The soul is a real sacred cow. People hear about the soul or the spirit, and they don’t even flinch. Why? Do these same people not stutter when they are talking about using their brains? There is a serious disconnect here.
First let us define some terms. By soul most people mean some ephemeral, transcendental presence of being. Something that could survive death – something indestructible and supernatural.
The brain, in contrast, is an organ. Pure and simple like any other organ, it is made of cells; these cells have membranes by which all interactions take place using chemical messaging.
The brain has a job, which is to interface all of the information of the body to maintain the necessary equilibrium for life, called by scientist Claude Bernard Shaw, “the internal milieu.”
Thinking happens in the brain. One way we have learned this intimately is that when brains are damaged in certain places thinking is impaired in a predictable way. This is how we did much of the original mapping of the brain in neurology.
Now we have this marvelous machine called an FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imager), which can show what brain regions are engaged in oxygenization and presumable activity as a subject completes a task.
You literally lay down in the middle of a great big round magnet while it reads your mind. Now don’t get me wrong, FMRI cannot project an image from your imagination onto a screen, but it can tell us what parts of your brain are more active than others, and because of what we are learning about the functional purposes of different brain regions we can deduce a great deal about what’s going on in your mind.
So let me recap. The way your mind works is affected by the physical condition of your brain, and when your mind is doing stuff, specific brain regions get activated by what your mind is doing.
So why does anyone believe in the soul?
It’s not because they’re really thinking about the implications of brain science.
Let me tell you my favorite case study. It is a universal part of any education in behavioral and brain sciences because it is when we began to understand to what depth our personality is linked to our brain.
It was on September 13, 1848, that railroad foreman Phineas Gauge had a terrible accident. Phineas, by all accounts, was an exceptionally good man: a leader in his community, and a reliable man to all who he encountered. Then a railroad spike was blasted in through his skull and out the other end, in effect destroying a region known as the prefrontal cortex. If you can imagine the area right behind your eyes, that’s about it. In the movie Hannibal, during the famous scene in which Hannibal Lecter feeds Ray Liota his own brain, he calls the prefrontal cortex, “the seat of good manners.”
Well, it turns out we know this because of Phineas Gauge. When his prefrontal cortex was destroyed, so was his likable personality. Phineas Gauge became a violent and belligerent man, and a pain to be around. This phenomena is universal in all people who suffer prefrontal cortex damage. It really is, “the seat of good manners.”
That’s just one case of many that I can present. Toss that at the next creationist you meet. Maybe they will leave evolutionary biology alone, and come after neuroscience.
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If you like this, then look up “Morbus Pick”. Probably, that’s what You mean.
awesome post man. made me think about that too. i have, in all honesty, not given my brain the credit it deserves.
Ancient superstitions die hard. Especially when people get indoctrinated from an early age, and those concepts and irrational ways of thinking get reinforced day in and day out.
All the soul I need I get from Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Booker T. and the MGs, and Sam and Dave.
Well said on the soul musicians.
Indeed, that is the only truly immortal soul.
although i liked the article and tend to agree with the lack of credit the brain is given, i do however think the soul should be elaborated on. its not just some wishy washy term that a lot of people use. sure it has no tangible form or measurable capacity but it is often given emotional value. giving something a little spirit or soul often refers to will power and your direct focus that comes from your state. sure this state is attributed to the brains chemicals and exactly how the brain is functioning but many people attribute their soul to the function of their brain. so in essence, your brain and what people may call soul are one in the same.
If the brain and soul are one and the same, let us just call it the brain and be done with it.
Interesting discussion, but I think the origin of ’soul’ talk really comes down to the very old problem of dualism. The word can quite easily be explained as a primitive understanding of mind/consciousness. Why talk about the soul in ’supernatural’ terms… well if you want to avoid the death thing, then you create a ’supernatural essence’ that leaves the body and is the seat of consciousness.
The soul idea created quite a lot of problems in theology when thinking people would then try and describe how something insubstantial could have an effect on the body and more specifically the meat in our skull we call brain tissue.
But even if you get rid of the supernatural: I’m-going-to-outlast-my-body-and-go-to-heaven, you still have a small problem of what is the mind? Many people these days like to compare the human brain to hardware and the mind to software…but there are problems with such a simplistic analogy… one objection being the ‘Chinese room’ argument. I’m not an expert on brain though.
I think the problem Rodrigo has with people calling the end result of neurological functioning the soul, is that the term has notions of religion just dripping from it. Maleszyk, why don’t you refer to your definition of the soul as “state” or maybe “transcendence.” Austin Dacey refers to something he calls “horizontal transcendence” and not “vertical transcendence.” By using this distinction you can maintain a sense of the “spiritual” on matters that don’t appeal to hooks in the sky (god), but instead a very humanistic (thus horizontal…across all humans and not up) outlook.
absolutely, people don’t really think like that though, and its naive that people associate this state or “transcendence” known as spiritual or soul with religious dogma. i personally love saying ive got soul or im a spiritual person, but i don’t like it having religious connotations. i just like messing with minds.
p.s. edger rocks
p.p.s all kneel to the hammer of THOR!
If I got a metal spike through my brain it would ruin my pleasant demeanor too.
Rodrigo,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m only playing Angel’s Advocate, here’s an objection I’ve heard from a Scientologist Auditor, and that was that they claimed the brain was a “switchboard” that tied together all parts of the “meat body” and the soul (or thetan in Scientologist nomenclature) interacts only with the nervous system.
So given this, it is expected that there will be problems with cognition if there is physical brain damage, because the thetan can’t interact with the damaged portion of the brain.
Also I heard from a Christian lady with whom I was speaking about Alzheimer’s patients, she told me that the disease went away when the person went to heaven, kind of like a backup from an earlier stage. So implicit in this sort of belief in a soul, there is a certain medium through which the soul acts, and the damage to the medium (the brain) would cause damage to the overall functionality.
This sort of dualism is completely untenable and in my opinion complete crap, but I’d just thought it’d be important because these are the kinds of things you will likely hear when attempting to disillusion people about the existence of a soul.
Thats what I thought when I was a believer.
Its hard to argue against, except that it is like creationism in that it relies on gaps in our understanding to promote the desired reality.
I always tell people who say this kind of stuff that I hope they are right.
Micheal Shermer said it best when asked about the afterlife, “I’m all for it!”
My response is usually to keep piling on the evidence, just like you do with creationists.
Yes, I feel that. I usually point out how such an entity (soul/thetan/spirit) doesn’t actually explain anything, whereas an organ with predictable, measurable properties does. If that doesn’t phase ‘em I’ll pull a Shermer.
I am a believer in science, though i might not totally understand the mechanics behind a human brain, I can reason that it is the cause of emotion, thought and reasoning, among other things. However don’t you think that your definition of the soul is a bit too narrow? I’m not going to attempt to play semantics, but I for one think that the soul is larger then just simple nerves and action potential. I can understand emotion as being a reaction in ones brain, but don’t you find that a bit too simplistic? Art, society, passion (for science and philosophy!), dare i even say it…love (i know hahaha) is simply just a reaction in me head? I accept your understanding of our brains, but i somehow feel you’ve narrowed the idea of the soul down to just a simple religious definition. I know I have a soul, but its not the same one you’re talking about. Music, art, and video games move me. When i write, understand or reason, I’m not going to justify it simply justify that by chemicals in my brain. I can’t simply live enjoying a delicious meal and simply explain my enjoyment as a reaction in my brain. It’s beyond that. I think you might just have to re-evaluate what it means to have a “soul”.
The last thing i want to do is sound all lovey-dovey or hippy-like. but i hope you get my drift.
“Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.”
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
The data suggest that the brain, more than a thinking machine is an emotion machine. When you lose parts of the structures that we know underlie the emotions, we call these the limibic system, you suffer cognitive deficits as well.
The powerful experience that is had in the presence of a masterpiece is still a neurological phenomena.
The experience of loving another human being is a relatively well known neurological phenomena, which is the limbic systems release of oxytocin, dopamine, and testosterone (if you are talking about romantic love). Oxytocin seems to produce the compassionate aspects of love, dopamine makes it feel good to you to love the other person, and testosterone makes both males and females sexually aroused.
The system has its complexities, like if you gave someone a tall glass of dopamine, oxytocin, and testosterone, it would not have all the subtleties of love, it would more be like taking very refined
MDMA (ecstacy). But thats because of the all the metabolic hoops it would have to jump to get to your brain.
If I could bathe your limbic system in an excess of these three chemicals, it would be a very real love potion.
Your question about art however is a good one, and I will do more reading on the specific neurology of art and eventually write a blog about it.
I know that Dr. Antonio Demasio is working on that precise question at USC.
It’s wonderful how the brain works with all its intricacies, but I wouldn’t describe to a loved one that my love is strong because my oxytocin, dopamine, and testosterone releases are going crazy for them….it seems kind of…i don’t know? hollow?
Why? In theory, it may be possible to recreate the feeling artificially (arguably, it already is possible–at least judging by the number of “I love you, man” statements I’ve gotten from friends on some form of ecstasy), but that doesn’t take away from the feelings when a healthy brain is working normally. It also goes a long way towards explaining why some parents abuse their children or spouses their partners–their brain chemistry is out of whack (I’ve never been able to get my head around how someone could do either, but I can’t deny it happens).
This is why humanism is so beautiful. Whenever science shits all over something we hold sacred, humanism is there there to help us think of its amazing beauty all over again.
All these physiological phenomena are causing all of our being. This is just another reminder of our existential situation.
Our whole existence is a matter of chance and should be embraced to the fullest, and our life should be filled with a proactive embrace of life and appreciation for the lives of others.