penetrate the wastes of the Sahara and the polar ice. It will be seen at once that human reason and baboon reason are identical in substance and structure. The difference is in degree. Both are instances of the mind of individual memory, of cause and effect. But selection must provide a further quality. The new memories must not be transmissible, since that would inevitably have the effect of releasing a species from one threatening environment only to chain it to another. Therefore all acquired environmental memories perish with the individual. All that he does transmit is a mind capable of acquiring new ones. That is what human reason is - and nothing else.

Our second question was: What becomes of the old mind of hereditary memory, with all its intensely acute senses, its homing ‘instinct’ and so forth? It seems unlikely that it is utterly destroyed in the process, since there are not such changes in the old brain - with which it associated - as to bring about destruction. We tested the baboon for sense acuteness, and found that most of his senses are not far below those of the lower mammalia. Some, however, show marked degeneration. The baboon's sense of smell is not much better than that of man. I think this is connected with the changes in the operation of the sexual sense; when sexual gratification comes to depend on causal memory, smell is no longer necessary as a means of excitation - its greatest function in nature generally. Hence the degeneration.

We were almost forced to the conclusion that neither in the baboon nor in man has there been complete destruction of the old mentality. It is much more likely that it has been rendered functionless, just like the rudimentary organs. As the cortex submerges the old brain, so the new mind connected with it submerges the old one. Inevitably the conviction gathered force in us that the so-

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called ‘subliminal soul’ in man - the ‘subconscious’ mentality - is none other than this old ‘animal’ mentality which has been put out of action by the new mentality.

There is one way of inducing a partial refunctioning of the old animal mentality in man - hypnotism. The first German investigations showed that the hypnotic state in man means no more than that the cortex of the brain is temporarily put out of action. So we commenced our experiments in hypnotism, which continued almost daily for several years. Our subjects were five young Boer girls, and our station was on the farm Rietfontein, which is now the centre of platinum mining. (I was once induced to exhibit their ‘marvellous’ powers before an audience of doctors at Naboomspruit. It was very disappointing. They were all keen to see ‘supernatural wonders’, and were tremendously impressed; but it seemed quite impossible to make them appreciate the real significance of what they saw.) I wish to emphasize here that we did not set out to prove a preconceived theory; in all our work we were inspired by nothing more exalted than curiosity.

We found, after a little hypnotic instruction, that the girls could do all the usual wonderful things. They had the scent of dogs, the hearing of antelopes, both telescopic and microscopic vision; they could distinguish by touch a copper bar from an identical magnetized steel bar through three thicknesses of baize. They could detect sulphate of quinine by taste in a solution of one in eight-hundred thousand; they could hear the ticking of a watch in an adjoining room; they had a time-sense equal to that of most animals or plants (quite equal to that of the Pacific seaworm which rises to the surface annually by calculating sidereal time, irrespective of the season); they had a homing-sense exactly equal to that of a Namaqua partridge - established by actual experiment.

We then, by carefully devised experiments requiring infinite patience and a great deal of time, compared these hypnotic ‘senses’ with the normal senses of baboons and other animals, and found a correspondence which cannot be accounted for by coincidence. Man hears, sees, feels, tastes, and so forth, with the cortex. It is the ultimate switchboard where all sensory impressions enter the new mind - call it consciousness, if you will. But there is quite another set of sensory apparatus in the old brain, through which all these afferent impulses pass before they reach the sensory centres in the cortex. Animals which have practically no cortex hear, see, and so forth, almost exclusively with these centres in the white brain. But the more highly the cortex is developed, the more completely does it monopolize these sense impressions, to the exclusion of the ancient centres, which become simply conduits to the grey brain. If you put the cortex out of action (see Bernheim, for example, on the effects of hypnotism on the functions of the grey brain or cortex), the organism once more becomes dependent on these ancient centres in the white brain. The human

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being becomes an ‘animal’ once more. Extensive vivisection experiments on the brain of the baboon more than confirmed this, but it hardly needs this confirmation.

The knowledge thus attained led to a further and even more interesting discovery. I had long since noticed how remarkably most forms of human insanity simulate the normal mental processes of the lower animals. If one is able to study the mentality of animals under conditions where the struggle for life is still insistent, one obtains a vastly different conception from that which laboratory experiments afford, one appreciates that a perpetual state of dread is the normal mental state of most wild animals. Fear of open spaces and fear of closed spaces are experimentally demonstrable in most animals - especially in the baboon. Fear connected with food, an uninterrupted state of qui vive, is always present in the baboon. In Waterberg he is generally hungry. He is surrounded by poisonous plants, and he is dependent on his own individual experience in avoiding them. He is perpetually afraid of eating the wrong thing. It was always intensely amusing to watch the baboons' tremendous conflict between dread and temptation when we offered our wild troop some kind of food with which they were unacquainted, such as for instance mosbolletjies (a kind of bun). All wild animals, baboons included, when once the fear centres have been excited, look with suspicion, fear and anger upon everything in their environment. Even known conditions and things excite these suspicious states of mind under such circumstances.

The psychological moment of grandeur which recurs regularly in the psychic life of all animals is well known. The ‘display’ of the male bird and of the male antelope is known to every South African. The male baboons also have these periods of inordinate pride and swaggering. Under the stress of this period of exaltation a young male will do the most foolish and insane things, even to the extent of defying one of the leaders.

On the other hand, we discovered quite early in our investigation a very peculiar psychological moment to which the troop were subject. Just about sunset they became profoundly and causelessly depressed. They gathered in groups, assumed attitudes of profound dejection, and repeatedly uttered their cry of mourning, even at times when things were going well with them. One of the men with me declared that he was subject to the same depression at sunset. A careful inquiry revealed the fact that ten per cent of the Europeans in our vicinity felt the same psychological ‘melancholy’ at sunset. It passed as darkness set in. In big cities it is far less often experienced, since all the conditions tend to counteract it. Among ‘wild’ blacks it is almost universal. They mention all manner of reasons as the cause, but in ultimate analysis we found that not one sufferer can explain why he feels like that. We named the moment ‘Hesperian depression’. I examined the literature of different nations and

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found that the moment was universal in civilization. I need only mention the well-known English hymn: ‘Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;’ in order to suggest numbers of other references; in music we find that many composers have written intensely melancholy nocturnes.

I could go on for several pages more, but this will suffice for my purpose. Anyone with a knowledge of human insanity will realize that all the phenomena I have just been describing are the basic elements in most forms of human insanity. I myself have not found a single well-marked delusion of which the analogue was not a normal manifestation in animal life. All these mental conditions of animals which I have described are due to the excitation of of centres which are of direct benefit. All communal animals, for instance, are ‘selected’ to feel this moment of depression at sunset in order to bring the troop closely together at their time of greatest danger. It can be easily understood how these centres, long submerged in man, can become confusingly active in consciousness. If for any reason they become functional again while the cortex is still active, they work havoc as delusional insanity.

It is generally admitted nowadays that the mind of man is not truly one, but two. Our difference from all accepted views is only on the questions of the place and the function in man's mentality of the second mind. It is often held that the second mind is always secretly active in all its functions; but I do not think this idea can any longer prevail in the face of what we have found. The activity of the second mind is always pathological. (I sometimes wonder whether that is not the case with the vermiform appendix.) We must recognize two facts about which there can be no question: firstly, that man is possessed of two souls; and secondly, that it is possible by means of hypnotism to imbue one of them with an activity which it does not possess normally. In most forms and types of human insanity we recognize the same activity of the second mind with all its intense sense-impressions. There is this difference only between hypnosis and insanity, that in insanity the cortex and its mind are not put out of action. (It is interesting to note that Charcot recognised hypnosis as a pathological condition very like human hysteria.) The first and most general symptom of the insane mind is confusion of thought. It is not invariable, but very common. Then come the sensory illusions - illusions of touch, smell, hearing, and taste. They are quite certainly subjective, but the patient does not think so. It would be very wonderful if he did recognize as subjective the activity of a mind which he cannot possibly recognize as his own, since he has never previously experienced its working, and since his whole mental make-up is not fitted to the purpose. He is really receiving sense impressions in two minds simultaneously. It is quite impossible not to recognize in most types this doubling of mentality. It is a real ‘possession’, a possession by his own ancient ‘animal’ mind, which thrusts its activity through into his normal conscious-

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ness. Very few observers fail to recognize the essentially ‘animal-like’ change which insanity entails.

I am sure that anyone who has some little knowledge of animal mentality under natural conditions, and who knows something about insanity, will ‘feel’ at once the truth of our conclusions, however revolutionary they may seem, and however much they may run counter to many accepted theories.