musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

What if the homunculus forgets?


Do you ever wonder who runs what? Who is actually in charge of things? If the workers in a large factory decided to lay down their tools and all production stopped, would the boss, or the foreman still be in charge -and in charge of what: a non-functioning business? Hierarchy only works until it doesn’t… We’re all cogs in the machine.

 When I was very young, I thought about such things with the wisdom of the time. I mean, quite obviously there was something like a little person (a homunculus I learned to call it) who sat, ensconced behind my eyes somewhere, and much like what we might imagine as an air traffic controller nowadays, was charged with guiding us through the world outside. It wasn’t terribly imaginative by today’s standards I suppose, but you have to work with the science of the time.

And anyway, what else could explain the control I felt emanating from somewhere north of my shoulders? There had to be somebody -well, at least something– in control, eh?  Otherwise what would direct my feet, or make sure my heart kept beating and my lungs pulling in the air, without me (or a delegate thereof) having to constantly remember to coordinate things. And in those antediluvian times, there were no computers -just slide rules (remember those?) to help with any logarithmic functions buried in obscure bodily functions; dates circled on calendars no doubt hanging on the walls behind the eyes; or perhaps tiny notebooks lying on the desk in front of the homunculus, each with an array of little sticky tapes in a variety of colours (in those days had anybody even dreamed of those as part of the Evolutionary plan?) protruding from the pages as quick reminders of what to do next. I have no idea how I made it through childhood…

At any rate, there had to be somebody in charge of the of the untold scads of bodily colonies I didn’t even know I had. Of course, that was then; this is now. There’s a more equitable distribution of bosses in there, I’m given to understand: a sort of proto-DEI perhaps. And despite the disparate responsibilities and presumed lack of instruction manuals our bodies seem to manage.

Still, a central controller is a hard thing to disavow, don’t you think? And the idea of no I -no me– sitting somewhere in my head validating my unique identity if nothing else, is a non-starter. Why does my me situate itself there and not, as the poets usually claim, in my heart -and certainly not in my liver (wherever that is, and which, as a child, didn’t really exist as a thing)?

No, as a child the knowledge in which I was raised was basically top-down; somebody -some thing– had to be in charge. Otherwise, as Yeats put it in his Second Coming: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…’

So, is the much revered Brain actually a monarch on the shoulders, or simply just one member of the gang hanging around the schoolyard making plans for the weekend? I mean it’s hard to cede authority like that -especially when it feels for all the world that it’s the brain that has to do the ceding (which means it must be the ultimate arbiter of who does what, eh?) Or am I still caught up in authoritarian thinking; is anything actually relinquishing anything, or simply cooperating?

Things have to cooperate if they want to live together -stay alive together- but without a schedule, or something, how do the kidneys know how to filter things and then, without little bells on pulleys, tell you when it’s time to relieve yourself? Okay, so they have an agreement with the bladder that rings an alarm when it’s too full, I suppose, but come on, how do they communicate with your sense of where the bathroom is? And haven’t we decided that there is no you who somehow knows what to do when an urgent request arrives?

No, without rules, every part would be acting like a selfish child at a birthday party: gorging on this, and putting that in its pocket because it’s shiny; children need parents -or at least loving authority figures- to teach them how to behave. A body is anything but a free-for-all; one child eats too much and there is less for the others; one organ misbehaves, or misreads the instructions, and they -or maybe everybody- gets sick.

Which is interesting because every child (okay, every cell) is working with the same instruction manual -the writing is the same, but some instructions are highlighted; what is important in one part of the body may be whited out elsewhere (well, redacted depending on the requirements in the area). What redacts it? Beats me, although my suspicions would fall on a watchful immune system which seems to know where it is and what might constitute a grievous error if the light is always green. Still, it has been there from the very beginning -maybe it’s why we’ve made it this far… After all, even in the womb (do people still say womb?) there is non-prejudicial immune surveillance with long-tested instructions from both the placenta and the mother to help the multiple developing cells to graduate to the outside and deal with what those same cells might find when they’re properly cooked and seasoned. Maybe that shared early immune response is special. After all, even in a petri dish, the cells still seem to know who they are. No brain there, eh?

I’m not sure when, why, or where those cells in culture might have run into a watchful immune response, though. After all, they’re a bit like kids in an orphanage arguing over who is going to bell the imaginary homunculus they’ve never seen…

Have I mixed my metaphors again…?

, , , , ,

gozzter

, , , , ,

Leave a comment