The Phenomenology of Hydroplaning
Rain fell in blinding sheets, the wipers swishing maniacally. Waves of water crashing over the windshield made a noise as loud as a garbage disposal. Like damn fools everyone was still driving as fast as ever. I didn’t see the deep puddles of water that had gathered in low spots of the pavement. Then—BAM!—I was hydroplaning. All of a sudden I felt like I missed the last step of a staircase—a sudden disorientation and concomitant panic. Paying especial attention to how it felt, I realized then and there that it felt basically like pain.
“I was able to pay attention,” I later told Kelly, “because the time I hydroplaned before that, I told myself the next time to try to notice how it feels in the moment.”
“And it felt like pain?” Kelly said.
“Yes, I mean, we could call it alarm, the flight or fight response, or, more technically, a surge of adrenaline. But if you pay attention to the feeling with the danger of the hydroplaning bracketed off, you’ll see it’s basically pain.”
What I was trying to get across was that Mother Nature only has so many ways to get human beings to pay attention. But of course I don’t believe in Mother Nature. I believe in evolutionary biology. The point is that the feeling of the kick of adrenaline from our fight or flight response was indistinguishable from pain, if you paid attention in the right way.
“It was instantaneous. The tightness, the constriction like an electric shock—what I’m calling pain—started in the center of my chest and spread out to my arms and legs,” I said.
Really fast, my whole body had screamed ‘Danger!’ And then it dissipated, but slowly, orders of magnitude more slowly than it came. The tingling pain lingered for a good long while after the hydroplaning was over, much longer than one would think.
Give it a try, you’ll see. Reader, the next time something like that happens to you pay attention to how it feels in your body. Pay attention immediately afterwards the next time your car starts hydroplaning, or the next time you get really startled—I mean reallystartled, not just someone walking around the corner and surprising you, but something that make your heart skip a beat, as they say—or the next time you misread an email and mistakenly think you’ve been fired. Can you remember when you last got sent into fight or flight mode? What did it feel like? I don’t mean, did you want to fight or did you want to fly? I don’t mean your intention or anything as cognitive and essentially conceptual and discursive as that. I mean, what was your bodily experience?
Epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, is the hormone responsible for our fight or flight response to emergencies. During a frightening or dangerous event, adrenaline instantly floods the bloodstream. The hormone raises the heart rate, dilates the pupils, dilates the blood vessels or capillaries and the air passages in the lung, increases sweat production. You get a feeling of intense reserves of energy and a boost in physical performance for a brief period of time. You might get tunnel vision and a tunneling of your hearing as well and time dilation and extreme focus of attention. Adrenaline creates faster reaction times and can block the sensation of pain.
“Does it block reasoning? Does it create useful illusions? Does it confabulate so that a cause seems to come after what is its effect or other switcheroos?” Kelly asked.
Afterwards your hands might shake, you might feel weak, your blood pressure might drop suddenly from the elevated levels adrenaline brought it to and you might faint or feel woozy. Afterwards, whatever was repressed during the emergency might burst forth. People can break down crying.
“If you pay attention to the phenomenology, it’s basically just pain,” I said to Kelly.
“What does ‘phenomenology’ mean?” Kelly asked.
It’s a fancy looking word but it’s really quite useful. It’s the quality of a conscious experience. (It also means the study of the quality of conscious experience.) Here’s an example: a spiritually inclined hiker perceives a forest of Douglas fir and shore pine as a moment of unity between herself and the evergreens or in some other spiritual way. The point is that such a spirituality-inflected phenomenology would be vastly different from that of a lumber executive in the same forest who knows how much each fir tree would fetch on the market (based on volume or number of likely 2x4s inhering in each fir tree) and he knows just by looking. For him, it would be as if each Douglas fir tree had a price tag on it and each shore pine was labeled worthless. The spiritual and the financial experiences of the very same forest have very different phenomenologies.
“The phenomenology of an experience which represents the world—like a visual perception—is the way the representation seems or feels, bracketing off whether or not the world is actually as represented.”
“So, like what? What’s another example?” Kelly asked.
The most common example in the academic philosophy literature—and an example I use with my students—is the phenomenology a bat undergoes when it perceives the world via echolocation. “What’s it like to be a bat?” is the title of a famous-in-philosophy essay by Thomas Nagel. The way a bat perceives the world would be strange to us since echolocation must produce an experience of the world different in character and quality (i.e., different in phenomenology) from that of visual sight. A nature documentary film producer might try to represent it. They might show a black and white world with edges of objects that shimmered or consisted of wavy lines of probabilities instead of definite straight lines.
An object would register in echolocation but many of its characteristics would be unknown such as color or finer details beyond its mere existing. But echolocation experience would include some information human sight does not give as clearly, such as a more precise knowledge of the rate of movement of the object towards or away from the bat itself. Figuring out how fast something is coming towards us is something we do all the time but our facility is not shall we say stellar, judging by the number of times pedestrians walk out in front of oncoming traffic.
Because of the way echolocation works—bouncing sound off an object and listening for how long it takes for the sound to echo back—bats know precisely how fast something is moving perhaps as well as we know the color of something.
A dog has extra sensitive smell. So much so that a dog can tell the difference between the scent of urine on a fire hydrant that is fresh and one that is older. If precise enough, then the phenomenology the dog has of a fire hydrant’s scents will include information on how long it has been there, a characteristic which will be as evident to the dog as the hydrant’s color is to us.
Philosophers talk about what it’s like for a bat to echolocate in order to establish a short hand to talk about consciousness, which is otherwise nearly ineffable. We can’t say what it is like to be a bat because echolocation is too foreign a way of representing the world in experience. But there is something it is like; every conscious being has a phenomenology moment to moment. Of course, neither can we say very well what it is like to be a human being. The closest we get might be a stream of consciousness novel, for example by Virginia Wolfe or James Joyce. The shorthand and nominalization is useful.
We can say that for a rock there is nothing it is like to be. But for you and me and for our dogs there is something it is like. Then we can debate whether or not there is something it is like for C3PO or Watson or Alexa.
Are animals conscious? Are human children conscious if only a percentage of their brain is developed at a certain age? How does the consciousness of a dementia patient seem to that person? What is it like to be batty?
For some people, their physiology is such that the phenomenology of tasting cilantro is like tasting soap. Not for me; I love cilantro. But paying attention in the way I’m talking about has allowed me to understand how the way it tastes to me could morph into the taste of soap. I kind of get it. The tastes are close enough.
We need novels and so on to know what words to use to describe how we feel.
“But it’s not feeling first and then novels and learning the language of describing our experience. It’s learn the language first and then describe experience,” Professor Z said, then he quoted Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
What is your phenomenology like when something bad happens? Do you ever find yourself placing blame on others whom in a cool moment of reflection you could see are not blameworthy? I have observed that my dad casts aspersions and blame onto others for every last thing, even those things for which he is responsible, as anyone except him could plainly see. I understand how it is that my father can blame other people in this way. Because it happens to me, in a way. The way I see it, he is less successful (or maybe doesn’t even try) in tamping down the miniature sudden bursts of blaming others that I have observed in myself but which I succeed in squelching. Pay attention to your experience on the level I’m calling “miniature” and see if you have thoughts that you do not allow to get to your mouth and almost prevent from coming to consciousness at all.
Imagine that you had a dollhouse replica of the real house you live in. Imagine the dollhouse had miniature versions of your couch and TV and bookshelves, everything just like in reality but smaller. Would it not help to have such a miniature version of your living room when you were considering rearranging the furniture? Now imagine your brain and your mind—the phenomenology of being you—in miniature like that. It can give you a perspective. You own experience is not usually what you are paying attention to. Usually it is through your experience as medium that you pay attention to the world, the object of your experience. Experience is like a transparent medium, which by its not being seen, lets you see other things. The miniaturizing approaching I’m talking about lets you pay attention to it in its own right. It should give you the sense of something so near and unspoken of newly becoming available for inspection.
Now that you know what I mean by phenomenology, I can say what I wanted to say when I started in.
Sometimes the best reason to take up a certain philosophical position won’t be a standard argument per se. Sometimes a phenomenological description can be persuasive.
For instance, when I describe myself as of “a site of conflicting vectors” of various “modules or drives or wills to power,” it allows you to try on for size describing yourself and your experience of yourself and the world in those terms and see how it fits.
Around this time I was re-reading a New Yorker profile about the philosophers Paul and Pat Churchland.
For instance, both he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not “pain” but something more complicated—first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers. The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile’s complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine.
I was also reading Sapolsky at the time, so I knew while C-fibers and A-fibers was right, there was more to the story.
The two kinds of pain, sharp and dull-aching, are the result of two different kinds of inhibitory circuits in a neural network.
“I love this circuit because it is just so elegant,” Sapolsky gushes. It’s cool in part because it introduces the “double negative of inhibiting inhibitors.”
Imagine a nerve cell A with its dendrites sitting just below the surface of the skin. And imagine that something’s happened and nerve cell A has an action potential to send a pain signal. A stimulates neuron B “which projects up the spinal cord, letting you know that something painful just happened.” But neuron A is set up to also excite C which inhibits B. This is the feed-forward version on an inhibitory circuit, the result of which is “neuron B fires for a while and then is silenced, and you perceive this as a sharp pain—you’ve been poked with a needle.”
Imagine now there’s neuron D near to A but of a different kind. D has a myelin sheath to the action potentials travel down the axon of neuron D much slower than in neuron A (“details aren’t important,” Sapolsky says). D excites B just like A does but D also inhibits C which inhibits C’s ability to inhibit B. “You perceive it as a throbbing, continuous pain, like a burn or abrasion.”
Without necessarily knowing about this circuit we manipulate it to our advantage each time we scratch at a mosquito bite. “An insect bite throbs unbearably, we scratch hard right around it” which makes for a sharp pain for a moment but also shuts the system down for a while because we are exciting A which excites C which inhibits B… “and the slow, chronic pain pathway is shut down for a few minutes.”
Sapolsky shares more of his enthusiasm for this circuit by telling the story of how it was discovered. In 1965 neurobiologists Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall offered the architecture of such a circuit just theoretically. “No one has ever seen this sort of wiring, but we propose that it’s got to look something like this, given how pain works.” And “subsequent work showed that’s exactly how this part of the nervous system is wired.”
When I was a kid, my dad was sent to Washington DC for a year to serve as the technical liaison for BPA’s lobbying effort in Congress. My brother, John, and I spent a long summer with him and Dianne and Kelly and Jason when I was in first grade. At civil war battlefields I recall seeing barrels of spent musketballs. They looked a little bit like acorns. When we walked around the battlefields I always scoured the ground in front of me for unshot bullets.
I did not know at the time, but this kind of musket ball had been a recent innovation. In 1849 the French inventor Claude-Etienne Minié created an improved bullet for front-loading rifles, which increased accuracy at greater distances as compared to earlier kinds of guns. The bullet was cylindrical in shape with a conical front end and three grooves on the side toward the back. It had a hollow base and when the gunpowder packed behind it was detonated, the metal bullet expanded, which was a good innovation for two reasons. Being smaller in diameter than the rifle barrel when loaded meant it was less likely to jam. And as it expanded it gripped the spiral grooves etched inside the rifle barrel—the “rifling”—which set the bullet spinning as it came out of the barrel, improving accuracy to a range of about 225 yards. Without rifling, bullets ricocheted around in the barrel and could come out in a terrible variety of literally untoward directions.
The British paid Minié for his patent in 1851 and used bullets with his design in the Crimean War of 1853-1856. In 1855, the U.S. armory at Harper’s Ferry, making some improvements on Minié’s design, adopted what came to be called the Minnie ball. When the spinning hollow Minnie ball encountered a human body, it continued its expansion, flattening on impact, ripping up tissue and shattering bone. The rifle-musket and the Minnie ball is thought to account for 90% of the 200,000 killed and 400,000 wounded soldiers during the civil war.
Before the advent of antibiotics the slightest wound threatened infection, gangrene, and ultimately death. King blah blah died of gangrene caused by a small wound from an arrow, which today we would call a mere flesh wound. Over time—from the time of Kings and arrows to the time of muskets—over time it was learned that the only way to stop the spread of gangrene was amputation. But of course that was only possible if the wound was located on one of four extremities. By the time of the American Civil War, field surgeons could cheerlessly inform soldiers who’d been shot in the arms or legs that they were lucky: with amputation of the limb they might live.
It is estimated that around 30,000 limbs were amputated during the civil war. Approximately ninety-five percent of amputees reported experiencing sensations, heat, cold and pain in their missing limbs. The neologism, “phantom limb,” was coined by the civil war field surgeon Silas Weir Mitchell, who is credited with the first scientific inquiry into the phenomenon.
In pre-scientific times, amputation of limbs was less prevalent but not unheard of. Any report of experiencing a phantom limb was regarded as mysterious, mystical, or magical by ancient and medieval minds.
Around Mitchell’s time period, the practice of doctoring was attempting a professionalization more in the direction of objective evidence. Amputees reporting phantom limb were sometimes disbelieved or reckoned to be malingers.
It was Mitchell’s survey, in 1872, which found that ninety-five percent of amputees reported experienced phantom limb feelings. His improved understanding of the phenomenon was based on positing nerve damage and indeed, after the war, Mitchell became one of the fathers of modern neurology. In the process of amputation, the bones and muscle tissue, obviously, are cut but so are the long nerves (bundles of neuronal axons) going from the extremity of the limb to the spinal column. Depending on the specifics of the damage done in surgery the stump it could be that the body is being fed stimulus as if a limb were still there.
The mind is blind, metaphysically-speaking. The nervous system stretches out across the body and its nerve endings are like a blind man’s cane tap-tap-tapping at the external world, recording how the world responds to the prodding. It passes along to the brain a signal caused by the impression the external world made on those nerve endings. In creating this impression, the nerve endings undergo a certain physico-chemico-biological process which can be artificially interrupted or intervened upon, and indeed, deceived, or simulated.
Is not the classic brain in a vat just a brain with its entire body like a phantom limb?
In the summer of 1866, an anonymously authored short story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly magazine called “The Case of George Dedlow” made a sensation across the country for its vivid depiction of phantom limb pain. Dedlow, the narrator, had lost both arms and both legs in the Civil War and yet experienced clenching and burning in the missing limbs, terrible pain for which he can find no relief.
Dedlow recounts how he “suffer[ed] the most acute pain in my left hand, especially the little finger; and so perfect was the idea which was thus kept up of the real presence of these missing parts, that I found it hard at times to believe them absent.” Missing all four limbs he said he would “try with one lost hand to grope for the other.”
The misery—and the impossibility of its relief—touched many American readers who sent donations to the US Army Hospital for Injuries and Diseases of the Nervous System, known as the Stump Hospital. Some people visited the hospital hoping to meet Dedlow in person and must have been disappointed when the superintendent reminded them the story was fiction, Dedlow was not a real person. Not to get too “meta” but the fictional—or dare I say phantom—Dedlow had seemed real enough to those coming to see him.
It was only found out decades later that the anonymous author of the short story was Silas Weir Mitchell. Historians have discovered his patients’ experiences, related in first hand recounting among Mitchell’s and his son’s papers. Veteran Henry Huidekoper described dreaming at night of trying to write with his lost hand, only to have it cramp up on him, which he dream-perceived to be from intentional malevolence. Huidekoper reports he is awoken by “from the most profound sleep,” because of very real pain caused by a now doubly-phantasmic—oneiric and amputated—limb.
Mitchell discovered a lot about the function and malfunction of the human nervous system. He was renowned and eventually came to be known as the father of modern American neurology. But he was mostly unable to help relieve his patients’ pain.
Some sense of his feeling of helplessness can be gleaned from the fact that “The Case of George Dedlow” ends with Dedlow attending a Spiritualist séance with a medium who summons the ghosts of his amputated legs. Dedlow briefly ambulates on his phantom limbs before levitating back down—an experience which gave Dedlow hope he’d be reunified in heaven.
As one historian describes it: “Dedlow’s resort to Spiritualism hints at an emotional need that Mitchell and his medical colleagues couldn’t address: the need to feel whole after a traumatic loss…”
The New Yorker:
The psychologist and neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran turned up at U.C.S.D. as a junior faculty member around the same time Pat and Paul arrived. Paul met him first, when Ramachandran went to one of his talks because he was amused by the arrogance of its title—“How the Brain Works.” Then Pat started observing the work in Ramachandran’s lab.
V.S. Ramachandran performed a feat that Pat Churchland found to be so astounding it was as if Ramachandran had waived his hand and cured the blind. A patient suffered from pain in a phantom limb—the phantom limb felt like it was clenched in a painful and rigid fist. But of course this person was an amputee and there was no limb, no fist. How could a doctor work on something that was not physically there? And how could the patient ever hope to be free from the pain, which was subjectively as real and as intense as pain in non-phantom limbs? This patient was desperate to unclench his phantom fist but could not do so. One can sympathize. Do we not all have some part of us deep inside that is forever elusive… [alt] There is this pain, there is this area I cannot reach that hurts—it’s wound up so tight, but I cannot access it to understand it let alone unwind it. I have often felt that the source of some of my grief was deep inside my psyche, so deep it was beyond reach. Pain, hurt, and heartache radiated out from it, but when I went looking I could never quite reach it with my mind—I could never quite get my mind to understand itself just there, what was happening right there in that blankness.
But Ramachandran found a backdoor.
Ramachandran had his patient make a fist with his remaining arm and rest it on a table where there was a box of mirrors that Ramachandran had arranged just so, such that the reflection of the patient’s remaining arm was where the phantom limb would have been. It looked to the patient as if he had two hands both making a fist. Ramachandran said, “Unclench your fist,” and the phantom fist unclenched, the pain disappeared, and the patient, one imagines, cried tears of unutterable relief and joy.
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