neurons; about 257 billion neurons compared to a human’s 86 billion. However, 98% of those neurons are to be found in the cerebellum; the elephant’s cerebrum contains a paltry 5.6 billion neurons compared to the 16 billion in the human cerebral cortex. That seems to explain our experience that human beings are a good deal smarter than the admittedly still-smart elephant. As Herculano-Houzel likes to say, ‘Not all brains are made the same.’ As she puts it, brains scale differently in different species and in different orders. The primate brain, and particularly the human brain, has evolved to pack more neurons more efficiently into a smaller volume, thus giving humans an advantage in intelligence over other species.
What, then, of the whales? Cetaceans share a rather close phylogenetic relationship with Artiodactyls such as pigs, deer, and giraffes. Based upon the scaling for those species, Herculano-Houzel predicted that the count of neurons in the much larger cerebral cortexes of several kinds of cetaceans would actually come out to a significantly lower number than that of humans. The largest cetacean cortex, that of the sperm whale, would contain fewer than 10 billion neurons, still much less than that of a human. It seemed that human beings’ ranking of number one would remain unchallenged.
There the matter stood until a whale hunt happened to deliver the brains of ten long-finned pilot whales into researchers’ hands. Using the techniques of optical dissector stereology, it was discovered that the neurons in the pilot whale neocortex numbered 37.2 billion – more than twice the human’s 16 billion. Heidi S. Mortensen, Bente Pakkenberg, and five others described the quantitative relationships in the delphinid neocortex in a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroanatomy. Their discovery should rank among the greatest in importance in the history of science. Instead, this very great breakthrough remains largely unknown. The cortical neurons of the orca have yet to be counted, but it would not be surprising if they topped out at over 75 billion.
As if all this weren’t enough to dethrone Man as the King of Creation, one more humbling discovery should be considered. In addition to the previously mentioned three primary structures of the mammalian brain – the rhinic, the limbic, and the supralimbic – cetaceans have evolved a fourth cortical lobe absent in any land mammal, human beings included. Although we do not yet know the precise functioning of this paralimbic lobe, it has been speculated that it integrates and enhances perceptions of sound, sight, taste, and touch. This would make sense of the orcas’ synesthetic powers, what Arjuna calls ‘the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light.’ It may also have something to do with orientation in space and time and the orcas’ perception that they can journey at will through the one as readily as the other.
Given the limitations of science and our ignorance of what really goes on inside the minds of whales, we believe that it would be as silly to try to calculate the cetaceans’ intelligence as it would be to count the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Were one to attempt to do so, however, considering the enormous size of the cetacean brain, considering its differentiation, sectional specialization, neural connectivity, and complexity (to say nothing of various orca feats such as the truly astounding acquisition of numerous languages), it would be enticing to come up with a rather large number. If the average human IQ can be measured at 100, with Economics Nobel Prize winners at 153 and geniuses on the order of an Einstein or a Goethe perhaps coming out at around 200, then an orca would score five times that while a sperm whale topped out at over 2,000.
What do orcas do with such massive intelligence? We have already mentioned their astonishing ability to learn languages (a sponge absorbing water is not an inaccurate metaphor), and Arjuna has much to say about the musical/philosophical compositions that the orcas call rhapsodies. All the whales have powers of the mind of which we have only the dimmest of intimations. How else can the seeming Miracle of the Solstice be explained? The speed of sound in water at 20 degrees Celsius is 1,482 meters per second – far too slow to account for what otherwise can be explained only by positing some sort of instantaneous planetary communication.
That we must accept the existence of certain so far inexplicable abilities and phenomena in the lives of whales does not imply that we should not question Arjuna’s interpretation of some of them. What are we to make of the impossible creatures that he calls the Seveners? Certainly many strange species dwell as yet undiscovered in the vast reaches of the oceans. In many ways, we know much more about planets millions of miles from earth than we do the perpetually dark deeps of our own oceans. Could a complex animal assemble itself out of tiny multi-cellular organisms in a matter of minutes? Could such a creature possess the sort of intelligence that Arjuna accords it?
To the first question, we have a hint of an answer in the pyrosomes: colonies of thousands of zooids a few millimeters in size that associate with each other in huge, bioluminescent tubes up to twenty meters long and two meters in diameter – capacious enough to fit a grown human being inside. To the second question, we must incline toward a resounding ‘no’ because pyrosomes and any other conceivably similar species are not complex and lack anything resembling a brain.
And yet. And yet. Compendiums of findings about the Plantae kingdom (see Tompkins’s and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants and Mancuso’s and Viola’s Brilliant Green) suggest that trees, flowers, ferns, mosses, and the like can be said to possess a real intelligence completely absent in a brain. And then there is the recent discovery of bacteria that might need to be classified as an entirely new and seventh kingdom of life. It seems that the species of Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella, found in certain estuaries and other aquatic environments, have evolved to strip and deposit electrons from metals and various minerals, thereby essentially eating and breathing electricity. As well, they have the ability to interconnect with each other in ‘cables’ of thousands of individual cells. It is thought that this association is facilitated by ‘nanowires’ that are an extension of the cell membrane and which can conduct electricity in a biological circuit.
Might Arjuna’s Seveners be some sort of very intelligent colonial organism assembled from bacteria similar to Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella? We have no evidence of that, and we are skeptical that such a creature either does or could exist. It seems much more likely that Arjuna encountered (and ate) some sort of organism whose tissues produce alkaloids similar to those found in Psilocybe cubensis or Lophophora willamsii. Very intense hallucinations would account for Arjuna’s insistence that what he experienced in the South Pacific was as real as his birth or any other event of his remarkable life.
Before closing this introduction to that life, we would like to say something about two terms that Arjuna uses at various times throughout his account. The first is the name he often used to describe human beings: the idiot gods. He thought long and deep before deciding on this sobriquet. At times, he thought it much more apt to call our species the mad gods or the insane gods. However, madness can too easily be associated with anger, and although Arjuna certainly saw human beings as afflicted with wrath, as a rabid dog is lyssavirus, he did not see this as humanity’s greatest sin. Neither did he think of our kind as purely insane. Rather, he perceived in our derangement of sense and soul a willful debilitation, as if we human beings are an entire race of sleepwalkers moving through a nightmare from which we refuse to awaken. We are, he once said, like lost children wandering through a dark landscape without markers or boundaries. He had great compassion for (and dread of) our innocence. Given the horrors that Arjuna recounts, that seems a strange word to apply to the human kind, but it motivates his choice to call us idiots. It is the holy fool kind of innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as well as the deadly innocence of the young man Lone in Sturgeon’s The Fabulous Idiot, incorporated into the great work known as More Than Human. Of all humanity’s failings that Arjuna enumerates in such painstaking and painful detail, he counts as the very worst our refusal to embrace our best possibilities and so to live as gods.
The second term we would like to define is quenge, the most quintessential part of a whale’s true nature. Arjuna himself coined the word to represent a nearly ineffable cetacean sensibility and prowess. We would like to explain this
