God Soul Mind Brain

Chapter 1

    The intention behind the event

    Questions of the spirit world are usually considered to be scientifically unapproachable. We humans are somehow, for reasons unknown, aware of ourselves and of the world around us. We perceive soul and consciousness and awareness in each other. Ghosts, spirits, protecting angels, gods—most people claim to have sensed at one time or another the presence or warmth or intent of these disembodied minds. Science is now widely accepted to be a useful tool for studying the physical domain, but the spiritual domain is almost universally assumed to be outside the limits of physicality, of science, of any mechanistic understanding.

    Of all branches of science, neuroscience is the only one that has seriously challenged the dualistic view that the universe is divisible into matter and spirit. For at least a century neuroscientists have suspected that the machinery of the brain is somehow physically responsible for consciousness—for the soul itself. To understand how the brain results in the mind would rank among the great achievements of science. Darwin’s theory of natural selection answered the question of how we got here. Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity described the structure of space and time. Would it be possible to uncover the biological basis of the spirit world?

    It is my belief that neuroscience has already effectively answered this question, and has done so mainly in the last twenty years with the advent of what is called social neuroscience. Not all neuroscientists are entirely aware of the tiger whose tail they have grabbed. There are still many conflicting views of the brain basis of consciousness and, as of yet, little work on the brain basis of spiritual beliefs. Yet in synthesizing the literature, one can see a relatively simple theory that has already emerged from the work of many people. Special-purpose machinery in the human brain, that evolved over millions of years to make us socially intelligent animals, results in our perception of other people’s minds, in our perception of our own consciousness, and in the perceptual illusion that disembodied minds fill up the spaces around us. The general structure of the theory is in place, it is conceptually sound, it seems increasingly likely to be correct, but the neuroscientific details are far from known. The purpose of my book is to describe to the public my own understanding of this remarkable, burgeoning scientific advance—nothing less than the mechanistic understanding of the spirit world.

    Before I go any further I need to address a particular point. I know that in writing this book I will be accused by some people of trying to kill the spiritual world. People who are suspicious of science or openly hostile to it commonly argue that it kills mystery and reduces beauty to gears and numbers. But science does exactly the opposite. Good science doesn’t “explain away” in the sense of dismissing. To come to some deeper understanding of the natural world is a type of homage and makes the universe immeasurably more interesting, compelling, and yes, even quite beautiful to contemplate. My goal here is not to denigrate the human experience of gods and spirits. Quite the opposite. Most science, unable to make head or tail of human spirituality, has ignored or dismissed it. I propose to pay it the ultimate respect of a scientist: taking this crucial piece of human nature seriously and examining it scientifically.

    A second point that I would like to make at the outset concerns the audience for this book. The book is not a scientific report. It is not meant to propose a theory in full technical detail to my colleagues. It is written for the most general, nonscientific audience. The examples that I give throughout are not the contrived or complicated examples of experimental protocol. They are anecdotes from everyday life. In the first half of the book I lay out fundamental principles of perception, illusion, awareness, and consciousness. The second half of the book focuses more on the underlying brain science, and the writing necessarily becomes more technical and detailed but hopefully still clear to a nonscientific audience.

    If you are a neuroscientist or psychologist who wants to get right to the heart of the story, I urge you to read Chapter 4 (Explaining consciousness) and Chapter 7 (The machinery for the perception of mind). Together they present the essential concepts. If you