Martian Powers

When I was a boy, one of my favorite television shows was My Favorite Martian, which ran for just three years (from 1963 to 1966) and which starred Ray Walston as the Martian who crash-lands on Earth and Bill Bixby as the L.A.-based reporter who takes him in and who then becomes the sole earthling to whom the Martian reveals his astounding powers. (Did I like the show especially because the Martian took the earth-name Martin? Maybe!) And those powers were truly astounding. Uncle Martin could make himself fully invisible merely by raising two antennae otherwise hidden deep inside his skull and willing himself to disappear. That power, I particularly envied. But there was lots more. He could speak in English to animals and successfully will them to understand him perfectly. (I never thought to wonder why he didn’t address them in Martian.) He could will his body to function in a superhuman high-speed mode that made him able to accomplish work in minutes that would otherwise have taken hours. And he could will other people’s minds to open up before him so he could successfully read their thoughts and know what they were thinking. But of all his super-powers and abilities, the coolest was Uncle Martin’s ability to will inanimate objects to float in the air simply by pointing his index finger at them and then lifting his finger slightly. (He was also an amateur inventor of super-cool inventions, of which my favorite was definitely the “molecular separator,” a remarkable machine able to turn anything into anything else merely by “re-arranging” its molecules.)

Uncle Martin’s powers were basically discrete abilities, but the feature they all shared was the ability to alter the physical world in ways that earthlings possessed of human brains could only dream of. And that was the part that intrigued boy-me and made me wish I could have even some, let alone all, of Martian Martin’s powers, and thus be possessed of the ability telepathically to interact with the whole world in the way we humans can, generally speaking, communicate solely with our bodies.

The way the brain interacts with the body is one of the great mysteries of life, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand well enough to help those for whom the kind of interaction we all take so for granted is not working properly. So used to the whole thing are we, in fact, that it actually takes some discipline to think of brain-body interconnectivity as a thing at all. But it is a thing. And it is truly amazing too. Joan tells me (yet again) to put my dirty coffee cup in the dishwasher by coordinating her lungs, larynx, tongue, lips, and brain to produce sounds that she invests fully with meaning. This message is directly directed at me and I hear it—but, of course, I don’t hear the meaning, just the sound, which my ears somehow turn into the sort of electronic impulses that travel up my auditory nerve into my brain, and which my brain somehow manages to interpret not only as sound but as actual speech, which is to say: as sound suffused with meaning. And then, having successfully deciphered the message, that same brain of mine conceives of the correct response and somehow first wills my right arm to extend out in the direction of my empty coffee cup and then wills the fingers of my right hand successfully to grasp the handle of the cup and lift it up off the counter. And then that same brain, crackling with meaningful intensivity, somehow instructs my body to assume the standing position and to walk towards the dish washer, then to use my left hand to open the door and pull out the rack while my right hand manages to turn the cup upside down without dropping it (most of the time) and set it on the upper rack of the dishwasher. And this all happens so quickly that I fail even to perceive it as a process at all, let alone a complex one: Joan said to do something and I, ever eager not to irritate, do it. I hardly give the matter any thought at all! (Why she needs to ask this of me daily is a different question entirely.) And yet my point is not how fabulous a husband I am, but how quickly that whole procedure unfolds: the whole procedure from Joan conceiving of her wish that I put my cup in the dishwasher to me actually putting that cup in that machine takes, maybe, ten seconds. Or less.

So Uncle Martin could levitate ashtrays and bicycles, but I can will my body to behave in accordance with messages my brain sends out without me understanding even vaguely how any of the above works. I want to take my cup to the dishwasher, so I do it without even noticing the amazing mental and neurological processes that lead from the inception of the desire in the world of ideas to its fulfillment in the physical world of coffee cups and dishwashers.

These were the thoughts that I brought to reading about the truly remarkable announcement the other day that doctors in Switzerland have developed a kind of implant that, when properly set into the brain of paralyzed persons (that is, people whose brains’ instructions to their limbs are not getting through because of damage or deterioration of some sort), can provide a kind of “digital bridge” across which commands that originate in the brain can “find” (if that’s the right word) the correct part of the body’s musculature and then instruct, say, arms to rise or legs to walk.  If this sounds like science fiction to you, you’re not alone. Dr. Jocelyne Boch, the neuroscientist in Lausanne who successfully set just such an implant in the brain of the paralyzed man described in the article, said exactly that: “It was quite science fiction in the beginning for me, but it became true today.” (To read the whole article in the New York Times, click here.)

The article is about a man named Gert-Jan Oskam, a healthy looking fellow who was left paralyzed from the waist down by a motorcycle accident in 2011. Now possessed of this “digital” implant, his brain can skip past the damaged parts of his spinal cord and communicate his desire, say, to take a step forward to his legs, which can then obey. The result, that the man takes a step forward, is something all of us take for granted: what could possibly be less interesting to discuss than someone taking a step forward? That’s probably how we all feel…until we are confronted with devastating disability that makes it impossible for our brains to will our bodies to respond in certain specific ways. Another scientist in Lausanne explained the breakthrough in Oskam’s treatment like this: “We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement.”

We happily non-neurologically-impaired persons can probably not even begin to imagine what it would be like to will oneself to take a step forward and have one’s body not “hear” that command. Nor was this just about getting Oskam’s legs to move: previous efforts to re-connect his brain to his body, he said, left him with a sense of an “alien distance” between his mind and his body, whereas this new breakthrough so closely mimics “regular” thinking that he felt, he said, like a regular person willing himself to raise his arm or willing his leg to take a step forward.

The actual way this works is not for non-scientists like myself even to pretend to understand. (Even the Times’ article was, at least in part, beyond me.) But the notion that science has created a kind of bridge across which neurologically handicapped persons can send signals from their brain to their limbs even if part of the neural highway has collapsed and is non-functional—if that doesn’t qualify as a miracle of modern science, I don’t know what would.

I’m often asked if I find my faith in God as the source of all healing weakened by discoveries like these. The answer, as anyone who hears me preach regularly will already know, is that I don’t at all think that. The human body is a remarkable machine in almost every way. That it occasionally breaks down because a part wears out or is damaged and has to be repaired doesn’t strike me as theologically problematic. Normally, this is an uninteresting procedure: you break a tooth and the dentist fixes it. But advances like the one described above stir up in me only wonder. That human beings are fragile, brittle things that break easily is not the point. That we creatures of God are able somehow to teach ourselves how to fix our broken bits and pieces and parts in ways that even a generation earlier would have sounded like science fiction is, on the other hand, precisely the point. Creativity, intelligence, and inventiveness are the greatest of God’s gifts.