Lesser

'?Mae

Known

Views

of Mental

RICHARD J. A. BERRY, M.D., F.R.C.S., F.R.S.E. Director of Medical Services, Stoke Park Colony, Stapleton, Bristol and Chairman of the Burden Mental Research Trust

By

As with many other human beliefs, views of mind are usually and largely matter of faith, with little or no scientific evidence behind them. The strong, men of fiction, for are often endowed with a sixth and marvelexample, Us sense, and their lady friends with small, but very beautiful, heads. There 1S' course, no mental defective who does not possess at least three times six Senses> whilst many7 are also the Fproud Fpossessors of heads of unenviable

a

^ent .

smallness.

There is, however, another aspect of mind which makes

no such universal The hours of study and toil; the tedious examination of thousands Microscopic slides of the human brain; the checking and testing of every by means of controls; the correlation of results; the statistical a of masses of figures; the pursuit of many paths which prove to be but an^ ^le wearis?me return to the straight and narrow path which a^eys' ?ne leads to the scientific goal of Truth. These make no such universal appeal, but they are the everyday lot of those engaged on the disentanglement mind out of brain, and at long last there is light. Some thirty odd years ago the British Association for the Advancement of ience issued instructions for the correct measuring of the living human 1' and these methods have not been substantially improved. Somewhere yet ?ut this same of the period Royal Society London published the brain capacICs of a number of then living scientists, obtained mathematically from head ..foments recorded as above. They gave some curious results. Scientific 1 appeared to be independent of head size. Nor did any of the many

^ppeal.

Scjrvation

blalysis

alo^ .

.

4o

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subsequent investigations reveal any more striking or noticeable association between head size and intelligence. In large groups it did, however, look as though the more highly educated classes had rather larger heads than the socially inferior ones, but most of the investigators, whether in Australia, England, or the Continent, seemed to agree that head measurement is not a measure of intelligence, and that there is little or no physiological correlation between the two. Though this temporarily ended anthropometric attempts in this direction, the relationship between brain and size of head most certainly exists, because growth of the latter is largely determined by that of the former. Coincident with these anthropometric studies of, roughly, the first decade of the present century, other investigators had been equally busy in other fields, and were enunciating strikingly novel views about the brain and its functions. They were, indeed, suggesting that the grey matter of the human brain was a tri-laminar arrangement, built up on a mammalian infra-granular basis with, from the marsupials upwards, constant accretions of brain cells at the head end, and that these different pyramidal, granular and polymorphic brain layers might have different functions. If these statements were true?and their exponents backed up their opinions by a mass of scientific evidence?they clearly denoted an incremental association between the growth of brain structure and intelligence on the one hand, and size of head on the other. The human brain is considerably larger than that of a mole and thus requires a larger box for its accommodation. Of the former fact the Royal Society published a striking illustration, which has since found its way into many of our text-books, where it usually passes unnoticed as it is more difficult to understand than the many ologies and isms which masquerade as the science of mind. A chance remark of a student wrought a revolution, at least, in the life of the writer. The student argued that if these facts were true they should be demonstrable on the living subject. Were they? Apparently no one knew. Enquiry revealed the astounding fact that, notwithstanding the thousands and thousands of measurements of all kinds and sorts which had been made on the living child, no one knew the size of his head at different chronological The ages. measuring rod had, therefore, to be made, and to make it the heads of 10,000 living children and students of both sexes and all ages were measured in strict accordance with the precise instructions of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. From the measures so made were calculated mathematically the brain capacities of each of the 10,000 children, and the final results tabulated in the form of Sir Francis Galton's percentile tables for each year of chronological age from six onwards; The checks, calculations, controls, statistics, and figures?all that procedure previously mentioned?were culled and collated for three long weary years. But the end was attained The rod was produced and the normal standards achieved for the first time in the history of science. It is now possible to set any child against this rod and to say definitely?within the probable error of the method ?whether its head size is that of its age or is only that of a normal child of

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three,

four

4*

years its junior. It would indeed be a bold man who that such differences between children of the same age, sex, and standing are devoid of significance. They are not. On the contrary, tney strongly suggest that, whilst the physiological correlation between size of head and intelligence is negligible (only .3), the pathological correlation is high. Persons of abnormal mentality tend?only tend, be it noted?to have Would social

or more

assert

abnormal heads.

One swallow does not make a summer, nor do a few isolated facts taken trom their context establish a scientific truth. But the following, amongst

many others, A

are

suggestive:

group of 355 criminals

was found to have a brain capacity barely equal normal sixteen-year-old boy. Another group of twenty-year-old Reformatory boys had a head size only equal to that of the normal twelve-year-old schoolboy; that is to say, their brain growth was eight years in retardation. Out of 31 criminals hanged in Australia for murder, only a few were, as within known head the statistical size, regards range of the normal variation. An adult student of vicious school history and subsequently rusticated from his University was found to have the smallest head of his age

to

that of

a

?gr?Up'. Or two

"

female murderess found guilty but for murder?but and an adult male insane," hanged previously examined by the same methods?all had abnormally small heads. Using the term in its anthropometric and correct sense, hundreds of Cental defectives show this same tendency to microcephaly. In fact, always provided that the necessary measurements are correctly recorded, smallheadedncss appears to be the common characteristic of the majority of those half-wits

juvenile fratricides,

a

""-the feeble-minded. And in the meantime, what of the brain?

Much that was previously less soThat man has, as it were, two brains, increasin?1y e one for those instinctive animal reactions which he shares with all mam' phe other a more recent evolutionary addition of control and inhibition 0 Qr which he is the proud and very nearly the only possessor, appears to some Us to be about just proven. It is thus not repression which causes the raisle*-> but its lack. This brain of repression always lags behind in its devein pment and sometimes never completes it. Hence the smaller heads of the Hit-wits, the defectives, and their likes, whose behaviour certainly seems to

thSCUre

*S n?W

the facts. It is

surely something

more

than the chance in

an

Irish sweep that in-

stigations amongst Australian aboriginals, Victorian defectives, criminals

Z1 murderers,

educated and non-educated East African natives, and English cntal defectives, all carried out by the same methods, by independent investors cjuite unknown to each other and thousands of miles ulu arrive at

working

practically

identical conclusions.

apart,

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42

If the lot of the mentally infirm is to be relieved it can only be so by the application of scientific, not legal, methods, and demands the closest study of the living rather than the dead. Hence the preference for the brain capacities of the living, because though many facts are known concerning brain weights as recorded after death, they are obviously inapplicable to the living, and only useful to-day as a check on the latter, but neither is an infallible guide to the mentality of the individual. To the query, then, is mere size of Because the brain alone a true guide, the answer is No. And the reason? of mind on a minute of brain cells, depend sufficiency technically phenomena called neurones and estimated in the mentally normal at around 14,000 millions. But besides the mind-forming neurones, the brain is made up of other things, such as neuroglia and blood vessels, and though we can see and study, under the microscope, all these essential and non-essential elements of the brain, we are never at the moment quite sure of their relative proportions. An excess of non-nervous elements may, therefore, give that large heavy brain of crass stupidity so frequently flung in our faces as disproving the relationship of brain to mind, and the fact that the latter depends on the necessary number of neurones. It is once more a case of the exception proving the rule. And so with those other infrequent cases, where a sufficiently large number of neurones are packed into small compass giving that rarer combination of small head and high intelligence. But the odds are against it. About evens against the small head and two to one on the big head?at least as regards a

high intelligence. By another of

those legal fictions so universally accepted and so false to the facts of nature, man attains maturity at 21 years of age. Whereas he really achieves three different maturities?sexual, bodily, and mental?and does so at three quite different ages. When he does not do so, or when he loses them in the wrong order, it is not improbable that he may require legal certification as a mental defective or a dement, though that is not to imply that there are not other causes of mental disorders. Just as man acquires these different maturities at different ages, so also does he lose them at different ages, which again differ in different men. Old age brings on a loss of the reproductive powers and eventually a physiological senile dementia, so? dementia and death?" last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history, second childishness and mere oblivion." If the foregoing brief and inadequate survey of the histological factors underlying the phenomena of the human mind and its aberrations be correct, it is evident that the biological approach to mental deficiency (amentia) and cerebral dissolution (dementia) differs from the legal or the social. The first method seeks the causes, the last two, the results. There should, therefore, be room for all in the investigation of a hydra-headed subject like mental

deficiency. It is

a truism, though one but little appreciated, that scientific achievement?always the work of a more than usually gifted few?has outstripped human development, and this has been especially the case during the nine-

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teenth

43

and

twentieth centuries. Contrast, for example, the enormous war with the days of a Wellington when his footsoldiers were instructed not to fire their inadequate firearms until the whites ?f the eyes of the enemy could be seen, and reflect that this enormously increased modern scientific power for destruction is the result of a century's

destructiveness of modern

"

progress."

In its more beneficent results, science has almost annihilated time, distance and space, and has thereby speeded up modern life to such a terrific rate as to make it impossible for the weaker human brethren to keep pace With it. Scientific discovery has thus been too rapid for the much slower numan development. The latter has, indeed, always been of remarkably slow movement. Paleolithic man, the man of the old Stone Age, made no appreciable cultural or other advance for a period of over 150,000 years. So r?m these two opposed factors there results the important conclusion that Modern civilisation has become too complex for those human individuals Wlth inadequately developed brains. In such an environment they are regarded as legal defectives, whereas in that simpler environment for which Mature clearly intended them they might and,presumably would hold their ?Wn without segregation, sterilisation, certification, or the countless other with which modern civilisation has now to protect itself in the disw^apons proportionate race between the tortoise of human mental progress and the are of scientific advance. The scientific study of legal mental defectives, at least as revealed by ^searches in this Institution, is strongly confirmatory of the hypothesis that deficiency is neither a disease nor a combination of disease, but is a histological manifestation of an all-round under-development. Compared Scientifically with the known standards for normal children of their own sex, and social status, they are found to be of inferior physique, of inferior rain size, of a grossly diminished intelligence, with little resistance to disand with a consequently greatly diminished expectation of life. A preand as lrninary, yet unconfirmed, investigation at Stoke Park as to the ^xpectation of life amongst certified defectives shows that the average longevity only half that of the normal; say 35 years as against the 70 of the Psalmist, ctectives thus frequently undergo, on top of their amentia, a premature ementia, for with their undeveloped neurones and physical systems they are Unable to stay the course." From the standpoint of human social civilisation it is a misfortune that those parts of the cerebral cortex concerned with activities of all animal life, namely the sexual and the are acquisitive, precisely those which in the higher grade defective are the east impaired. Hence the frequency with which such ill-deve?Ped individuals, lacking a properly developed brain of control and represSl0n, offend against the laws of civilisation and find their way into our police courts, gaols, reformatories, and institutions. It is probably precisely here?nts that lay bodies interested in mental welfare can perform so much useful ?rk for the individual and the community by finding, if and where possible,

Rental

j*?e> ease, |s

"

histological

functionally

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44 that

simple

environment

to

which alone the cerebral inefficient

can

usefully

react.

It appears, at least to the scientific student of mental deficiency, to be a hopeless task to seek a cure for an ill-developed brain, for it is beyond human brain cells where Nature has denied them. Once an idiot, to

power

put

always an idiot. Without a sufficiency of such cells it is a physical impossibility to expect those normal reactions to a normal environment which civilisation necessarily demands for its own protection and its own perpetuation. Prevention, rather than cure, is the problem. As mental deficiency appears to be a genetic manifestation of the inability of a human fertilized ovum of impaired stock to undergo that correct cellular division which can alone lead to a sufficiency of cerebral, somatic and reproductive cells to fulfil the ordinary functional requirements of brain, body and sex, some adequate conception of the underlying genetic and embryological causes responsible for these developmental errors seems to be essential before the problem of mental deficiency can be adequately combated. In the furtherance of such research work Mrs. R. G. Burden recently donated a sum of ^10,000, and on the advice of the writer a Representative

Committee of Administration and Direction was created to deal, in the national interests, with the problems confronting us. On this Committee the Central Association for Mental Welfare is represented by Miss Evelyn Fox. As regards the investigations so far visualised by the Committee and its Research Staff, the Principal Investigator, Mr. J. A. Fraser Roberts, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S.E., reports as follows: The establishment of the Burden Trust has enabled a comprehensive scheme of research to be inaugurated, with the special object of securing further information on the relationship of heredity to amentia. A considerable amount of work has been carried out in this field both in this country and abroad, and much information has already been secured. It is hoped that the work of the Burden Trust will extend that knowledge. The genetics of amentia is a most complex subject. No one would now contend that a simple single factor scheme could accommodate the findings, and while it is possible that inheritance is simple in certain cases, it is not possible to distinguish such cases from those in which inheritance is also simple but due to a different factor, nor from cases which are complex in inheritance, nor from those in which environment plays a part. For these and other reasons it is not likely that the mere accumulation of pedigrees can add much to what is already known. Pedigree collection is only likely to be of value in the future if it is concerned with very rare and special cases, is directed to the elucidation of a particular problem, or is based upon a general and complete ascertainment. A more general and biometrical approach is possible. How many affected persons have an affected parent, what is the proportion of affected brothers and sisters, how many defectives are the offspring of cousins? Such information can be very valuable, but it is not easy to collect. Institutional

MENTAL WELFARE cases are

necessary

sample, and in order to secure reliable figures it is survey complete population, or, more valuable still, a complete of a population?i.e., within certain narrow limits of age. It is

always to

cross-section

45

an

ascertainment

lt:>

it

a

biased a

on these lines that forms the first task of the Trust, and upon will be based the main work of the Trust. An attempt is being hoped, niade to measure the intelligence by means of standard tests of all the children particular age groups in given areas. This ascertainment will permit a amily study to be carried out on a truly random unbiased foundation, with proper control groups. It will also provide data that will be the basis for a of other and relevant investigations, e.g., the resemblance between brothers and sisters, and also cousins.

is

pumber

Some Lesser Known Views of Mental Deficiency.

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