Mistakes God Made Poem by gershon hepner

'Disgusting' is the label on what makes
us totally aware of separation
from what we call unholy, the mistakes
God made to fill a void with devastation.
Although God’s first words were “Let there be light! ”
He never did destroy the half-forgotten wastes
where darkness transforms day to endless night,
disgusting us with fore- and after-tastes.


Inspired by the work of Jonathan Haidt, whose studies suggest that we have unconscious, affective, moral heuristics that guide our reactions to morally charged situations and our moral behavior, and that if we are asked to reason we do so only after we have made the decision. Together with him I am trying to determine what is the common feature of forbiddenthings which the Pentateuch considers disgusting, and what distinguishes them from things that are merely impure. An article by Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker(“Silent Minds, ” October 15,2007) , made me aware of the work recent work by neuroscientists on the vegetative state, particularly Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist in Cambridge and Lionel Naccache, a neurologist at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, and suggested to me that the Pentateuch’s words for “disgusting” may denote a limbic awareness of impurity. Groopman writes:

We assimilate information unconsciously all the time; at any given moment, we process thousands of stimuli, of which we pay attention to only a few. As you read this sentence, you may not be aware of the birds singing in the back yard, but your brain has analyzed the sound and concluded that it poses no threat to you. In the past several decades, scientists have uncovered particularly dramatic examples of unconscious processing. In the early seventies, researchers at M.I.T. studied four patients who had experienced trauma to an area of the brain involved in vision and had been found to have a condition that was later called “blindsight.” These patients’ eyes functioned normally, but they did not perceive much of what was in their field of vision. When the researchers flashed a light at the patients and asked them to describe what they saw, the patients reported that they had seen nothing. Yet the researchers noticed that their eyes often located the source of the light. In a second experiment, a blindsight patient was shown pictures of faces displaying happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The patient said that he could not see the faces, yet he was frequently able to correctly identify the emotions. The researchers concluded that, despite the patient’s injuries, pathways in his brain had been preserved which allowed him to process at least some visual data, even though he wasn’t consciously aware of doing so.
In the early nineteen-hundreds, the Austrian neurologist Hermann Zingerle described patients who, because of tumors or other abnormalities of the parietal lobe on the right side of the brain, ignored the left side of the body and objects in the left field of vision. (The right side of the brain controls awareness of the left side of the body.) For example, some of these patients would shave only the right side of their faces, since they were unaware of their left cheeks. In the nineteen-eighties, researchers determined that patients who had the syndrome—now called “neglect”—could process some objects in the left field of vision. In one experiment, a patient was shown two pictures of a house. The images were identical except that, in one, flames were emerging from a window on the left side of the façade. The patient said that she couldn’t see any difference between the images, but, when she was asked which house she would want to occupy, she almost always chose the one that was not on fire. “This is more complex than blindsight, because it means that the patient was unconsciously able to interpret and understand the symbolic meaning of the pictures, ” Naccache said. “It is a powerful experiment to demonstrate that unconscious perception and unconscious cognition can reach upper levels of the brain.”
From these and other recent experiments, including his own, Naccache and his research team are developing a working medical definition of consciousness. “When we are conscious, the key property is our ability to report to ourselves or to others the content of the representation—as when I say, for example, ‘I am perceiving a flower, ’ or the fact that I am conscious of speaking with you now on the telephone, ” Naccache told me. “You have patients who are conscious, or who are able to make reports, but you can prove that some stimuli escaped their conscious reports, as in the case of blindsight or neglect. You can study the neural fate of these representations by showing that, even if the stimuli were not reported by the subject, they were still processed in the brain.” He added that, in the case of Owen’s vegetative patient who imagined playing tennis, it’s impossible to know whether she reported the event to herself—which would suggest that she is capable of conscious thought—or whether, as in the case of the blindsight and neglect patients, she had no subjective awareness of the experience. However, Naccache believes that consciousness also requires an ability to sustain a representation over time, which Owen’s patient clearly was able to do. “In assessing apparently vegetative patients who are unable to speak, and thus report, the direction of research should be to look for sustained representation, ” he said. “If we can prove by neuroimaging techniques that this person is able to actively maintain a given representation during tens of seconds, it provides strong evidence of conscious processing.”
Naccache has recently incorporated a third neurological feature into his definition of consciousness: broadcasting. In a person who is conscious, he explained, information entering the brain is processed in a few areas and then distributed—or broadcast—to many others. “It’s as though there is a kind of ignition in the brain, and then information is made available to a very rich number of regions, ” Naccache told me. “And that makes sense, that the information is initially represented locally and then made available to a vast network, because the person has this ability to maintain the representation within the network for a long time.”
In 2005, Naccache conducted an experiment whose outcome suggested the importance of broadcasting as a marker of consciousness. First, he and his research team presented a series of words to three epileptic patients, who had had electrodes implanted temporarily in various brain regions, in an effort to locate the source of their seizures. The electrodes enabled doctors to record the activity in a given region. Some of the words, such as “blood” and “rape, ” were chosen for their negative emotional connotations. The rest of the words, which included “chair” and “house, ” were considered neutral. Each word was shown to the patients for twenty-nine milliseconds and then replaced with an image of a geometric figure, such as a rectangle. The patients reported seeing only the geometric figures. However, Naccache’s team discovered that in each patient the amygdala, a brain structure that is associated with strong negative emotions, such as fear, displayed much more activity in response to the negative words than to the neutral words.
“The picture we have now is that, unconsciously, many areas of the brain can process information, and that unconscious representation can be very abstract and very rich—much more than neuroscientists thought some decades ago, ” Naccache said. “But now we can begin to identify some limits of unconscious cognition. The activation picked up by the electrodes is not only evanescent but restricted to the amygdala and a few other regions, without broadcasting and amplification through the brain.” Owen’s tennis-playing patient may have been broadcasting information during the experiment, Naccache said, though he added that he is uncertain whether her diagnosis should be upgraded from vegetative to minimally conscious. Moreover, he said, brain-scan research cannot yet tell us much about such a patient’s prospects for improvement.

10/12/07