Watching "The Mind"

Oct. 9, 1988

Since the commercial networks have long ago decided that mind-stretching programming is not profitable enough, that titillation and the glorification of the mediocre are what the "public" wants, only PBS gives us the opportunity to learn new perspectives, the mental growth that was expected of TV as a whole on it's inception, 40 some years ago.

When I think of recent television that has touched both my heart and my mind, I think of Brownowski's "Civilization," Attenborough's "The Living Planet," the superb multi-parter on the English language, and Nova, the high quality weekly series on science.  The latest in this Public Broadcasting Service tradition is "The Mind,"  a nine-part show about, well, if you have one, you've already guessed.

The debut program, airing on Monday, Oct. 10, is more an introduction than anything else, setting the stage for the eight to follow.  Its theme is simple, though well laid out with examples:  "The mind is what the brain does..."

It opens with a discussion of animals and contrasts their mental processes with those of early (17,000 years ago) man, following up with how early man might have differed from what we are pleased to call "modern man."  Jane Goodall, the British zoologist who studied chimpanzees in the wild as her life's work, discusses the creatures' similarities to us, their ability to make tools, their ability to communicate, their propensity to wage war on their own kind, and their social structure, best exemplified by "grooming," which she compares to two guys having a drink together in a bar. 

Yet when asked about how chimps differ from humankind, she replies without hesitation, "No spoken language," describing talk as that which frees humans from the present, which allows us to reflect on the past and plan for the future.

Desmond Morris, probably best known for his best selling book, "The Naked Ape," expands upon Goodall, adding that humans can use symbols to represent ideas and objects.  A drawing of our brain compared to that of a chimpanzee shows many more similarities than differences, and even the sizes are in the same ballpark, compared to other land mammals, yet as Morris points out, we have passed a threshold and we can sit, close our eyes, and just think, and become a different individual - something beyond the brightest chimp.

We are capable, according to Professor Nicholas Humphry, of predicting the behavior of our fellows according to the conceptual model that we create from experience, and of therefore interacting and socializing in ways not open to other animals. 

At this point, this first episode goes into an explanation of the approach it will take on it's subject, an explanation that is unbalanced in that it relies too heavily on heartrending examples and not enough on the sort of knowledgeable exposition that characterizes the first portion.  It starts well with Dr. John Searle of the University of California, Berkley, telling us that mind is the name of a process, not a thing.  As Daniel Robinson, a professor at Georgetown, points out, the search for mind begins with philosophy, and philosophy as we know it began in ancient Greece, "when men realized that knowledge was not the simple product of experience, but something that had to be analyzed, examined like any other phenomenon of nature."

Aristotle, whose heritage is still powerful, especially in those of a religious bent, articulated mind-body dualism, the belief that the mind and body, though they affect each other, are essentially separate, and that the laws of mind differ from the laws of nature.

It wasn't until Darwin's "Descent of Man" That this dualism began to lose its grip, and that the idea of mind evolving from animal roots began to gain ground in the world view of thinking people.  Prior to Darwin, the mind could not truly be studied, except for introspective brainstorming, because it was not thought to follow the knowable laws the rest of the universe does.

Though this episode describes the pioneering Freud's theories of sexual repression and the warring conscious and unconscious, it rather misses the point, because Freud was important not so much for his theories, as for his approach, that mind can be studied, that we can use it's visible characteristics to infer its processes, that we do not have to pray for knowledge of the mind of God o learn about ourselves.

To judge from the first episode, "The Mind" is not going to be as involving as some  previous PBS documentaries.  It lacks the strong personalities of Brownoski and Attenboroush, men who loved their work, men who made us feel their passion for it.  And, as I mentioned before, it's emphasis of presentation lacks balance.  As interesting as are the autistic young bicyclist, and the ex-choirmaster who has lost his ability to remember anything more than a couple of minutes past, both are meant to show the mind is the product of a physical entity, and how when that entity is damaged so is the mind.  The long almost biographies of these unfortunates finally distract from the series theme, that the mind is knowable because it is the out-growth of physical processes.

So the naturalistic approach to the study of the mind is what this series will take, and that probably won't sit well with people who believe that the mind should be studied only from the perspective of a divine soul.  But what is learned from religious revelation is only that which the revelator reveals to us, and that is not truly study at all.

Vermont ETV Channel 28, which was kind enough to lend me a preview tape, and WMHT Channel 17 will show part 1 of "The Mind" on Wednesday, Oct 12 at 8 p.m., and ETV will repeat on Monday, Oct. 17 at 1:10 p.m.  New episodes will follow at the same time each week.

Mac Rush works in the Banner's-composing room.