At the end of March, the publishing house "Alpina Non-Fiction" published a book by the American surgeon Leonard Schlein, which examines the genius of the great artist from the point of view of the achievements of modern medicine. Schlein examines Leonardo's achievements in art and science through the prism of studying the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and the physician sees Leonardo's uniqueness in their amazing integration. But da Vinci's brain is not an end in itself for Schlein, but an occasion to talk about the features of intelligence and the evolution of the human species. "Lenta.ru" publishes an excerpt from the book.
Exceptional creativity stems from his ability to think outside the box. By virtue of his sexual preferences, Leonardo, in a sense, found himself somewhere between men and women. His left-handedness, ambidexterity and mirror-like writing indicate that Leonardo did not have a pronounced dominance of one of the hemispheres. His commitment to vegetarianism at a time when almost everyone ate meat speaks volumes about the integrity of his view of the world. The equal development of the right and left hemispheres ensured Leonardo's achievements in science and art, unmatched by anyone in all history. The uniqueness of the structure of his brain gave him the ability to perceive the world from a height of another dimension. To comprehend the inexplicable magic of his scientific and artistic works, one must take a step back and ask:Did Leonardo's mental abilities differ only in degree, or was his form of consciousness qualitatively different?
My guess is that many of Leonardo's successes (and failures) are due to his ability to achieve a higher state of consciousness. What person at the turn of the XIV-XV centuries could rise to a qualitatively new level of perception of space (distance vision) and time (accuracy of predictions)?
The Tigris River, flowing through Asia Minor, carries water from three lakes located at different heights. The Nile also originates from three high-mountainous lakes in Ethiopia and flows north to the sea off the coast of Egypt, making a path for about 7000 km, and the shortest straight line connecting the source and mouth is 5000 km. In his notebooks, Leonardo wrote:
In the Mediterranean Gulf, where the bulk of the water from Africa, Asia and Europe flowed into the sea, the waters flowing to it reached the slopes of the mountains that surrounded it and created an obstacle to it, the peaks of the Apennines stood in this sea in the form of islands surrounded by salt water; and Africa inland from the Atlas Mountains has not yet turned the open land of its great plains to the sky. And over the plains of Italy, where birds now fly in flocks, fish prowled in large flocks.
This is amazing. Europeans did not explore the source of the Nile, about which nothing was known, until John Speke discovered it in 1858. But they were described by Leonardo with a fairly high accuracy 350 years earlier. He could not learn this from the travelers.
I am aware that below I offer you fabrications bordering on fantasy and capable of causing skepticism and laughter. But we have no explanations for important facts that do not fit into the ordinary perception of reality. Some of them are listed below.
Rupert Sheldrake, a biology educated at Oxford, conducted experiments to study psychic abilities in humans and animals. In his book, The Sense of Being Stared At, he describes his research showing that most people have some degree of psychic ability. For example, in a simple experiment, one out of four people were asked to call another at an appointed time. None of the four knew exactly who should call, until the moment, until he opened the envelope at home.
Promotional video:
When the telephone started ringing, the subject receiving the call had to guess who was calling. The odds of guessing were one in four, or 25%. However, it turned out that the person guessed correctly in more than 60% of cases. This was a noticeable excess of the random level. The accuracy of the result was strongly influenced by the relationship between people. The closest bond was between mothers and daughters. In this case, the distance did not matter in the slightest. Some of the calls were made from very remote locations, such as New Zealand calls to Berlin. In fact, the experiment confirmed that some people are endowed with psychic abilities that allow them to disregard space.
The perception of space, different from the usual, is characteristic of representatives of another special group. What can be said about the mental abilities of the brilliant chess players who played a session of the simultaneous blindfold and won all or most of the games? Twenty-eight-year-old chess player Harry Pillsbury played blindfolded against 20 opponents in Philadelphia in 1900 and won almost all games. He toured the United States, covering 60,000 km, and demonstrated his blindfold skill at the same time, leaving people in amazement at his amazing ability.
The blindfolded chess masters continued to puzzle audiences over the years. In 1925, in São Paulo, Richard Reti played a simultaneous blindfold game with 29 opponents. After graduation, he went home, forgetting his suitcase. When someone reminded him of this, Reti exclaimed, “Thank you very much! I have a terrible memory …"
Photo: The Hamster Factor / Flickr
Modern neuroscientists cannot explain what mental processes provide chess players with the opportunity to play blind. When the masters of such a game were asked how they manage to follow several boards at once, most of those who could express it in words answered that they see all the boards in their minds. In other words, they perceived them as a whole. If you or I decide to demonstrate such aerobatics, we will most likely try to memorize the position of the pieces on all the boards sequentially. However, already on the first moves this strategy will be unsuccessful, and we will not be able to win or draw a single game. It will be extremely difficult for us to simply keep in mind the positions of the pieces on each board.
People like Pillsbury and other blind chess players are able to imagine space and time differently than everyone else. And this is not a matter of skill, but something more. For all of us who see the world in three spatial dimensions and observe the linear flow of time, it remains incomprehensible how these chess players achieve this skill.
Autism is a congenital mental illness in which there is "mental blindness" from an early age, meaning that one cannot empathize with others. Man and other higher mammals, such as the common chimpanzee and bonobos, have the ability to build a theory of mind. We can imagine ourselves in the place of another person and understand what he thinks or feels. This allows humans and other higher animals to empathize and empathize with the other.
Some people with severe autism symptoms are unable to do this. As a rule, they are much more comfortable with objects than with people (…) In rare cases, there are people with outstanding mental abilities among autists. Perplexed neuroscientists, confused about how their amazing talents can be explained, call such people savants. Psychiatrist Darold Treffert has collected all known cases of this kind in his book Extraordinary People. He divided them into four types: people who do complex calculations with ease; eidetics characterized by phenomenal photographic memory; those who have an extraordinary musical memory, and those with artistic skills that they could not master in the usual way.
Human calculators are able to tell exactly in a few seconds, for example, what day of the week will be May 10, 3067. Eidetics can, only once glancing at a printed page of text, retain it in memory for an indefinitely long period. People with a special musical gift can sit down and play any fragment of the melody they have heard only once, then another, and so on ad infinitum. Kim Peak, who served as the prototype for the autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man, could unmistakably quote any book he had ever read and perform a piece of music once heard without notes. It is especially interesting that Kim Peak's right and left hemispheres were not connected: he had no corpus callosum.
Shot from the movie "Rain Man"
The last and most mysterious form of savantism is the rare ability of some people to paint with such artistic precision that only experienced artists can achieve after years of study. In the second half of the 20th century, psychologist Lorna Selfe studied a girl named Nadya. Nadia's extraordinary talent began to manifest itself when she was three and a half years old, and by five she was creating artistic masterpieces comparable to the drawings of the mature Leonardo. The most interesting thing is that she was dumb from birth. Her language skills were so undeveloped that she could only utter screams. Nadia was taught the language, and gradually, as her speech improved, her artistic abilities deteriorated. By the time she was nine, she had lost all the special skills she had discovered at an early age.
During her artistic heyday, Nadya did not know how to speak clearly, looked little into the eyes and, on the whole, showed passivity and indifference. She was awkward and needed help with even the simplest activities, such as dressing and tying shoelaces. However, when she was given a pen and paper, all her ineptitude seemed to disappear. Left-handed, she could draw a rider riding a galloping horse, a three-quarter view, with a correct perspective. There is no scientific explanation for how she could have acquired such a skill. Mastering artistic skills takes a significant amount of time.
The psychologist Jean Piaget has detailed how children develop their perception of the visual arts. The first figures that children draw are very schematic, later they have more and more details such as, for example, arms and legs. Only as children grow up, they confidently master more and more complex forms of drawing. A five-year-old child does not even know how to draw a neck yet.
Experienced artists spend years learning to depict a person with the proper anatomical detail and perspective. So how could a five-year-old girl, especially one with mental disabilities, draw such a horse? Could she use the collective unconscious existing in the space-time continuum as a source of knowledge? Nadia is a big secret. Treffert suggests that she could achieve a special form of space-time consciousness that is not available to others.
Examples of space-time consciousness and quantum nonlocality like these disrupt normal causal relationships and transcend conventional space and time, which is why our left hemisphere - and the scientific community - regards such abilities as anomalies. Nobody can explain them. Faced with these paranormal phenomena, with UFO sightings or with the Turin Shroud, most scientists assure themselves that these phenomena do not exist. They feel more comfortable working within the confines of science and prefer to direct their attention to what can be proven. However, there are many more examples of abilities in our culture that do not obey the rules of our so-called rational world. Sooner or later we will have to accept them.
Thinking about Leonardo's brain, we must ask the question: What if its features reflect a leap towards the future of humanity? Are we moving as a species towards understanding spacetime and nonlocality? We have to consider other questions as well: why do we have such a developed brain that has grown faster than other animals? Why is it split? Why are we the only mammals to have an upright posture? Why are we the only primates who have lost their coat?
Why are there left-handers?
Why are we able to kill each other?
Perhaps the answers to these questions will show that Leonardo's uniqueness is just one link in the great tragedy of the ongoing evolution of our species.