Alcmaeon: The Pythagorean/Alien Life Form Neuroscientist
a squared + b squared = a whole lot of fun!
You know, basically everything about the history of science is interesting, but some topics are even more interesting than others. And one of the most interesting of all is the history of neuroscience—the history of how we came to understand the purpose of the nervous system and the function of all its parts.
Unfortunately, though, you wouldn’t know that it’s interesting by reading about the history of neuroscience, because pretty much everything written about it is academic writing, aimed at an academic audience. And that stuff is BORING. Academics, you see, are people born with a very special talent: they are able to take something extraordinarily fascinating, something that would captivate almost anyone, something that has commanded the attention of humanity’s greatest minds throughout the ages—and totally strip away everything cool about it until whatever they started with has been reduced to a gray dirt clod that tastes like a stale saltine cracker. Those lucky enough to have come to earth with this divine endowment then throw those saltine dirt clods at their undergrads in order to keep them awake during classes that the undergrads themselves paid to be in. Don’t misunderstand me, it takes rare greatness to do this. Not everyone could; lots of people would screw it up and accidentally communicate something that people might actually want to listen to.
And so, because the history of the brain is full of vibrant stories, and because those stories have either never been told or have been told only in the fashion of a frumpy middle-aged librarian whisper-shouting at people to SHUSSHHH!! PLEASE, YOU’RE IN THE LIBRARY, Antebrain has decided to step in and save the day. For behold! I welcome you to…
Yes, it’s The Brain: A History, told serially (and possibly also published in a book someday). All of that is the title of a collection of essays, and the collection is starting right now! And because it’s going to be told serially, we’ll get little parts of the story a little at a time, until someday I have enough to go to a publisher and whisper-beg them to publish the whole thing as a book!
The only downside to doing this serially is that you only get little parts at a time. And also that it’s hard to go in order, because you don’t have a view of the whole project at once. And that the connections between parts are hard to see because you’re jumping around. And also…
Ok fine, there are a lot of disadvantages. But you know what? We have to start somewhere, and I just love this stuff so much that I can’t wait to get started, nor can I be bothered to write the whole book before presenting it to you! So it’s time to get started.
And what better place to start than with someone from the ancient world? I therefore cordially invite you to the strange, wonderful thought of the absolutely legendary…
ALCMAEON!!!!!!!!!!!
Alcmaeon: Alien King of Mesoamerica
Alcmaeon is an ancient Greek philosopher who lived in Italy around the fifth century BCE. He was from a city called Croton, which was a place that became famous in philosophical circles for being the home of Pythagoras. You definitely remember Pythagoras, even if you don’t realize it, because his name is attached to the “Pythagorean theorem,” which assures us that, however much instability there might be in global politics and economics, however difficult life might get, we can always find out the length of the long side of a right triangle as long as we have the lengths of the other two sides.
Before getting on to Alcmaeon, I have to address something that’s really been bothering me. As I was thinking about what to write on him, his name kept repeating in my mind: “Alcmaeon. Alcmaeon. Alcmaeon.” And I don’t know if this is correct, but I say the name “Alk-my-un.” So the mental repetition of the name gradually transformed and eventually became something new: “Alfmaeon,” or “Alf-my-un.”
Now while Alfmaeon might be a new name, he definitely isn’t unfamiliar; in fact, Alfmaeon is a person that I can very easily imagine. That’s because Alfmaeon is just Alfmayan, or Alf-Mayan, or Alf Mayan, which is just that weird alien from the TV show Alf, except in the civilization of the Maya! Of course! It’s so obvious!
But I felt like I couldn’t properly visualize Alf Mayan, and that’s where modern technology comes in. Imagination is so boring—why not let AI build a time machine to show you the real thing? And so, my friends, meet that cuddly, sassy, and inexplicably politically progressive alien who this fall will be landing his spaceship Tuesdays on CBS: Alf Mayan!
At first I thought this was cool, but the more I looked at it, the more horrified I became. But while it was still cool I also had the AI make a bunch of others. This first one is a promo for a Netflix documentary on the Alfian family dynasty:
This next picture is the one they have up at city hall, and he’s holding his favorite apple/orange/90’s McDonald’s ball pit ball:
And here’s what Alf Mayan’s wax statue looks like at Madame Tussaud’s:
So authentic! And finally, what portrait gallery would be complete without lil’ baby Alf?
Hail the future king!
Seriously though I find these images both offensive and repugnant. If this is the kind of abyssal nightmare that AI intends to unleash on the world during the singularity, then we are right to be concerned.
Alcmaeon, an ancient neuroscientist
Why would we cover Alcmaeon, some ancient alleged follower of Pythagoras, in the history of neuroscience? To start, let’s consider what it is that makes someone a “neuroscientist” in the first place.
Nowadays being a “neuroscientist” means that you study the brain. But it isn’t just that—to be considered a real neuroscientist, you also have to have some kind of legitimate training in neuroscience too, like a university degree or a postdoc or something. Just studying it yourself isn’t enough; no one becomes a neuroscientist by watching TED talks and binging pop science articles on the brain. There must be some certification of your expertise.
When we look at the history of neuroscience, though, obviously we can’t apply the same criteria. There were no degree programs back in the day, for one, and for another, postdocs at most Greek city-states hadn’t unionized yet, and so their jobs had little research and were mostly teaching. That’s why it was so much better to send your kids to the liberal arts colleges in Sparta.
So to identify neuroscientists in the history of science, what we end up doing is just looking for people who studied or wrote about the brain. And the farther you go back in history, the looser we apply this standard—and all the way back in Alcmaeon’s day, it’s applied super loosely, because we’re seeking pretty much anything about the brain in pretty much any written source. If we find something, we’re often happy to call that person a neuroscientist, or at least to talk about their neuroscientific views, even if neuro wasn’t a big focus of what they cared about.
But that’s what makes Alcmaeon so interesting: not only did he live more than two and a half millennia ago, but he also had views about the brain that we can clearly identify as neuroscientific. And his views were interesting too, because unlike so many others both of his day and after him, he said things about the brain that still make sense to us now. As we move forward in the history of neuroscience, that won’t always be the case.
Alcmaeon the philosopher
To make best sense of Alcmaeon’s views on the brain, it’s helpful to open up the conversation by seeing some of the things he thought about philosophy.
First, he had some advice about friends:
It is easier to protect yourself against an enemy than against a friend.1
This is presumably because friends tend to stab you in the back, and back-shields are more expensive than front-shields. But note that Alcaemon’s view may be in tension with D. K. Schrute’s claim that 70% of all attacks come from the rear. I will not address this conflict here, though, as the issue lies beyond the scope of this essay.
Alcmaeon apparently started his book on nature with a comment about our ways of knowing:
About things that are not manifest: about mortal things the gods possess certainty, but as humans, [one must?] conclude on the basis of signs.2
Like a lot of writings from Alcmaeon’s day, this one is pretty cryptic. He seems to be saying that we, as human beings, are only able to gain knowledge in a limited way—we aren’t able to “possess certainty,” or get to the point when we can be absolutely sure, about “things that are not manifest.” Those things might be anything that we can experience, and so maybe what he’s saying is that we can’t get certainty about things we can’t experience. If that’s what he’s saying, it’s definitely an interesting view, especially coming so long ago. But it’s also hard to say for sure whether that really is what he’s saying or not.
In any case, it’s interesting that he would comment on knowledge and experience at all, and his comment indicates a focus on what we can know by means of the things we sense. And Alcmaeon extends this focus to the human body, which is why he ends up being an important part of the history of neuroscience.
Alcmaeon the neuroscientist
According to later chroniclers, Alcmaeon had a lot to say about how the human body worked. For example, here’s a view he seems to have held about hearing:
He says that hearing occurs by the ears, since there is void in them; for this resounds (and a sound is produced by what is hollow), and air makes an echo in response.3
Obviously hearing occurs “by the ears,” everyone knows that. What sets Alcmaeon apart here is his attempt to give an explanation of how hearing occurs by the ears: for him it has to do with an empty space and echoes produced by the air inside the empty space of the ear. You could wonder what experiences led him to this idea—maybe he was inside a cave, for example, or maybe he heard a horn or the sound in a shell when you cup it over your ear. He’s trying to give a mechanism that would make hearing possible.
He also spoke about smelling:
Smelling occurs by the nostrils, at the same time as breathing occurs, by making the breath rise up to the brain.4
Brain! We got a brain sighting here! Now we’re talking history of neuroscience. Just as he did with hearing, Alcmaeon tried to give a mechanism for our ability to smell. Note the difference in how he explains hearing and smelling, though—for hearing, all the action is happening inside the ear. But for smelling it’s happening with the brain. For Alcmaeon, the nose is just like a pipe that channels the smells up into the brain. The brain must do all the work of actually “smelling”—he says in another place that it is by the brain “that odors are perceived.”5
This is one of those places where you kind of have to stop and take a moment to appreciate what’s happening here. Alcmaeon is being very explicit that it is the brain that is responsible for perception. Obviously he has no idea how smelling actually works; he has no sense that tiny chemicals bond to receptor cells to create action potentials, and so on. Of course he knows none of that. But it’s still a huge advance that he thinks the brain is involved at all.
To us it’s obvious that the brain is involved. But one thing you learn from the history of science is, whatever seems obvious to us now, there was a time and place, probably not that far distant, when that thing was not only not obvious, but it might have been obviously wrong! Alcmaeon’s doing some work here in the history of neuroscience.
He goes on in various sources to talk about taste (happens with the tongue, not the brain) but strangely enough he apparently doesn’t talk about touch at all.6 Some of these ideas and the others we’ve mentioned may have come about by his own dissections; there are claims that Alcmaeon was the first (recorded) person to perform a dissection, but the claims might be spurious.7
So, going back to what we were saying before about what counts as the history of neuroscience, even the brief remarks we’ve seen from Alcmaeon so far would be enough to make him an important figure in that history. He makes claims about how perception occurs and he ties them back to specific organs, and more important, to the brain. People have been called neuroscientists for doing a lot less.
But it’s all the more amazing, then, that we haven’t even seen the money quote yet! We’ve got one more thing to talk about, and out of all Alcmaeon’s ideas, this is definitely the coolest.
According to Aristotle’s colleague and chariot race fantasy league owner/manager Theophrastus, Alcmaeon went beyond each individual sense to an idea about how all the senses had at least something to do with the brain. Alcmaeon thought that
All of the sense organs are connected in some way to the brain, and that is why they are impaired when it is altered or changes place. For this obstructs the passages which the sensations traverse.8
Now THIS is a history of neuroscience quote right here. Going along with what he said earlier, Alcmaeon now affirms that each sense organ is somehow connected to the brain. And this connection isn’t just a decorative thing; it’s also a functional connection. This means that the connection has something to do with the ways that the parts are supposed to operate. In this case, Alcmaeon tells us that the connection is functional because when the brain “is altered or changes place”—in other words, when one half of the functional connection changes—then “[the sense organs] are impaired.” The sense organs are impaired, they work in a worse way, when the brain changes or changes place. When one half of the functional connection changes, the other half changes too.
But oh you scallywaggish rapscallion you, Alcmaeon! You aren’t done yet! You had to go and give us even more awesome stuff to talk about! Because you also say that a change in the brain half of the sense organ/brain functional connection has a very specific effect. You say that it “obstructs the passages which the sensations traverse.”
There’s so much there in one brief remark. Let’s list it out:
Alcmaeon is assuming that the movement of the brain could “obstruct” something important, or that it would affect something other than itself.
He’s saying that there are “passages” leading to the brain, which implies that something must pass through them.
He’s saying that the “sensations” pass through those “passages,” and so the sensations are the things getting relayed from the organ to the brain as part of that functional connection.
The arrival of the “sensations” from the organ to the brain is a necessary part of making sense happen—you can’t sense anything without that transfer from one place to another.
Awesome. And you can see how this would work in the case of smelling we discussed earlier. For Alcmaeon the nose and the nasal areas above it are going to contain these “passages,” which allow the “breath,” or just air, to travel up to the brain. That travel and arrival at the brain is essential to smelling. Smelling can’t happen any other way, so if there’s an obstruction or something is blocked, then you’ll be like a baby with a freshly-changed diaper: no smell.
One of the mysteries about this quotation is what Alcmaeon might have meant by “passages.” He’s using the plural of the Greek term πόρος, poros, which means a whole bunch of different things. You can check out the range of meanings here, but just as an example, poros can mean “a ferry to cross a river,” “a sea strait,” “a pathway,” and “an aqueduct.” All of these meanings have some kind of channel/means-to-cross-a-channel element in common, but really Alcmaeon here appears to be inaugurating a new use of the term to refer to just those “passages” that connect the sense organs to the brain.
And in that inauguration we find one of the best examples of very early neuroscience. Alcmaeon’s got no techniques, no technologies, no nothing like that. He just observes and thinks. And given the assumptions he makes about the sense organs, he concludes that they must be connected in some way to the brain. And what is that connection? The poros, he thinks, and with that he makes his mark as one of the first and most important figures in the history of neuroscience.
Alcmaeon and the brain
Alcmaeon makes another assumption that we haven’t really dealt with yet here: he assumes that the sense organs are connected to the brain for their function, rather than to the heart or to the stomach or to some other organ. But why make that assumption? The body has lots of organs, after all.
One reason might be that the brain is in the head, and we seem to sense the world from our head, in that we experience our eyesight and taste and everything happening up here, rather than down at our feet. But this doesn’t have much to do with the brain, and seems to have more to do with where our sense organs happen to be located than anything else.
Another better reason to think that the sense organs are connected to the brain and not to something else is injuries—specifically, head injuries. Head injuries, and not foot or stomach or heart injuries, appear to cause the “obstructions” Alcmaeon is talking about, which in turn cause the senses to be “impaired.” You might notice this if you saw someone get hit in the head by something, but you could notice if you’d spent time on a battlefield maybe, too. You’d pick up on these patterns of people getting head injuries and then some of them ending up with sense problems.
Whatever the source of Alcmaeon’s assumption, though, he was making it, and it mattered. There was a time and place where it was not obvious to people that the brain was responsible for or even involved in the way we sense the world. That had to be discovered—and while Alcmaeon didn’t discover it, his thinking was on the right track, and he linked up that assumption to innovative ideas on how sensation occurs in the human body.
For all these reasons, Alcmaeon is a crucial and even kingly figure in the history of neuroscience.
The Brain: A History
So that’s season 1, episode 1. Be sure to join us next time on…
The Brain: A History, told serially (and possibly also published in a book someday)
The Alf Mayan quotations are from Laks and Most’s recent Loeb edition of the Presocratics, which you can look at here. His stuff is in volume V, chapter 23, and spans pages 737–771, and then each quote has a designation with numbers and letters in bold text. This particular quote is on page 743, P4.
747, D4.
751, D12.
753, D13a.
753, D13b.
757, D18 says, “Regarding touch he has not said either how it occurs or by what means.”
771, R6.
757, D19a.