Operation Head Trip

By Michelle Mairesse

Professor Joseph Weizenbaum is a modest man. He programmed a computer to analyze language and to “respond” in English. He named his program ELIZA after the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. In his book Computer Power and Human Reason, he describes his scripting of ELIZA to imitate a Rogerian psychotherapist, whose principal technique consists in reiterating the patient’s own statements. Professor Weizenbaum was shocked by the responses of those who had sessions with ELIZA: they believed it to have powers of emotion and reflection. He was also shocked by the psychotherapists who concluded that a computer program could be an adequate form of therapy. Even though Professor Weizenbaum's program appeared to decrease intelligence in humans, he continued to believe that humans are more than machines.

Taking Professor Weizenbaum’s thesis several steps further, I created a complex artificial intelligence system I call Henry Higgins which is guaranteed to elicit unusually intelligent responses from all humans. The test run of the system resulted in a conversation about heads. I herewith present the triumphant result.

Henry Higgins: First, imagine yourself walking through one of those echoing Vatican halls filled with Roman statuary. Now zoom in. Go ahead. Your experience of cinema makes it possible for you to think and see like a camera; you’ve added a machine function to your repertoire. You are looking down a long marble aisle dividing two rows of pedestals, each pedestal surmounted by a marble bust of an eminent Roman.

Human: Um hmm

Henry Higgins: Can you explain our fascination with heads?

Human: Yes.

Henry Higgins: Explain your fascination with heads.

Human: A fingerprint is more distinctive than a visage, but we’d rather have a snapshot of a lover than a fingerprint. Our heads are turned by heads, and not merely because we think we think with them. The ancient cultures that we know most about did their thinking with their hearts and their feeling with their bowels, but Plato said in the Timaeus that the human head is the image of the world. Among the stone-age people who have persisted into our century, there is a nearly universal belief in the head as the vehicle of the soul, life-spirit, or vital force.

Henry Higgins: What about those big heads on Easter Island?

Human: What an extraordinary conception, when you think about it, to represent humans by discrete heads. We are as comfortable with these amputations as would be a Pacific Island headhunter, perhaps more so, since the Islanders, succumbing to foreign ways, no longer display their neighbors’ craniums on their walls but now decorate with stolen outboard motors. Today, the increasingly rare mummified heads are collected in more civilized circles.

Henry Higgins: Tell me more.

Human: The Mandruca Indians of the Amazon smoke-dry their captured heads and use them as civilized collectors do: as interior decoration and status symbols. Admittedly, the Mandrucas are not widely admired, but the Jivaro Indians, who have agriculture and livestock, ought, we feel, to have evolved less gruesome war trophies than shriveled heads shrunken to the size of an orange. The Jivaros, though, do not exhibit their trophies in a spirit of vainglory. They believe that the heads hung on their walls provide their houses with stores of strength and intelligence.

In Melanesia, the pickled, shaped heads were worn as masks so that the celebrant could obtain the virtues of the foe. In India, the skull was laid on a stone and buried after the stone had soaked up its powers. In Assam, Borneo, and West Africa, tribes were at pains to obtain slaves for the dead. Severed heads provided a steady supply of ghostly slave labor.

Henry Higgins: Tell me more.

Human: European warriors in the Balkans took heads well into the twentieth century. Montenegran raiders were especially careful to keep the potent hair intact. Hair, as the story of Samson reminds us, has long been considered the locus of the instinctive, animal life and strength. Statues of Egyptian queens come complete with beards.

Henry Higgins: Is there more?

Human: Though priests and nuns of many world religions shave their heads as an act of sensual renunciation, the Sumerians used beards, hair, and wigs to ward off evil spirits, and many clergy of contemporary religions cultivate forelocks, hairlocks, and beards. North American Indians contented themselves with taking scalps, probably believing that the strength and soul resided in the hair, a fairly widespread notion in Oceania and South America.

Henry Higgins: One final, unanswerable question. What song does a heads quartet sing?

Human: