Self-discovery

Of course, that's not the important thing. What is important is the fact that such information exists. Because “knowledge in sensation” gave birth to a clear, thought — out idea in him to control his own metabolism.

It happened the first time on the evening of January 28 in the forms. It turned out just like Pavlov's dogs — artificial salivation. But he wasn't thinking about food (he had had a dinner of kefir and sausage), but about the nerve regulation of the salivary glands. As usual he tried to visualize the entire path of the nerve impulses from the taste receptors in the tongue through the brain to the salivary glands and suddenly felt his mouth fill up with saliva!

Still only fully aware of how it had happened, he concentrated on a frightened protest — “No!” — and his mouth went dry instantly!

That evening he repeated the mental orders “Saliva!” and “no!” until his mouth convulsed.

He spent the rest of the week in his room — luckily it was a school vacation, and he didn't have to be distracted by lectures and labs. Other organs listened to his mental orders. At first he could only command them crudely. Streams of tears poured from his eyes; sweat appeared in profusion all over his skin or immediately dried up; his heart either quieted down to a near comatose rate or else beat wildly at a hundred forty beats a minute — there was no middle ground, And when he commanded his stomach to stop excreting hydrochloric acid he had such intense diarrhea that he barely had time to get to the bathroom. But gradually he learned to control external excretions gently and locally; once he even managed to spell out “IT'S WORKING!” on his back with beads of sweat, like a tattoo.

Then he moved his experiments to the lab and first of all repeated the effect of the sugar injection made famous by Claude Bernard. But now he didn't have to open the skull and inject the midbrain. The amount of sugar in his blood increased as a result of a mental command.

But in general it was much more complex dealing with internal secretion. The results were not so apparent or so fast. He made puncture marks all over his fingers and muscles checking whether the glands were obeying his commands to secrete adrenaline, insulin, glucose, or hormones. He irritated his gullet with probes trying to determine the reaction to his commands on changing acidity. Everything was working — and everything was very difficult.

Then he caught on. He should give his organism a specific goal, to do this and that, produce certain changes. And really when he walked, he didn't command the muscles: “Right rectus — contract… biceps — now… left gastrocnemius….” He didn't have time for that. The conscious mind sets a specific goal: go faster or slower, go around the post, turn into the driveway. And the nerve centers of the brain take care of the muscles. And that's how it should be with this. It wasn't his business which glands and vessels would produce individual reactions, as long as they did what he wanted!

Words and images got in the way. He was overexplaining. He told the liver how to synthesive glycogen from amino acids and fats, break down the glycogen into glucose, and excrete it into the blood; he told the thyroid to contract and squeeze out drops of thyroxin into the blood; he told the circulatory system to expand the capillaries in the large chest muscles and to contract the other vessels — and nothing happened, his pectorals didn't grow bigger. After all, the liver didn't know it was the liver, and the thyroid didn't have the slightest idea what thyroxin was and couldn't picture a drop of it. Krivoshein cursed himself for excessive attention at his lectures and in the library. The result of all this exertion was only a headache.

The problem was that in order to control metabolism within himself, he had to avoid numbers, terms, and even images, and think only in sensations. The problem came down to changing “knowledge in sensation” into a tertiary signal system of controlling internal secretions with the aid of sensations.

The funniest part was that he didn't need lab apparatus or control circuits. All he had to do was lie in a darkened room, eyes closed and ears plugged, and listen to himself in a half — dreaming state. Strange sensations came from within: the spleen, changing the blood, itched, and intestines tickled when they contracted; the salivary glands felt cold under his chin; the adrenals reacted to nerve signals with a delicious shudder, and the part of the blood enriched with adrenalin and glucose spread warmth through the body like a sip of wine. The sick cells in the muscles made themselves known with a gentle prickling.

Using engineering terminology, he was checking out his body with nerves the way an assembler checks out a circuit with a tester.