In the student cafeteria he followed the movement of every gulp of food to his stomach, trying to imagine and feel how, in the darkness, it was slowly kneaded by the smooth muscles, broken down by hydrochloric acid and enzymes, how the dull yellow mash was absorbed into the walls of the intestine. Sometimes he spent two hours sitting over a cold cutlet.
Actually, he was remembering. Nine — tenths of his discoveries were due to the fact that he remembered and understood how it had happened.
The computer — womb had no reason to begin with a fetus; it had enough material to assemble an adult. Krivoshein, the original, had made sure of that. At first the vague biological mixture in the tank contained only “wandering” currents and “floating” potentials from external circuits — these colorful terms from theoretical electronics were quite literal in this case. Then the transparent nerve fibers and cells appeared — a continuation of the electronic circuits of the computer. The search for informational equilibrium continued. The nervous system was becoming more and more voluminous and complex, and the layers of nerve cells turned into the cortex and subcortex. That's when his brain appeared, and from that moment on, he existed.
At first his brain was also a continuation of the computer's circuits. But now he received impulses of external information, sifted it and tried combinations, and looked for a way to realize the information in a biological medium. He was assembling himself! In the vat a system of nerves — for now still random — spread. Muscle tissue, vessels, bones, and inner organs began appearing around the nerves — in that practically liquid state when they could dissolve, blend, change structure under orders of the nerve impulses. No, this wasn't an intelligent assembly of a body following a blueprint, since there was no blueprint. The building block game continued, a sifting through many variants and choosing of the only one among them that reflected the information on Krivoshein. But now, like the computer which evaluated every variant of the solution with binary signals, his computer brain evaluated the synthesis of a body with a binary code of sensation: Yes meant it felt good, No, that it hurt. Unsuccessful combinations of cells, the incorrect distribution of organs were transmitted to the brain as a dull or sharp pain; the successful and correct one, as delicious satisfaction.
And the memory of the search, the memory of the sensations of the body under construction remained within him.
Life creates people who differ little in the properties of the organism, but are very different in their psychology, personality, knowledge, and spiritual refinement or crudity. The computer — womb acted in the opposite manner. The graduate student Krivoshein was identical to Krivoshein in psychology and intellect, but that was understandable. Those qualities in a person develop through the same process of random retrieval and choice. The computer merely repeated the retrieval. But biologically they differed the way a book differs from its rough draft. Not just one draft, but all the drafts and sketches that went into creating a finished and polished work. Of course, the contents were the same, but the drafts retain the path of finding and choosing the right words in their corrections, additions, and deletions.
“Actually, that comparison is imperfect, too,” the frowning student mused. “The drafts of books appear before the books, not afterwards. And if you show a scribbler all the drafts of War and Peace would that make him a genius? Well, I guess they would teach him something…. No, I guess it's better to leave comparisons out of this!” Man recalls what he knows in only two situations: when he must recall it — goal recollection — and when he encounters something that even remotely resembles the code in his brain. This is called associative recall. The biology books were the hint that stimulated his memory. But the difficulty lay in the fact that he did not remember words or even images, but only sensations. Even now he couldn't convey it all in words — and probably would never be able to.
Of course, that's not the important thing. What is important is the fact that such information exists. Because “knowledge in sensation” gave birth to a clear, thought — out idea in him to control his own metabolism.
It happened the first time on the evening of January 28 in the forms. It turned out just like Pavlov's dogs — artificial salivation. But he wasn't thinking about food (he had had a dinner of kefir and sausage), but about the nerve regulation of the salivary glands. As usual he tried to visualize the entire path of the nerve impulses from the taste receptors in the tongue through the brain to the salivary glands and suddenly felt his mouth fill up with saliva!
Still only fully aware of how it had happened, he concentrated on a frightened protest — “No!” — and his mouth went dry instantly!
That evening he repeated the mental orders “Saliva!” and “no!” until his mouth convulsed.
He spent the rest of the week in his room — luckily it was a school vacation, and he didn't have to be distracted by lectures and labs. Other organs listened to his mental orders. At first he could only command them crudely. Streams of tears poured from his eyes; sweat appeared in profusion all over his skin or immediately dried up; his heart either quieted down to a near comatose rate or else beat wildly at a hundred forty beats a minute — there was no middle ground, And when he commanded his stomach to stop excreting hydrochloric acid he had such intense diarrhea that he barely had time to get to the bathroom. But gradually he learned to control external excretions gently and locally; once he even managed to spell out “IT'S WORKING!” on his back with beads of sweat, like a tattoo.
Then he moved his experiments to the lab and first of all repeated the effect of the sugar injection made famous by Claude Bernard. But now he didn't have to open the skull and inject the midbrain. The amount of sugar in his blood increased as a result of a mental command.
But in general it was much more complex dealing with internal secretion. The results were not so apparent or so fast. He made puncture marks all over his fingers and muscles checking whether the glands were obeying his commands to secrete adrenaline, insulin, glucose, or hormones. He irritated his gullet with probes trying to determine the reaction to his commands on changing acidity. Everything was working — and everything was very difficult.
Then he caught on. He should give his organism a specific goal, to do this and that, produce certain changes. And really when he walked, he didn't command the muscles: “Right rectus — contract… biceps — now… left gastrocnemius….” He didn't have time for that. The conscious mind sets a specific goaclass="underline" go faster or slower, go around the post, turn into the driveway. And the nerve centers of the brain take care of the muscles. And that's how it should be with this. It wasn't his business which glands and vessels would produce individual reactions, as long as they did what he wanted!
Words and images got in the way. He was overexplaining. He told the liver how to synthesive glycogen from amino acids and fats, break down the glycogen into glucose, and excrete it into the blood; he told the thyroid to contract and squeeze out drops of thyroxin into the blood; he told the circulatory system to expand the capillaries in the large chest muscles and to contract the other vessels — and nothing happened, his pectorals didn't grow bigger. After all, the liver didn't know it was the liver, and the thyroid didn't have the slightest idea what thyroxin was and couldn't picture a drop of it. Krivoshein cursed himself for excessive attention at his lectures and in the library. The result of all this exertion was only a headache.
The problem was that in order to control metabolism within himself, he had to avoid numbers, terms, and even images, and think only in sensations. The problem came down to changing “knowledge in sensation” into a tertiary signal system of controlling internal secretions with the aid of sensations.