God Soul Mind Brain

sense, “She is angry, he is happy, that one hates me, that one has a crush on me, this other one doesn’t even know I exist,” as though these mental states were pulsing inside of the people around you. Sometimes this type of perception is called a “sixth sense” as if we have a special radar, a hidden sensory organ that picks up the mental energy emanating from other minds. We don’t actually have any such sensory organ. Indeed we don’t directly experience other people’s mind states. Our social experience is as much a simulation as our experience of the physical world. We live immersed in self-created models of minds crowding around us.

    The central contention of this book is that these mind-models, simplifications constructed by the perceptual machinery in the brain, assigned to this and that location in the space around us as if they were holographic projections, are spirit. Ectoplasm is the product of perception, so to speak. The contents of these mental simulations provide us with the intuitive human understanding of soul.

Chapter 3

    Social Illusions

    In Diagram 3-1, the upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they are objectively the same length. This effect is the well-known Muller-Lyer illusion. The illusion looks so utterly real that you need to measure it with a ruler, or cover up this or that part of the image, to convince yourself that it isn’t true.

    Which horizontal line is longer? They are the same length. This is the well-known Muller-Lyer illusion.

    Diagram 3-1

    There are of course many different examples of visual illusions involving shape, color, size, movement, and other aspects of visual perception. The Muller-Lyer illusion is only one especially simple example. The fundamental lesson to be learned from a visual illusion is this: the brain actively constructs a model of reality. That model is not always precisely metrically accurate. Correct or not, however, that model defines your experience of the world.

    Your machinery for social perception can also construct illusory or incorrect models of other minds. These illusory models are so compelling that it is hard to disbelieve them. They appear just as real as a visual illusion. Social illusions have not been studied systematically; in fact they have been relatively ignored. But they are just as fascinating as visual illusions, sometimes much more surreal, and they are informative about social perception. The purpose of the present chapter is to provide a diversity of examples, taken from everyday life, showing just how much our culture is immersed in social illusion. We live in a medium of social illusion. We swim in perceived consciousness.

The unitary soul

    The idea that the human soul is unitary is culturally ubiquitous and also very old. For example, Descartes suggested it in the 1600s and was thereby led to one of the most famous mistakes in neuroscience. In examining human brains on autopsy, Descartes found that nearly every structure in the brain was paired—one on the right side and one on the left. Since there was only one soul, these doubled brain structures couldn’t possibly contain it. He could find only one structure that was unitary, the pineal body, a small brain region about the size and shape of a pea deep inside the brain and near the center. He concluded that the pineal body must be the physical casing in which the soul resides. It turns out that the pineal body is a gland that secretes the hormone melatonin, and, as far as anyone knows, has nothing to do with the soul.

    The belief in a unitary soul is just as culturally prevalent now as it was four hundred years ago. I am reminded of a scene in a Harry Potter movie. Dementors (evil creatures) are sucking the soul out of Mr. Black’s mouth as he lies helpless on the ground. His soul is depicted as a blob of light about the size of a marble rising slowly up out of his open lips. (A phosphorescent version of Descartes’ pineal body?) I think that depiction is at least metaphorically close to how we perceive intentionality in others—a kind of unified point source of mental energy.

    Why do we have such a pronounced tendency to perceive a single, unified agent in people? The brain, after all, functions more as a miscellaneous compilation of routines and subroutines, reflexes and habits, decisions and prejudices, some closely related to each other, some distantly related, some in conflict with each other, all operating at the same