Ha! (22 page)

Consider a moment this thought experiment created by the philosopher John Searle: suppose you were to program a computer that answers any question it receives in Chinese, so convincingly that anyone interacting with it is certain it knows the language. Does the computer truly know Chinese? Now, suppose you're locked in a room with this computer and are handed slips of paper containing questions written in Chinese symbols. If you used this computer to answer the questions on those sheets of paper, would this mean that you know Chinese too?

Searle's scenario, called the Chinese Room Thought Experiment, is meant to highlight the issue of intentionality—acts of consciousness imparting thought and deliberateness to our actions. According to Searle, you wouldn't know Chinese in this scenario because no actual Chinese thinking is involved. It's an interesting philosophical problem, but one that I have no interest in addressing because I find the whole topic pointless. The real question is whether computers will ever think in the same way people do, and for that I have no answer beyond saying that I don't believe computers must be made of carbon to be creative. Saying that computers must look like us, or think like us, is anthropocentrism. What makes people creative—or sentient—can't just be what we're made of. Rather, it has to be our success at solving problems. This, in my opinion, is interesting enough.

I would like to end this chapter with a story from my first year in graduate school, back when I was a young scientist. I was attending
a neuroanatomy class taught by Arnold Scheibel, one of the most respected neuroscientists in the country. When someone was needed to examine Einstein's brain to identify the source of his genius, one of the people chosen was Arnold Scheibel. We used to joke that Scheibel invented the neuron, when really he was just among the first to discover how they communicate.

Dr. Scheibel was known for being a rather direct, serious teacher, occasionally making jokes but mostly dispensing vast amounts of information and expecting his students to keep up. One morning, in a complete break of routine, Scheibel opened the class by announcing that at the end of his lecture he would share his recently discovered secret of life. Without a pause he proceeded with his lecture, and for the rest of the session we were left to wonder whether he was serious. Scheibel wasn't one to exaggerate, so his claim seemed real. Finally, with only a few minutes before the class was scheduled to end, he returned to his promise.

“So, now on to the meaning of life,” he said, sounding like a computer in a Douglas Adams story.

“The secret is, simply, keeping salt out,” he said. Philosophers and religious scholars can question the purpose of our existence all they want, but life serves one main goal, and that's keeping salt on the correct side of our cellular membranes. All neurons are inherently polarized, meaning that they hold a negative charge relative to their surroundings. That charge is maintained by keeping positively charged sodium ions outside the cell body, while potassium and other chemicals are given free passage. When neurons need to communicate, sodium ions are allowed briefly inside so that an electrical current is formed, thus triggering a chemical chain reaction and transfer of information to other cells. If the process breaks down and sodium travels freely through our cellular membranes, our neurons no longer function and we quickly die. That's why without at least some sodium in our diet, we risk severe health consequences, because this transport of salt is essential. Too much sodium is dangerous too, because that threatens the heart, leading to hypertension and even cardiac arrest. Indeed, if there's one thing that
life couldn't exist without—or, to put it another way, if there's one thing life was designed to perpetuate—it's the keeping of salt outside our cellular membranes.

“And so, that is the secret of life,” Scheibel claimed. The lesson was over. What many neurophysiologists merely call the sodium pump had been elevated to the reason for our existence.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to share this story once with Margaret Boden, who has written about the sodium pump herself—and she was fascinated, but skeptical too. It seems the solution could just as easily have been ATP, she claimed. Otherwise known as adenosine triphosphate, ATP is an unstable chemical molecule used for energy storage. It's responsible for everything from photosynthesis to biosynthesis and is found in every species regardless of type or complexity, providing a means for organisms to retain energy so that it can be used at future times. “Of course, it's not the perfect example,” Boden added, with more than a hint of disappointment. “Because it turns out that very recently they found an organism with constant access to usable energy, I forget where. So, not every organism uses ATP, only 99.99% or something like that. That's the problem with exceptions, because just when you think you have a general rule, some anomaly pops up.”

Why did I share this story, especially in a chapter that started out as a discussion of computer-generated humor? Perhaps I wanted to show that the secret of life could just as easily have been a matter of keeping electrons in line, had computers evolved instead of humans. Or maybe I wanted you to question why Scheibel's secret of life wasn't about keeping potassium in.

Actually, I wanted to point out how silly such hypothetical speculation is, in order to appease our computer overlords when they do eventually conquer the earth and enslave us in their sugar mines.

As Ken Jennings said after his loss to Watson: “Karma is a bitch.”

   
PART THREE

       
“So What?”

            
B
ECOMING A
M
ORE
J
OVIAL
P
ERSON

6

   
T
HE
B
ILL
C
OSBY
E
FFECT

              
The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us [doctors] succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. . . . We are at best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.

—D
R.
A
LBERT
S
CHWEITZER, QUOTED IN
N
ORMAN
C
OUSINS
'
S
A
NATOMY OF AN
I
LLNESS

N
OW IT
'
S TIME FOR ANOTHER SHIFT IN TOPIC.
T
HE FIRST THREE
chapters addressed the
What is?
question of humor: What makes us laugh, and how do our brains turn conflict into pleasure? The two chapters after that addressed the
What for?
question: What purpose does humor serve, and what does it say about who we really are? Both of these sections provided important background for understanding why we laugh, but there's an even more important question we haven't addressed yet. I call it the
So what?
question: Why should we care what humor is, and how does it influence our physical, psychological, and social well-being?

Studies show that humor improves our health, helps us get along better with others, and even makes us smarter. In the next three chapters we'll see how. Along the way we'll attend a comedy show, watch a corporate wrestling event, and see how listening to Bill Cosby raises our threshold for pain. And it all starts with a man named Norman Cousins, who was told by his doctors that he had a 1 in 500 chance of surviving a debilitating disease and ended up beating the odds through comedy. In fact, he laughed himself out of an illness.

N
ORMAN
C
OUSINS

Cousins's story begins in July 1964 at a political conference in Moscow, where as chairman of the American Delegation he was charged with attending formal meetings on improving cultural exchange between the Soviet Republic and the United States. This involved many long evenings at social events and formal dinners—a stressful schedule considering that they were held in a country where he didn't speak the language. He was also exposed to an unhealthy atmosphere—literally. Mid-twentieth-century Moscow was notorious for its dirty air and water, and Cousins's hotel room was located in the center of town, right next to a housing construction site. Diesel trucks spewing fumes twenty-four hours a day left him feeling nauseated each morning. By the time he returned to America, his joints ached. Pretty soon he couldn't move his neck, arms, or legs. His body had been overcome by a debilitating malaise.

Growing concerned, Cousins finally saw a doctor and was told that he had contracted a severe collagen illness called ankylosing spondylitis. Collagen is the fibrous substance that binds our cells together, and Cousins's was disintegrating. Without it, he would become unable to move.

“In a sense, then,” recounts Cousins, “I was becoming unstuck.”

His outlook was dire. Specialists told him that his only hope was to fight the pain using drugs, but Cousins knew that when drugs become the focus of a treatment, that's a problem. “People tend to regard drugs
as though they were automobiles,” he complained. “Each year has to have its new models, and the more powerful the better.”

Another troubling aspect of his treatment was the disruptive way the medical staff addressed his illness. Once, four separate technicians took large vials of his blood in a single day. Taking so much blood—even from people who are well—usually isn't a good idea, and Cousins wondered if maybe the treatment wasn't doing more harm than good. He was fed mostly processed meals rather than a healthy balance of natural food. His sleep was frequently interrupted for tests that could easily have waited until the morning.