The Brain, the Mind, and the Person Within

The Enduring Mystery of the Soul

Mark Cosgrove

• Publisher: Kregel Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780825474941
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

The brain, with its nearly one hundred billion neurons, is the most complex structure in the universe, and we are living in a period of revolutionary advancements in neuroscience. Yet scientists and skeptics often frame these findings in ways that challenge the Christian worldview. Many professionals and popularizers claim that human beings are their brains, and that all human behavior and experience are merely by-products of brain physiology.In The Brain, the Mind, and the Person Within, professor of psychology Mark Cosgrove not only explains what the brain is and what it does but also corrects common misinterpretations and demonstrates that what we know about the brain coheres with the teachings of Scripture. He contends that humans are unities of soul and body in which both the spiritual and the physical interact. From this perspective, he presents informative overviews of contemporary debates about the brain, including consciousness, free will, "God spots, " personhood, and life after death.The better we understand the brain, the better we understand ourselves and our exquisite design that reflects the wisdom of the Creator. Thoughtful readers will find this to be a fascinating, accessible survey of this unique part of the body and the profound theological and technological issues surrounding it.

CHAPTER 1

THE OLDEST BRAIN

As I sit at my desk I am looking at a picture from a science report on the oldest brain ever discovered. A team of scientists from the York Archaeological Trust discovered in 2008 a skull with a brain inside. The skull, which was found in an Iron Age site in the UK, has been dated to the sixth century BC. That makes it 2600 years old! Amazingly, the brain is still intact inside the skull! Its soft spongy parts did not decay because the person was decapitated and buried face down in the mud. The brain appears like yellow spongy material. I find myself asking, who was in that skull. Was he afraid as he was killed and buried immediately in that spot? And I wonder how old he was, and why he had to die. He was a person of worth and value as we all are. I am thinking a bit like Hamlet as he looks at Yorick’s skull and ponders about a familiar life that once was in that court jester’s skull and now is not. What is it about human beings with mere three-pound brains who must engage in such heavy thoughts?

A TITLE CAN SAY A LOT

The Three-Pound Universe

—HOOPER & TERESI

THE HUMAN BRAIN: AN INTRODUCTION TO A MYSTERY

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, then we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

—Emerson M. Pugh

Atlas, the mythological Titan, is often seen in pictures, bending under the weight of the earth as he holds up the globe on his muscular shoulders. Zeus condemned Atlas to hold up the heavens for daring to make war against the Olympian gods. Lifting the whole planet is a load that none but an Atlas or a Hercules could possibly bear. However, we mere humans, small or large, weak or strong, with just our three-pound brains, manage to hold up the entire universe in our minds, on which to see and reflect. Our three-pound brain with its pinkish-gray surface of cells, as fragile as jelly, does not just move our legs, chew our food, and manage our reproduction. This mass of cells inside our skulls amazingly allows us to hold up and reflect on both the largest and the smallest parts of the universe and everything in between.

With our human brains of approximately 86 billion wet, neural cells, according to a recent count,¹ and one trillion smaller glial cells, you and I can almost see the ends of the universe, thirteen-and-a-half-billion-light years away through the lens of the space-traveling Hubble Telescope. Only a few thousand light years from earth, we can see in color the beautiful Hubble pictures of the Pillars of Creation in the act of giving birth to untold numbers of stars. That Hubble picture of those majestic pillars of stellar clouds was first shot in 1995 and then reimaged in 2015 with newer infrared cameras. The spectacular color image, looking like a hand with fingers pointing upward, makes us feel the presence of God since the starry heavens are spoken of in Psalm 19:1 as the “handiwork” of God.

With our same three-pound brains, and a change of camera and focus, we can also view the infinitely smaller stuff of our universe with the Hadron Super Collider on the French-Swiss border. The super collider name is accurate since this machine is a super atomic blaster. The LHC, as it is known, is the most complicated machine ever built. This human hammer of Thor operates three hundred feet underground and has a 17 mile, circular, atom-smashing tube crashing subatomic particles together at lightning speeds (99.99999 % the speed of light!) and with thunderous energy, exposing even smaller, subatomic particles yet undiscovered by human beings. We can hold up for inspection this enormous picture with just three pounds of our leaking and sparking brain matter using less energy than a refrigerator light bulb. With such a close-up view of the tiniest parts of the universe, we say we can witness creation. With this focus on a foundational particle, scientists named the newly discovered Higgs Boson in the Hadron particle accelerator the “God” particle. Such heavy thoughts from just three pounds of brain matter! Interestingly, one of the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider is called the ATLAS experiment, looking for what holds up the supersymmetry fabric of our universe. Our interests in such projects makes us wonder what universal drive is up there inside our brains that is of such importance beyond the urge to eat and breed.

The human brain is not much to behold when you are holding it in your hands, or viewing it with its dead-white color, floating in a jar of formaldehyde. But when that brain is in the skull of a human being, look out! Alive, the brain becomes what we call a person, capable of deep emotions, amazing scientific discoveries, tender poetry, cruel behaviors, and love of other human beings and even God. That brain, now a person, does not just build cathedrals and compose love poetry, but it is consciously aware of what life feels like, of falling in love, of seeing red, and hearing middle C played on a piano. That brain, no, a person, is capable of feeling meaning, awe, joy, hate, beauty, truth, heroism, honor, guilt, and humor, and that person fills her paintings and novels with the same rich emotions.

As I describe some basic features of the brain, let me suggest that nothing I say about personhood should take away from the wonder of the human brain, because that brain is the embodied person, who is you. I am describing nature, but I am also describing you. And, the pieces of brain I will describe are unified, and are not just machine brain part names to memorize for multiple choice exams. We should train ourselves to see the brain and its functions as much as a dance as a complicated biology. Then, with a poetic eye, we can begin to see meaning and beauty in brain and our embodied selves. Dancing in a biology lab might make some silly sense, I suspect.

The self-consciousness mystery in our skulls, which is us, is fused to the activities of those 86 billion neural cells in the brain, each of which makes five to ten thousand connections with other neural cells. The trillion even tinier glial cells, some called stellate or star cells, surround the neural cells and make contact with anything in range, allowing more interconnections between brain cells than there are stars in the entire universe, far more than Hubble could ever view! The mystery of our conscious, thinking, feeling minds deepens with every brain scan we perform to find out more about this three-pound enigma. The facts we gain with the activity scans like the familiar PET and fMRI scans make us feel like we are just standing in ankle-deep water in the ocean and seeing how much more there is to explore. Indeed, with every step into the research, the waters get deeper with more mysteries to unravel. There is so much to understand in this mystery of three pounds. We have learned to listen in on and initiate the activities of individual cells with our probing electrodes and micro pipettes. We study the rhythms of the brain with our EEG recordings as a person sleeps and thinks. We can lay down in an fMRI machine and watch where our brains are more active when we pray and when we laugh.

Step Back and See

In looking at a piece of art, one has to often step back from the framed picture in the museum in order to take in the whole of the picture and see what is being portrayed and felt on the canvas. Likewise, if you look at a map and want to see where you are, you might have to draw your gaze back a bit and look at a larger area on the map from where you think you are, and spot a few familiar landmarks or streets. The same seems true in our study of the brain and what has been called by most neuroscientists, “the most complex physical structure in the universe.” We often need to pull back from the tiny bits of scientific data and see how our data fit in with the whole of other data and theories, especially since we human beings are the data being examined. That has not been the approach of neuroscience, as repeatedly the field often ignores larger views of human beings, and other ways of knowing than its empirical studies. The best approach to knowing what a painting is about, or where you are in a city, is not to look at every little color dot, or to look at every street sign, but to view the larger picture within which the smaller pieces of information will fit and be understood. You have to do both, see the big picture and look at the details. Looking at the details is referred to as bottom-up thinking and research. And, seeing the bigger picture is seeing from a top-down, higher view.

Radical empiricism is a way of knowing practiced by some scientists in which it is said that I do not need anything but knowledge by sensory experience and the methods that flow from that. Empiricism is a hugely successful way of knowing, and I believe I can know through my senses. More radical empiricists, like B. F. Skinner, of behaviorism fame in the middle 1900s, argued in favor of sensory empiricism studying behavior not the mind. No subjective reports, please, just objective information. A radical empiricist says to us, do not tell me about your feelings; I will gather objective data and put together the whole picture of you, and tell you what to believe about yourself.

Opposed to such radical empiricism, will be the approach that says keep in view the concept of personhood that we experience in ourselves and in our interactions with others while we study the details of the brain empirically. Do not assume that such top-down thinking means that religion or angry popes will be telling the scientist what is true in the details of the science. Such top-down viewpoints may indeed speak too forcefully at times, but the brain sciences should be open to stepping back and seeing the larger world of human experience and thoughts as helpful guides to research directions and to the interpretations and applications of research findings.

In the interest of stepping back, in this book I will use examples of persons and their inner lives, and seek to explain personhood and not just explain it away. Such examples help us with the discovery of self and often help in the understanding of the neuroscience data we are unveiling. Many important discoveries about human nature are coming to us because of empirical studies in neuroscience research. Other facets of human nature can be revealed in the depths of poetry, art, music, and religion, and those forms of knowing are every bit as useful for understanding the complexities of human nature. Opening up ways of knowing in neuroscience seems like the wise thing to do because the subject matter, which is us, sits on the edge of matter and mind. We are hybrid creatures, embodied spiritual beings, and the one piece of creation in this natural world that is able to look up and reflect on this universe and our place in it. To call us freaks of nature ignores the personal examples of great genius and humanness that I will bring up in every chapter. This book is about neuroscience, and so I will be primarily discussing the brain and the research on it. However, I never want us to forget that there is more that is out there in the world of our common experience, which is related to our brain’s activities, and connected to the world of matter and ocean and star and beyond. We will back up in every chapter with a look at some fantastic individuals, who have minds and personalities so much beyond the explanations of brain function that fill our textbooks.

It would be less than humble for me to be too specific about how I think the brain and/or mind of the person is unified and functions. Almost every neuroscientist seems to agree that the human brain is the most complicated thing we will ever find in the universe, and if we add a spiritual dimension to such brains, then our personhood is even more complex. I will discuss some theories of mind and brain in this book, and no apologies are needed to say that our theories may not be at all adequate to describe ourselves as persons. What I do want is to never lose sight of ourselves as persons, spirit and matter tightly knit together, whatever that means, and to move our scientific research in that direction.

The Pooh Bear Problem

As successful and skillful as we have been with our examination of the human brain, there is an obvious difficulty in studying the human brain and the mental life of the person. We are trying to understand ourselves using just ourselves and our own minds. I saw a Winnie-the-Pooh Bear cartoon once that showed Pooh Bear scratching his head as he looked at a toy pooh bear stuffed animal in his hand. The caption read “Will Pooh Bear ever be able to understand pooh bear?” In other words, how can Pooh Bear ever understand himself using just his pooh bear brain? The Pooh Bear caption was asking the same question as a famous 16^th century woodcut from the first edition of De humani corporis fabrica (on the workings of the human body) by Andreas Vesalius, which shows a human skeleton studying a human skull on a table. This book was first out in June of 1543, just days after Nicholas Copernicus had published his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. The skeleton in the woodcut is leaning on its bony elbow as it stands at a table, peering closely at the skull. That woodcut and Pooh Bear make us ask ourselves how can we humans ever hope to understand our own brains, our purpose, and meaning in this immense universe, using only our own brains with which to investigate such things?

The answer often given is that we, like Pooh Bear, will never be able to understand anything beyond our material brains and our immediate environment. We are told not to worry about this limitation because that is all there is to you, a material brain of complicated mechanics. Reductionism, the philosophy of reducing all things to mere matter, says to stick to objective observations and do not make pronouncements beyond the brain sitting on the table in front of you. What is interesting, though, is that we, biological humans beings, do understand so much about ourselves and the universe in which we find ourselves, and more is opening up to us all the time. We appear to be so much more than the mere matter of our brains, and our discoveries with Hubble and LHC and our understanding of much in this vast universe are evidences of that. The fact that we have motives for searching out the meaning of the universe and its underlying physical framework seems to argue for more to us than mere brain cells. Why else do we long for more than bananas and grass in a universe that is supposedly mere matter?

We do understand so much of the brain, with our little Pooh-like, three-pound brains. We understand much of life, and of meaning, perhaps because the brain we examine in our heads is no mere brain, as we will see later. Those who believe in God say human beings are a union of brain matter and spirit from God. Call us a biological accident and a freak if you want to, but you are pushing a boulder up a steep hill. As good as a goldfish’s color vision is, we do not expect it to understand what is on a color television set 12 inches from his bowl on Super Bowl Sunday. That is because seeing is more than generator potentials in rods and cones. What can the goldfish make of a football bowl game played a thousand miles distant from its little bowl of water? The game’s image is carried on invisible waves, showing men who have hopes, dreams, wives, and families. If goldfish could think, and had their own schools of learning, what theories could they possibly develop as explanations for what they saw outside of their water worlds? Would they even want to? We, on the other hand, do not have that same, forever-inaccurate view of reality. The truth is, we understand so much more of what is out there calling to our deeper desires to know.

Finding an answer to the Pooh Bear problem is greatly improved when one considers that in the Christian worldview it is believed that God communicates truth about humanity to human beings in the Bible. The revealed word of God in the Bible describes a view of the human person that fits the biblical record of matter and spirit fused together to create a unified, living being, a person. We believe that we survive the death of our brains, are resurrected with new bodies and brains, and have eternal value and purpose in God’s eternity. We lean on the authority of inspired Scripture, and trust the writings of such great minds as the apostle Paul, the church leaders Augustine and Aquinas, and so many more. It has been obvious for such a long time in our own experiences that something more is going on in our three pounds of brain, and it does not have to necessarily be a body-soul dualism as pictured by Arthur Koestler’s oft quoted book title, The Ghost in the Machine. A long line of poets and philosophers, priests and pastors, novelists, and scientists continue to voice this view of personhood down to this day. And never has a time needed such a personal viewpoint more, when so much depends on thinking clearly about science and the nature of human persons.

Oliver Sacks—A Person of Interest

We should step back and ponder the brain of Dr. Oliver Sacks, who died in August of 2015 at 82 years of age. He invested his professional time as a neurologist, seeing the personal in his patients, and that viewpoint allowed him to see more than just damaged brains. In his books, he viewed personhood for all of us. Dr. Sacks had a keen scientific mind, but he behaved more like a great, soft teddy bear around persons suffering from neurological problems. He became a gifted communicat...