Authored by Craig Hamilton

Like a lot of people interested in matters of the
spirit, I’ve always had a somewhat conflicted relationship to
science. On the one hand, for anyone interested in humanity’s
further evolution, it’s hard not to be excited by the latest
findings of a discipline that, in a single century, has managed
to cure polio, crack the genetic code, send a probe to Saturn’s
largest moon, and invent the internet. But on the other, there
is something about science’s tendency to reduce even life’s
greatest mysteries to the movements of matter alone that has
always left me a little chilled.

It probably goes back to my childhood. Raised by
theologically ambivalent parents who were as committed to their
agnosticism as many are to their faith, I was taught early on
that science, reason, and rationality are a far better guide to
truth than inspiration, doctrine, or dogma. But as years passe
d,
and my inbred agnosticism gradually gave way to a committed
spiritual quest, I soon began to have experiences of a deeper
reality, far beyond anything described in my science textbooks.
In the face of this unfolding world of meaning, purpose, and
mystery, the notion that science held the keys to ultimate truth
began to seem increasingly hard to accept.

I think the tension between these two sides of myself
hit its peak during my senior year in college. Having majored in
psychology because I thought it would help me understand human
nature, I’d spent my first three years judiciously avoiding the
“harder” scientific side of the field, focusing
instead on the “softer,” therapeutic, social, and
humanistic dimensions. So when I finally signed up for the
dreaded, mandatory “Statistical and Experimental
Methods” course, the last thing I expected was to be
interested. But as we sank our teeth into data analysis and
experimental design, once-foreign concepts like
“statistical significance” and “double-blind
control” began to take on an aura of magic for me. Even in
our mock experiments, the fact that I could scientifically,
experimentally, statistically prove that one hypothesis
was right and another wrong acted on my nervous system almost
like a drug. By the end of the term, to the disbelief of my
friends, I was even considering applying to graduate school in
experimental psychology. But as I began to look a bit more
closely at what would be involved, I soon came face to face with
an almost dogmatic materialism that seemed to grip the entire
field. In the end, my interest in higher matters got the better
of me, and it was my minor in religious studies and my growing
passion for the spiritual quest that ultimately set the course
for my life and career.

Although the call of the spirit saved me from a life in the
laboratory, however, my sympathies for science haven’t gone
away. One result of this split personality is that whenever I’m
confronted with the battle between science and religion, I
always find it hard to take sides and end up in a sort of
internal battle of my own. Whether it’s the ethical debate
surrounding biotechnology or the argument over the anthropic
principle* in cosmology, it’s as if I have a red-horned skeptic
on one shoulder and a white-winged believer on the other, and
it’s hard to know who to listen to.

Admittedly, the further I look back in history, the less
ambiguous it gets. When I think of Giordano Bruno having an iron
rod driven through his tongue and being burned at the stake for
proclaiming that the universe is populated with other suns just
like ours, I don’t have much difficulty condemning the Church’s
narrow-mindedness, to say nothing of its tactics. And there is
certainly no doubt in my mind over what the outcome of Galileo’s
trial should have been. But follow the timeline a little closer
to the present, and, for me at least, the picture quickly starts
to muddy. Take the evolution vs. creation debate. There are few
public expressions of ignorance more annoying than the
insistence by fundamentalist Christians that biblical
creationism be taught as an “alternative theory of
origin” in our public schools. Yet when I see evolutionary
biologists using the unproven dogmas of neo-Darwinian theory to
convince our kids that they live in a purposeless universe, my
sympathies toward science start to fade once again.

Of course, if the science and religion battle were to stop
with the debate over biological evolution, I would, in the end,
have to come down on the side of science, even if I were to
quibble over the interpretation of some of the data. But if
current trends are any indication, the battle is not stopping
there. Nor does it seem to be calming down. In fact, in recent
years, thanks to the ambitions of two influential new scientific
disciplines, the attack from the science side seems
to have
taken a somewhat more insistent turn. And this time, the
target
is nothing less than our humanity itself.

The first of these emerging disciplines is evolutionary
psychology. Originally dubbed “sociobiology” by
biologist Edward O. Wilson, this relatively new field of study
is responsible for the frequent headlines in Sunday science
sections announcing the evolutionary origins of such complex
human tendencies as monogamy, moral outrage, and our love of
golf. Think Darwin as humanity’s psychoanalyst, tracing the
psychological quirks of the species to the adaptive challenges
we faced in our childhood on the ancient savannah. Armed with
this powerful new explanatory tool, a growing throng of
theorists are racing to force every aspect of higher human
behavior—from altruism to spiritual seeking—through
the mechanistic grid of natural selection. As a result, many
dimensions of human experience that were once considered to be
beyond science’s explanatory reach are now coming under the
scrutiny of the microscope.

But as effective as evolutionary psychology has been at
stretching Darwin’s dangerous idea to its logical limit, it is
still largely a theoretical discipline, deriving its strength
more from the explanatory power of its model than from the
testability of its hypotheses. As such, it is, at best, still a
moderate weapon in the arsenal of those who aim to
scientifically explain the causes of human behavior and
experience. For the heavy artillery, however, they need not look
far. The thriving field of neuroscience promises to fill that
void and then some. Employing powerful new methods for studying
the intimate workings of the brain, the pioneers of this
increasingly self-assured discipline aspire to demonstrate once
and for all that the mind, emotions, and even consciousness
itself are entirely generated by the three-pound lump of gray
matter in our skulls. For a generation of researchers in this
field, the prime directive is to prove what Nobel laureate
Francis Crick, who turned to neuroscience after co-discovering
the DNA helix, called “the astonishing hypothesis”:
That “you, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in
fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
and their associated molecules. . . . You are nothing but a pack
of neurons.”

Now at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the notion that
the brain is somehow involved in mental life and
consciousness is one that even the most devout among us would be
hard-pr
essed to question. As consciousness researcher Marilyn
Schlitz put it on the PBS program Closer to Truth,
“All we have to do is take a sledgehammer and bang
somebody over the head to see a reduction in
consciousness.” But the question of just what
role the brain plays in mental and emotional life is another
matter. And it is here that we enter the thorny territory.

In a recent New York Times column entitled
“The Duel Between Body and Soul,” developmental
psychologist Paul Bloom describes a conversation he had with his
six-year-old son, Max, in which he asked him about the function
of the brain: “[Max] said that it is very important and
involved in a lot of thinking—but it is not the source of
dreaming or feeling sad or loving his brother. Max said that’s
what he does, though he admitted that his brain might
help him out.” Bloom, who clearly aligns himself with the
neuroscientific perspective, goes on to explain that
“studies from developmental psychology suggest that young
children do not see their brain as the source of conscious
experience and will. They see it instead as a tool we use for
certain mental operations. It is a cognitive prosthesis, added
to the soul to increase its computing power.” And, Bloom
laments, “This understanding might not be so different
from that of many adults.”

In my own case at least, Bloom has, I think, hit the nail on
the head. For all of my studies in psychology, I must confess
that my own idea about the relationship between the mind and the
brain has remained something like that portrayed by the
scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. Despite his melancholy
mantra, “If I only had a brain,” the straw-stuffed
overalls still had plenty of personality and emotion and at
least enough cognitive capacity to get through the day. Although
you probably wouldn’t ask him to sort out the dinner bill, there
was clearly somebody home. Indeed, when I was cast in the role
in an eighth-grade school play, I knew what I had to do. Just
act a bit dopey and absent-minded. Probably to the play’s
benefit, I didn’t consult with any neuroscientists about what it
might actually be like to not have a brain. And while my ideas
have no doubt matured somewhat over the years, if you were to
ask me to describe my current thinking on this issue, I don’t
think I could do better than Bloom’s description of the brain as
a “cognitive prosthesis” for the soul.

In light of Bloom’s analysis, it seems likely that I’m not
alone. Which means we have a bit of a problem on our hands.
Because, although in the case of children this belief could be
attributable to a lack of learning, where adults are concerned,
the issue seems to cut deeper. A lot deeper. Despite the
insistence of neuroscientists that our brains are the sole
source of our experience and behavior, there are very strong
reasons why most of us don’t want to believe that this is the
case. For starters, for most of us with religious or spiritual
inclinations, accepting such a premise would eradicate, in one
fell swoop, one of our most basic convictions—the belief
in an immaterial soul or (if we’re Buddhists) “mind
essence” that transcends the physical body. Even for those
who do not count themselves among the faithful, the notion that
we are entirely reducible to brain stuff still seems to take
away something essential—our humanity, our dignity, our
sense of meaning. In my own case, no matter how hard I try, I
find it exceedingly hard to accept that I am just my brain. And
it’s not just because I’ve had mystical experiences that point
to the existence of something beyond the material. There is
something about the experience of consciousness itself, some
kind of mystery inherent in the fact that we are conscious at
all, that seems irreducible to the mere firing of our neurons.
As convinced as the neuroscientists are of their case, I can’t
help feeling there must be more to the story.

And here, as they say, is the rub. Because if I take a step
back from my own convictions, there is something about this
picture that starts to look suspiciously familiar. After all,
isn’t this how religious people always feel when their ideas are
being challenged by science? Is there any difference between
what I’m experiencing and what the elders of the Church felt
when Galileo attempted to oust the Earth (and thus human beings)
from the center of God’s universe? Could it be that far removed
from how some Southern Baptists feel when the science teachers
try to convince their children that God didn’t create the world
in six days? In all of my postmodern sophistication, those
stories sound to me like an adolescent unwillingness to grow up.
But can I be sure that I’m not guilty of the same thing?

I would, of course, like to think that the current situation
is different—that, in attempting to penetrate the
mysteries of the human soul, science has finally flown a bit too
close to the sun. But given the trajectory of the science and
religion debate over the past few hundred years, it would be
hubris at
this point not to take the claims of neuroscience
seriously. As atheist apologist Keith Augustine put it in a
recent essay on infidels.org:

Historically in the “war between science and
religion” the “reconciliation” has alwa
ys
fallen on the side of science with theologians scrambling to
redefine their faith in order to make it compatible with new
scientific evidence. . . . That we never see the
reverse—scientists scrambling over the latest theological
speculation—illustrates the authoritative dominance of
science over religious belief in the modern world. Scientific
explanations of phenomena have been so successful that today
believers are trying to develop scientifically informed
theologies.

Indeed, given the legacy of abandoned dogmas that the
encounter with science has left in religion’s wake, it would be
more than a little na?ve for us to think that as scientists
begin to probe the mysteries of the brain, our sense of who we
are would come out unscathed. We are clearly in a challenging
predicament. And for all of my ambivalence on the science and
religion debate, I have to admit that this round makes the
others look easy—particularly for those of us with
spiritual inclinations who also feel compelled, as a matter of
integrity, to follow the truth wherever it leads. Are we willing
to question our spiritual convictions deeply enough to grapple
with what neuroscience has to say about the matter?

It was my own recognition of this predicament last spring
that convinced me that if I was to avoid ending up on the side
of ignorance, I would have to dive into the unknown waters of
brain science and find out for myself what the fuss is all
about. What does it actually mean to say that our brains are the
sole source of our experience? What evidence is there to prove
it? And assuming it was true, would that mean that all of our
spirituality is a ruse? Could the brain in fact be the soul?
Over the past year, my journey into this mind-bending world has
taken me from the cutting-edge conference on
“consciousness studies” to the offices of some of
the leading thinkers in the field to the laboratories of a few
pioneering scientists who, far from the mainstream, are working
to usher in a new, more holistic paradigm that is as true to the
spirit as it is to the data. In the course of this adventure, I
have moved in and out of confusion more times than I care to
count. And though I can’t say that as of this writing I have
entirely found my way to the other side, what I can say is that
I have learned a lot about th
e miraculous and as-yet mysterious
workings of a part of myself I had honestly never given much
thought—my own brain.

part one: toward a science of consciousness

Neural correlates of consciousness?

“Consciousness: that annoying time between naps,”
read the bumper sticker on a dusty SUV with California plates.
It was barely nine AM, and the Arizona sun was already scorching
as I made my way across the sprawling parking lots surrounding
the Tucson Conference Center. On the heels of an unusually cold
New England winter, I had come to the desert prepared for a
reprieve, but in my long sleeves, I was still overdressed. A
nondescript southwestern city, Tucson seemed an unlikely place
for the cutting-edge conference on consciousness
studies. But for those in the know, it is here that every other
year for the past decade the brightest minds in mind science
have gathered in pursuit of “a science of
consciousness.”

If ten years sounds like a short record for the defining
conference in a major scientific field, it only owes to the fact
that the notion that something as ineffable as consciousness can
be scientifically studied is itself a relatively new idea.
Having built its empire on the pursuit of the t
hird-person
“objective” perspective, science in general has long
considered consciousness or subjective experience to be, at
best, beyond the scope of its inquiry, and, at worst,
irrelevant. There was a period in the early days of psychology,
when William James and other introspectionists made a foray into
the subjective domain by beginning to observe and chronicle the
workings of their own minds. But this was quickly expelled from
the discipline by James B. Watson’s introduction of behaviorism
in the early 1900s, which promised to make psychology a
respectable science by limiting it to the study of observable
behavior. With the birth of cognitive psychology in the 1960s,
and the subsequent decline of behaviorism, gradually the word
“consciousness” began to trickle back into play. It
wasn’t until the early 1990s, however, that it would emerge as a
serious area of study in its own right, due in large part to the
increasing boldness of neuroscientists like Francis Crick. In an
influential 1990 paper cowritten with his research partner
Christof Koch, Crick, who had been determined from an early age
to disprove the existence of God and the soul, made a passionate
call for neuroscience to begin employing its growing scientific
arsenal to demonstrate the material basis of consciousness. The
paper was apparently a mark of the times, as, over the next few
years, the field of consciousness studies surged into being,
culminating in the inauguration of the first Tucson conference
in 1994.

If the scene surrounding the opening plenary at the 2004
conference was any indication, in the ten years since,
consciousness has become a hot topic. As I made my way into the
conference center’s largest ballroom, some eight hundred chairs
faced a large video screen and stage, and cameramen jockeyed for
position. Though the main section was already filled by the time
I arrived, I managed to find a lone seat up front just as the
conference organizer, MC, and resident bad-boy David Chalmers
took the stage. Sporting faded jeans, a half-tucked-in T-shirt,
black leather jacket, and scraggly long hair, the 39-year-old
Australian would have been more convincing as a heavy metal
singer than as one of the world’s most respected philosophers of
mind. But ever since the 1994 conference, when he famously
challenged the audience to face up to the “hard
problem” of consciousness, it’s been difficult to read
anything on the relationship between mind and brain without
encountering Chalmers’ name.

The “hard problem,” as Chalmers defines it,
“is the question of how physical processes in the brain
give rise to subjective experience.” This is as
distinguished from the “easy problems” of
consciousness, which involve understanding such things as the
neural mechanisms behind perception, how we pay attention, and
the differences between waking and sleep. The essence of
Chalmers’ challenge, which has seemingly been taken seriously by
nearly everyone in the field, is that making progress on the
“easy problems,” as worthy an endeavor as that might
be, does not necessarily bring us any closer to solving the hard
problem. And where a scientific understanding of consciousness
is concerned, the hard problem is the problem.

Those who studied a bit of philosophy in college may
recognize in Chalmers’ hard problem a restatement of the classic
“mind/body problem”—what Schopenhauer called
“the world knot”—that philosophers have been
arguing about over the past few centuries. Ever since
René Descartes gave birth to dualism by asserting the
separation of mind and body, the big issue in the philosophy of
mind has been figuring out how these two different
substances—the mental and the physical—could
interact with one another. On one hand, how could an objective,
physical brain give rise to subjective, mental events? And on
the other, how could those subjective, mental
events—presumably not governed by physical
laws—impact the objective, physical world?

The title of the opening session, and the theme for the
conference as a whole, was “Neural Correlates of
Consciousness,” or NCCs, as they would come to be called.
After a few welcoming words from
Chalmers, we moved straight to
our panel of three speakers, who would address what many
consider to be the leading edge of the neurobiological approach
to consciousness. The first speaker was, fittingly, Christof
Koch, whose work with Francis Crick on vision and consciousness
has made him one of the stars of the neuroscience world. With a
delivery style that seemed to suggest he’d failed to heed the
warnings about mixing high doses of caffeine with amphetamines,
Koch proceeded to cram what seemed to be an entire semester of
lecture notes into a thirty-minute session. I must confess to
not having understood a word of it, but after concentrating as
hard as I could on the next two panelists and listening to the
often contentious debate that followed, I was able to piece
together the rough outlines of the theory.

What Koch and other neurobiologists on the trail of NCCs are
attempting to uncover is just ho
w the brain behaves differently
on the neuronal level when we are consciously perceiving
something as opposed to when we are perceiving that same object
unconsciously. Now, for most of us, the notion that we even
could perceive something unconsciously probably sounds like an
oxymoron. To illustrate, Koch refers to a curious and rather
counterintuitive phenomenon known as “binocular
rivalry.”

A simple explanation would go something like this: Although
most of us tend to think of ourselves as somehow looking out at
the world through our eyes, the nature of vision is not at all
as we experience it. What is actually happening is that two
different inverted two-dimensional images are falling on the
back of your two retinas and being sent to some thirty different
visual centers in your brain for processing, the result of
which, mysteriously, is the unified three-dimensional picture of
the world you see. How that happens is an example of what is
known as “the binding problem” and is itself a
mystery that no one has yet solved convincingly. For the moment,
though, what’s important to understand is that each of your eyes
is seeing a different part of the picture, and your brain is
piecing it together into a unified whole.

Now what happens if we isolate your eyes from one an
other
and literally show each of them an entirely different picture?
Will you see two things at once? No. This is where binocular
rivalry comes in. As it turns out, your brain can only
consciously represent one complete picture at a time, so when it
is given two competing visual stimuli, it has to somehow choose
which one to represent. At times it fixes on one image and
ignores the other. Or, with the right sequence of images, it can
be made to flip back and forth between the two. The key here in
terms of consciousness is that regardless of which image is in
consciousness at any given moment, the input into the visual
centers in the brain is identical. The reason this is so
exciting for Koch and his comrades is that, through the use of
brain imaging techniques, it allows them to compare snapshots of
the brain when a given perception is conscious and when it is
not conscious. This, they hope, will ultimately give them some
clues to understanding how neuronal activity correlates with
consciousness.

If this description leaves you wondering how this kind of
research is really going to help us understand consciousness, it
may well be that you already have an intuitive feel for what
David Chalmers was referring to when he distinguished between
the “hard problem” and the “easy
problems” of consciousness. By Chalmers’ definition,
Koch’s work, and that of the other panelists, is entirely
concerned with one of the easy problems. No matter how clear a
snapshot we can get of what type of neuronal activity correlates
with which sorts of conscious perceptions, we will still be no
closer to understanding how the brain could possibly
produce something like conscious experience itself. As
philosopher John Searle wrote in a recent review of Koch’s
latest book, The Quest for Consciousness, “The
subjects on whom these experiments are performed are already
conscious. . . . So the most we can reasonably expect from this
research is an explanation of how, within a brain that is
already conscious, we can cause this or that perceptual
experience. . . . In my view we will not understand
consciousness until we understand how the brain creates the
conscious field to begin with.”

During the question-and-answer session following Koch &
co.’s presentation, the questions ranged from experimental
technicalities to quantum physics to the paranormal. One woman
asked Koch how his “neurobiological framework for
consciousness” would account for near-death experiences in
which patients are able to report on events that happened while
their brain
s were not functioning. Koch’s curt reply was,
“If they’re having an experience, there must be neural
correlates. I’d need to see a double-blind study.” As I
was pondering just how one would go about recruiting volunteers
for such a study, I made my way to the stage to introduce myself
to Chalmers. Engrossed in the business of conference organizing,
he paused for a brief chat—until he connected my name to
the magazine I’d sent him before the conference. Obviously
pegging me for someone on the “fringier” end of the
spectrum, he asked: “How would you feel about moderating
the panel on Nonlocal and Paranormal Effects? The person we had
scheduled didn’t show up.”

Always up for a little stage time, I smiled. “Sure,
when is it?”

“It starts in ten minutes.”

“Do I need to know anything? I’m not really an expert
in the paranormal.”

“No, you’ll be fine. Just get there in time to talk
with the panelists beforehand.”

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Compared to the auditorium-sized plenary session; the
breakout room with seats for about a hundred and fifty felt
almost cozy. By the time I had found my way through the maze of
hallways, all of the panelists had arrived, as
well as most of
the audience. Catching my breath, I did the fastest four
interviews of my life, thought up a few jokes about materialism
for my opening comments, and proceeded to try to lay out some
context for the session.

The first panelist was prominent paranormal, or psi,
researcher, Gary Schwartz, whose book The Afterlife
Experiments reports on a series of experiments done with
spirit mediums that suggest strongly that whatever consciousness
is, it seems to be able to survive physical death. Schwartz, who
runs the Human Energy Systems Lab at the University of Arizona,
delivered a robust talk in which he summarized this impressive
body of research, and expressed his frustration with the
mainstream scientific community’s unwillingness to even consider
what it might mean for our understanding of consciousness. He
was followed by Katherine Creath, another researcher from the UA
psi lab, who presented evidence for intentional remote energy
healing—of plants. Using biophoton imaging technology,
Creath found that “energy healers” from three
different disciplines were able to significantly increase
biophoton emissions (a sign of health) in injured plants, simply
by “treating” them with the intention to heal. After
my joke about never eating salad again failed to rouse the
expected laughs, we moved quickly on to a talk on remote viewing
by a young student from Florida and a presentation of research
by a German scientist showing that we can consciously
“will” the nervous systems of others into a calm
state, even at considerable distance.

Following the materialism of the opening panel, I found it
something of a respite to spend a bit of time contemplating the
mysteries of consciousness beyond the brain. Given the
conference’s clearly neuroscientific be
nt, I was surprised to
find a session so far outside the scientific mainstream. Indeed,
over the days that followed, I was intrigued to discover that,
in addition to a plethora of sessions devoted to discussing the
intricacies of the brain, there was also a wide range of
presentations on topics that would generally be considered
fringe. One well-attended session explored the current state of
research on “meditation and consciousness.” Another,
entitled “Art and Consciousness,” included a talk on
the relationship between altered states of consciousness and
“visionary art.” Stanford’s Stephen LaBerge gave a
workshop on lucid dreaming. And one of the plenary sessions was
even devoted to research on the effects of psychedelic
drugs.

Perhaps not quite as f
ringe, but no less far out, were
several presentations from the artificial intelligence crowd on
the possibility of building conscious robots, and a surprising
number of panels and papers on models employing quantum physics
to explain the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
Over lunch one afternoon at a nearby Mexican restaurant, I asked
Chalmers how a serious academic conference had remained open to
such a wide range of approaches. Pausing momentarily from his
chicken burrito, he replied, “There is so much that we
don’t understand about this that it’s always been our approach
to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom.’ There’s room here for
everybody, precisely because we don’t know where the answers are
going to come from.”

But despite the conference organizing committee’s
open-mindedness in embracing alternative thinking, it was
nonetheless clear which camp is gaining the most ground. For
although a thousand flowers may have been blooming in Tucson
that spring, there was little doubt where the vast majority of
them were rooted: in materialism and its fervent aspiration to
reduce all human experience to the workings of the brain.

Indeed, though I had come to Tucson in full awareness of the
conference’s materialistic focus, as the week wore on, the
larger implications of what it would actually mean to
demonstrate the neurobiological basis of consciousness began to
set in. And it is a disconcerting picture, to say the least. If
consciousness is, in fact, created by the brain, it turns out,
very little of our commonsense picture of reality is true. Over
the course of the week, I learned several important things:

1) free will is an illusion

2) so is the self

3) consciousness sort of is, too, or at least, it doesn’t do
anything

4) even if we were to discover that we are living in the
“Matrix,” we should act as if it’s real, and not
worry about it. In other words, Neo took the wrong pill.

Having jumped in at the deep end, by the end of the
conference, I was more or less thoroughly confused. In part, my
confusion was conceptual. As a layperson, trying to listen in as
professionals debate the finer points of brain science, AI, and
philosophy of mind is not exactly an easy entry into the
territory. I often found myself asking whoever was sitting next
to me to translate what had just been said into
“English.” But I think the deeper source of my
confusion was on a human level. Having someone look you in the
eye and calmly tell you that they are “nothing but a
complex of algorithms”—or worse, that they
“have no conscious control over their
actions”—is the kind of thing that makes you start
scanning the room for a security guard. Over and over as the
week wore on, I found myself wondering how it was that so many
people could become so convinced of ideas that run so counter to our most basic experience of being alive. Given all the talk about artificial intelligence, I secretly began to suspect that, in fact, the speakers were all sophisticated robots programmed to try to convince us that we were too. I left the conference even more determined to understand the roots of this strange predicament, but I knew that before I could, I would have to figure out why it was that scientists are so sure that we are nothing but our brains.

part two: steps to a biology of mind

A brief history of mind

Fifteen years after President Bush senior inaugurated
“The Decade of the Brain,” it is hard to believe
that until fairly recently in human history, the idea that the
brain is even involved in mental life was a matter of
considerable dispute. Indeed, the first thinker on record to
suggest a link between mind and brain was the Pythagorean
Alcmaeon of Croton, writing in the fifth century BCE. Prior to
that, across cultures, it was widely held that the mind, or
soul, was located in the heart. The priests of ancient Egypt,
for example, when preparing the body of the deceased for the
afterlife, would pull out the brain, piece by piece through the
nose, but would leave the heart intact, believing it to be the
center of a person’s being and intelligence. In most ancient
cultures, the idea of dissecting a cadaver was taboo, so with no
knowledge of the nervous system, it was only natural to conclude
that the accelerated heartbeat that accompanied an excited mind
was a clear indication of the bodily location of mental life.
Even such great thinkers as Aristotle subscribed to this view.
But, rigorous biologist that he was, Greece’s greatest polymath
was certain that the brain must serve some function. Noticing
that it was cool to the touch, he concluded that it refrigerated
the blood—a conclusion that also allowed him to account
for the inordinately large brains of humans. Because of our
unusual intelligence, he argued, our hearts produced more heat
and, thus, required a larger cooling system.

Alcmaeon’s brain-centered theory, however, did manage to
persuade the likes of Hippocrates and Plato to abandon the
prevailing “cardiovascular theory,” and despite
Aristotle’s resistance to the idea, it was picked up by
physicians during
the early Roman period who broke the taboo
against dissecting cadavers and discovered the nervous system
branching out from the skull and spine. Although this view
gradually took hold, and has remained dominant ever since, it
was still being disputed as late as the seventeenth century,
when philosopher Henry More wrote, “This lax pith or
marrow in man’s head shows no more capacity for thought than a
cake of suet or a bowl of curds.” It is also worth noting
that the model of the brain that prevailed through most of the
second millennium was very different from the model we subscribe
to today. Whereas we now see a vast, complex electrochemical
network of some hundred billion neurons, these early anatomists
were convinced that the mind, or soul, was a kind of etheric
presence that lived in large “ventricles” or
chambers in the brain, communicating its commands to the rest of
the body through “vital spirits” that flowed through
the nervous system’s minute pathways.

Indeed, it has been this move away from a spirit-based view
of the brain’s workings toward a purely biological one that has
led to the idea, so unpopular with the religiously inclined,
that the mind, or soul, is ultimately reducible to brain
activity.

Like a hole in the head

The road to this now widely shared conviction has, like any
scientific development, been marked by several major turning
points. But few have struck the field with as much force as the
story of a Vermont railroad worker named Phineas Gage. The year
was 1848, and Gage was out supervising the construction of a
section of track when an accidental explosion shot an iron rod
more than three feet long and one and a quarter inches in
diameter straight into his left cheek, through his frontal lobe
and out through the top of his head, taking no small measure of
brain with it. To everyone’s amazement, Gage was back on his
feet in
a matter of minutes and appeared unfazed by the
incident. In fact, according to the doctor who treated him an
hour later, he was able to speak more lucidly about it than his
shaken coworkers who had witnessed it. Although his basic
cognitive functions remained unaltered, however, over time it
became clear that something fundamental had changed. According
to John Harlow, the physician who followed his case, where Gage
had once been efficient, capable, and thoughtful, after the
accident he became “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times
in the grossest profanity, . . . manifesting but little
deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when
it conflicts with his desi
res.” So radical was the shift
in personality that, “his friends and acquaintances said
he was ‘no longer Gage.’”

At the time of the Gage incident, there was already
considerable speculation that specific regions of the brain were
responsible for specific aspects of perception, cognition, and
behavior—particularly among the
“phrenologists,” who attempted to “map”
the regions of the brain according to the lumps on the skull.
But the reason Gage’s case caused such a stir was that it seemed
to suggest that there were even systems in the brain responsible
for the creation of our personalities, our unique selves. In the
century and a half since, studies of brain-damaged patients by
clinical neurologists have revealed much about the relationship
between the functioning of the brain and the way we experience
and respond to the world. Their stories are often as perplexing
as they are revealing.

In his book Phantoms in the Brain, neurologist V.S.
Ramachandran tells the story of a young patient named Arthur
who, after suffering a severe head injury in a car accident,
began to insist that his parents were impostors. No matter how
hard they tried to convince him otherwise, whenever he would see
them, he would say, “You may look like my real parents,
but I know you’re not my real parents.” When they would
call him on the phone, however, he immediately recognized them.
This peculiar delusion, known as Capgras’ syndrome, has been
chronicled a number of times in psychiatric literature and has
generally been given Freudian interpretations relating it to the
notorious Oedipus complex. But Ramachandran had a different
idea. His explanation was that a connection had been severed
between one of the visual centers of the brain and one of the
emotional centers. So despite the fact that Arthur could
recognize his parents’ faces, he didn’t feel anything
when he saw them. Though Arthur’s father did manage to
temporarily convince him of his authenticity (by apologizing for
hiring the impostor parents), Arthur soon returned to his
original delusion.

It is hard for most of us to imagine what it would be like
to have one of our most taken-for-granted faculties suddenly no
longer available to us, like the ability to respond emotionally
to our visual experience. Indeed, what is most intriguing about
these stories is the way in which they challenge one of our most
fundamental intuitions—our sense that the self is a
single, unified whole. Repeated throughout the neurology
literature are cases in which damage to a specific part of
the
brain leads to the loss of some specific aspect of our ability
to perceive and respond to the world. Damage one part of my
brain and I’ll lose the ability to learn any new facts. Damage
another part and I’ll be unable to recognize faces. Damage
another area and my experience of the world will remain intact,
but I’ll be unable to find the words I need to speak clearly
about it. Damage still another part and I’ll lose the ability to
pay attention to half of my visual field, but I will be
convinced that the half I’m seeing is the whole picture. As a
result, in the morning, I’ll only shave half of my face. Taken
together, the data from neurology suggest that despite our
brain’s ability to organize our experience of ourselves and the
world into a seamless unity, we are, in fact, made up of many
parts, the loss of any of which can have dramatic effects on the
whole.

Being of two minds

When we think of brain damage, we generally think of damage
caused by accident or disease. But there is also the kind of
damage intentionally inflicted by surgeons in order to help
resolve a brain disorder. Given our increased understanding of
the delicate interrelatedness of the entire brain, such
procedures are rarely done these days, owing in some part to the
often disastrous results of the 45,000 frontal lobotomies
performed in the U.S. in the 1940s and ’50s. But another
procedure, performed in the 1960s as a means to eliminate
epileptic seizures, yielded some surprising findings for our
understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self.

However ignorant we may be of brain science, most of us are
familiar by now with the idea that our brain has two
hemispheres, a left one and a right one, each responsible for
very different aspects of our behavior. Our dominant left brain,
we are told, is more analytical; our right brain more emotional,
creative, and intuitive. Although much of the popular psychology
literature on the right brain–left brain distinction has
been, in the eyes of neuroscience, exceedingly simplistic and
inaccurate, the basic fact—known in the field as
“hemispheric specialization”—is well
established. In a normal brain, these two hemispheres
communicate with one another through a large band of nervous
tissue known as the corpus callosum (larger in women than in
men, incidentally, accounting for their superior ability to
multitask, among other things). But what would happen if the
connection between these two halves of the brain was severed,
leaving us, in effect, with two brains in our head? Would we end
up with two different selves? Over th
e past few decades, a group
of neuroscientists have had the chance to find out.

Epilepsy comes in many forms, some mild and some severe. In
its worst manifestations, it brings with it nearly constant
seizures that make life almost impossible for the patient. In an
attempt to control these severe cases, in the 1960s
neurosurgeons began cutting the corpus callosum to prevent the
seizures from spreading from one side of the brain to the other.
The procedure was remarkably successful, and to the relief of
the doctors who pioneered the treatment, patients generally
recovered well and were able to live relatively normal lives.
But in these “split-brain” patients, psychobiologist
Roger Sperry soon recognized a rare opportunity to study the
differences between the two hemispheres in a way that had never
been possible before. Over the decades that followed, he
pioneered a series of studies that ultimately earned him a Nobel
Prize. Most of these split-brain studies focused on illuminating
the functional differences between the two hemispheres, but
along the way, Sperry and his colleagues began to realize that
there were implications to what they were seeing that went far
beyond the scope of their initial questions.

One of the most commonly known facts about hemispheric
specialization is that the right brain controls the left side of
the body and the left brain controls the right side. Where
visual input is concerned, the same rule applies. The left half
of the visual field (of each eye) is routed to the right brain
and vice versa. Knowing this, researchers realized that by
presenting information quickly to only one side of the subject’s
visual field, they could ensure that the information only
reached one side of the subject’s brain. This technique provided
the cornerstone of their research.

Employing this method, researchers had learned early on that
the dominant left brain, with its ability to reason and use
language, is the home of what we usually think of as the
conscious mind. For instance, when asked to
report on
information that had been presented to their left brain alone,
subjects could speak about it quite normally. When information
had been presented only to the right brain, by contrast,
subjects seemed unaware of it. As the research progressed,
however, the picture grew more complex. For instance, when the
right brain was shown an image of a spoon, the subject’s left
hand (which is controlled by the right brain) could successfully
identify an actual spoon from among an assortment of objects,
even though the subject claimed to have no conscious knowledge
of having seen it. Despite its inability to express itself, the
right brain nonetheless seemed to have a will and mind of its
own. Eager to test this, Scottish neuroscientist Donald MacKay
devised a twenty-questions-type guessing game and successfully
taught each of the two halves of a patient’s brain to play
it—first against him and then against the other half. But
this image of the two halves of one brain competing with one
another soon moved from the experimental to the macabre, as
split-brain patients began to develop the bizarre malady known
as “alien-hand syndrome.”

Imagine just having zipped up your trousers with your
dominant right hand only to find your left hand unzipping them
and taking them off. Or reaching to embrace a lover only to find
your left hand punching her in the face. Or attempting to shop
at the supermarket as your left hand grabs unwanted items from
the shelves and shoves them in your pocket. If this sounds like
a story straight out of The Twilight Zone, it is
nonetheless exactly what a number of split-brain
patients began to report. One patient said it regularly took her
half a day to pack for a trip because each time she put an item
in her suitcase with her right hand, her left hand would remove
it. Another said that he was even afraid to go to sl
eep for fear
that his left hand would strangle him.

As extreme as it sounds that each half of a brain could have
its own agenda, this fact was eventually demonstrated
experimentally by neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph
LeDoux. Although in most of us, the dominant left brain houses
all of our language capacity, in a small percentage of the
population, the right brain also develops some linguistic
functions. Using a rare case of a young split-brain patient
whose right brain had developed a slight capacity for printed
language, the researchers asked both halves of the brain a
series of questions, and found that, particularly where
preferences and opinions were concerned, there was often
disagreement. What was most revealing, though, was when the
patient was asked about his ambitions. In response to the
question: “What do you want to do when you
graduate?” his dominant left hemisphere answered, vocally,
“I want to be a draftsman. I’m already training for
it.” His right hemisphere, which could only respond by
using Scrabble letters to spell out its answer, responded
“A-U-T-O-M-O-B-I-L-E R-A-C-E-[R].”

The idea that splitting the brain amounts to nothing less
than splitting the self is a challenging one with enormous
implications for our understanding of the brain’s role in
creating consciousness and even individuality. Therefore, it is
no surprise that it has remained a controversial finding, even
among scientists. But for the man who was awarded the Nobel
Prize for his pioneering work in this area, the experience of
working with split-brain patients for many years all pointed in
one direction. “Everything we have seen indicates that the
surgery has left these people with two separate minds,”
Sperry wrote. “That is, two separate spheres of
consciousness.”

This is your brain on drugs

One morning last summer, in the midst of my research, a
longtime colleague and friend showed up at my office door
looking a bit out of sorts.

“Something’s really wrong with my dad,” he said.
“He’s not himself.”

Having spent time with my friend’s father over the years, I
was well aware of the twenty-year battle with Parkinson’s
disease that had slowly eroded the dexterity and agility of this
successful trial lawyer and former athlete. And I had more than
once seen the look, somewhere between pain and confusion, that
engulfed my friend’s face when the disease suddenly took a turn
for the worse. But today there was something different.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Is it the
Parkinson’s?”

“Sort of,” he replied. “Somehow his
medication has gotten out of whack. He’s doing the most bizarre
things. Late last night, my brother found him standing in the
front yard with a water pistol in his hand. He was convinced
that he was protecting the house from a gang of
marauders.”

“In Omaha?”

A smile momentarily broke his sobriety. “Yes. And when
my brother found him, all he said was, ‘It’s about time you got
here. I need some backup.’”

“How is he now?” I asked.

“They’ve got him in the hospital, and they’re
monitoring his medication, trying to figure out what went wrong.
They have to keep him under constant supervision because
whenever the nurse leaves the room, he tries to make a break for
it.” He paused for a moment. “It just seems so
delicate. What does it mean that the person you thought you knew
can change so dramatically simply because their brain chemistry
changes? What does that say about who we are?”

The relationship between brain chemistry and consciousness
is one that, in the neuroscience age, is hard to get away from.
As neurobiologists have deepened our understanding of the
powerful neurochemicals that underlie our moods and motivations,
words like adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin have
become part of our vernacular. And for those who have spent any
time studying the field, it has become increasingly difficult
not to think of human behavior in chemical terms. In his 2004
book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of
Everyday Life, journalist Steven Johnson sums up the
prevailing view: “Our personalities—the entities
that make us both unique and predictable as
individuals—emerge out of these patterns of chemical
release.” Although part of the widespread confidence
behind this view comes from observing cases like my friend’s
father, where a sudden chemical imbalance can cause a severe
psychological disturbance, more of it has come from observations
of the overwhelmingly positive transformations that attaining
the right internal chemistry can bring about. Ever since the
psychopharmacology revolution of the 1950s, when psychiatrists
discovered the power of Thorazine to reduce even the worst
symptoms of psychosis, the quest to chemically engineer mental
health and well-being has been in full swing. Of course, most of
us need look no further than our last trip to Starbucks or the
local pub to see our
own conviction in the benefits of
chemically altered consciousness. But what if our power to
chemically transform our experience went beyond a temporary
release of inhibition or elevation of awareness? What if you
could take a regular pill that would radically transform your
personality, and even your sense of self, for the better? In the
brave new world of psychopharmacology, even this bizarre
possibility has become a reality.

We all probably know Prozac as the first and still most
popular of the new genre of antidepressant medications to have
swept the civilized world over the past two decades. By
inhibiting the cellular reuptake of serotonin, this magic pill
has proven overwhelmingly successful in lifting the spirits not
only of the clinically depressed but of anyone simply wishing to
feel a bit “better than well.” While this latter
use, dubbed “cosmetic psychopharmacology” by

psychiatrist Peter Kramer, raises many ethical issues and has
been the subject of much heated debate, it is the results from
Prozac’s original clinical application that are of greatest
interest here.

In his 1993 bestseller, Listening to Prozac, Kramer
documents the cases of several patients who, after being
prescribed the medication, experienced not only the expected
elevation in mood but a wholesale transformation of their
personalities. One such case was a woman named Tess who, in
addition to being relieved from her depression, reported being
simultaneously more at ease and more driven, less subject to
emotional disturbance, and more extroverted, socially adept, and
competent at her work. Two weeks after starting the medication,
Kramer writes:

She looked different, at once more relaxed and
energetic—more available—than I had seen her, as if
the person hinted at in her eyes had taken over. She laughed
more frequently, and the quality of her laughter was different,
no longer measured but lively, even teasing.

With this new demeanor came a new social life, one
that did not unfold slowly, as a result of a struggle to
integrate disparate parts of the self, but seemed, rather, to
appear instantly and full-blown.

“Three dates a weekend,” Tess told me.
“I must be wearing a sign on my forehead!”

This new personality remained consistent for nine
months—until Kramer took her off the medication. Although
Tess did initially manage to hold on to some of her newfound
confidence, she gradually began falling back into the
personality traits that had characterized her life before
Prozac. &ldquo
;I’m not myself,” she told Kramer after
several months, at which point he promptly put her back on the
medication.

Another patient, Julia, had experienced a similar
transformation, following a stunning reversal of the
obsessive-compulsive behavior that had been ravaging her family
and work life. But when Kramer tried to lower the dose:

Two weeks later Julia called to say the bottom had
fallen out: “I’m a witch again.” She felt
lousy—pessimistic, angry, demanding. She was up half the
night cleaning. . . . “It’s not just my
imagination,” she insisted, and then she used the very
words Tess had used: “I don’t feel myself.”

In reflecting on Kramer’s accounts, Walter Truett
Anderson writes in The Future of the Self, “What
is particularly fascinating here is that in both cases, the
women believed their ‘real selves’ to be what they had
experienced during the short period of treatment and not the way
they had been for the rest of their lives. Which, then, is the
real self? And who decides?” Kramer himself, perhaps the
single greatest advocate of cosmetic psychopharmacology, also
found it hard to come to terms with this particular outcome of
the treatment. “How were we to reconcile what Prozac did
for Tess with our notion of the continuous, autobiographical
human self?” These are big questions. And in light of the
present inquiry, I would add one more: If a simple shift in
brain chemistry can bring about such a dramatic transformation
of the self, what aspects of our selves, or souls, do we imagine
are outside the control of the brain? Like the study of brain
damage, psychopharmacology also seems to suggest that we are
more a product of our brains than most of us would like to
think.

Neuroethics

If the study of brain damage and neurochemistry provides the
beginnings of an outline of the profound link between brain and
mind, powerful new brain scanning techniques promise to fill out
the details in living color. By providing a picture of the
brain’s blood-flow patterns when engaged in particular
activities, PET, SPECT, and fMRI scans are enabling researchers
to map the regions of the brain like cartographers once charted
the contours of the globe.

Through extensive imaging studies, neuroscientists have been
able to identify nearly a dozen areas involved in different
aspects of speech alone. And that pales in comparison to the
thirty-plus different areas involved in specific aspects of
vision. There is one area that recognizes vertical lines,
another for horizontal lines, another for detecting motion, and
another for the color blue. When it comes to face recognition,
the picture gets even more complex. Would you believe that there
are specific clusters of neurons that light up when presented
with specific faces at specific angles—that, for instance,
there is one tiny part of your brain dedicated specifically to
your grandmother’s profile, and another reserved for the
ubiquitous mug of George Bush?

Discovering the biological basis of speech and perception
is, however, just the beginning. With experimental methodologies
improving by the month, even the more complex aspects of our
experience, such as emotion, reason, motivation, and will, are
beginning to give up their secrets. In Mapping the Mind,
science journalist Rita Carter writes: “It is now
possible to locate and observe the mechanics of rage, violence,
and misperception, and even to detect the physical signs of
complex qualities of mind like kindness, humour, heartlessness,
gregariousness, altruism, mother-love, and
self-awareness.”

The profound implications of these findings are not lost on
the neuroscience community. Indeed, one of the more interesting
new areas of discussion is what has become known as neuroethics.
According to psychologist
Martha Farah, brain imaging in
particular has opened up an ethical can of worms with its
unprecedented ability to peer into the previously private
reaches of the individual mind. For instance, with neuroimaging,
it has now become possible to tell when someone is being
deceitful, or even when they are deceiving themselves. Enter
lie-detection 3.0. Scientists can also discern whether someone
was involved in a crime by showing them objects from the crime
scene and seeing how their brain responds. Welcome to the new
forensics, as marketed by Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories,
Inc. It’s even possible to tell whether someone is an illegal
drug user by showing them photos of drug paraphernalia and
seeing whether the brain enters a “craving state.”
Meet the new war on drugs.

Then there is what Farah refers to as
“brainotyping.” Using these same methodologies,
neuroscientists can now look behind the scenes of your persona
and find out what sort of human being you really are. Do you
secretly harbor racial prejudices? By watching your brain while
you look at pictures of racially diverse faces, brain scanners
can provide an answer. How about sexual preferences? By showing
you a variety of erotic imagery, we can see who or what turns
you (or your brain) on. (And don’t bother trying to suppress
your response. Your brain looks different when you do that too.)
Are you a risk-taker? A pessimist? An introvert? Neurotic?
Persistent? Empathic? Even such core personality traits as these
are now laid bare before the new neurointerrogation.

Ethical issues indeed.

Within the discussion around neuroethics, however, there is
a larger issue coming to the fore that some feel may rattle the
very foundations of the way we think about ethics itself. In
civilized culture, our ethical norms and even our legal system
are built on the notion of individual responsibility. When
judging the actions of another, we hold him or her accountable
for having freely chosen those actions for good or ill. But if
we look at the picture of the human being emerging from
neuroscience, many feel that there is little in it to support
the idea that we freely choose our actions. If our actions are
entirely caused by the brain, and the brain is in turn shaped
entirely by the interaction between genes and environment, where
does free wil
l enter the equation? This may seem like
philosophical nonsense, given that one of our most basic human
intuitions is our sense of our own freedom to choose. But
prominent neuroscientists claim that this deterministic picture
of human behavior has, in fact, been reinforced by a number of
experiments that seem to show that our brain makes choices
before we are conscious of having made them, that in fact,
conscious will is an illusion.

This bizarre notion, which is widely held within the
neuroscience community, is clearly not one that will go over
easily with the public at large. In fact, on the controversy
scale, it may run a close second to what is no doubt going to be
the most hotly disputed neuroscience claim of all—the
notion that, as Farah puts it, even our “sense of
spirituality” is itself a “physical function of the
brain.”

part three: the quest for a new paradigm

Is God all in your head?

As my train surfaced just west of Penn Station, the light
snow that had been with me since I left Massachusetts early that
morning seemed to have picked up the pace. Settling in for the
last two hours of my journey to Philadelphia, I pulled out the
new issue of Time I had picked up at the newsstand. It
was a “special Mind and Body issue” on “The
Science of Happiness,” and as I started flipping through
it, I almost immediately landed on a two-page spread featuring a
large color photo of a meditating Buddhist monk with electrodes
attached to his head.
Fixing the electrodes to his shaven scalp
was psychiatrist Richard Davidson, the “king of happiness
research,” who observes the brain activity of meditators
in an effort to understand the connection between meditative
bliss and our prefrontal lobes. The article, entitled “The
Biology of Joy,” was only the latest in a series of
reports that have hit the popular press in recent years
documenting the efforts of neuroscientists to understand the
relationship between spiritual experience and the brain. The
first, and certainly most memorable, was a Newsweek
cover story in May of 2001: “God and the Brain: How We’re
Wired for Spirituality.” It was in that article that I
first learned about the work of the man I was now on my way to
Philadelphia to meet, the renowned meditation researcher Andrew
Newberg.

A radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical
Center, Newberg earned his fame by conducting brain imaging
studies on meditators in the late nineties. His findings,
published in two books, The Mystical Mind and Why
God Won’t Go Away (cowritten with his research partner, the
late Eugene D’Aquili), were some of the first to capture on film
the distinct changes that occur in the brain during spiritual
experience. Since that time, he has made the rounds of the
progressive talk show circuit, been featured in nearly every
relevant magazine, been inundated with speaking requests from
churches and medical schools alike, and appeared in the recent
science-meets-spirit cult film What the Bleep Do We
Know!?—all of which points to just how much public
interest (or fear) there is regarding the possibility that even
spirituality may have its roots in our cranium.

After meeting me in the hospital lobby and escorting me
through a labyrinth of hallways to a small windowless office in
the radiology department, Newberg turned his computer monitor
toward me and said, “This is what I wanted to show
you.” On the screen were two colorful images of what I
assumed was a human brain. “The picture on the
left,” he explained, “is the image of the subject’s
brain before meditation. On the right is what it looks like
during meditation. In this case, the meditator was a Tibetan
Buddhist, or, rather, an American Buddhist practicing a Tibetan
form of meditation.”

In their initial studies, Newberg and D’Aquili worked with
two main groups, one comprising eight American Buddhists doing a
concentrative form of meditation and another made up of three
Franciscan nuns practicing contemplative prayer. Although the
results of their studies varied somewhat between the two groups,
the overall picture was remarkably consistent. Not surprisingly,
Newberg and D’Aquili found that during meditation or prayer,
there was an increase in activity in the prefrontal lobes, a
region responsible for such higher faculties as intention, will,
and the ability to focus our attention. But it was another one
of their findings, in particular, that seemed to create all the
stir.

“If you look here at this area at the back of the
brain,” Newberg said, pointing with his pen to a bright
yellow blob of color, “you can see that it is much less
pronounced during the meditation session than before. This is
the posterior parietal lobe, what I call the
orientation-association area. It’s the part of the brain that
allows us to orient ourselves in space, that gives us a sense of
boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world. What we
hypothesized was that the sense of unity, or oneness, that
people experience during meditative practice would be correlated
with a reduction of activity in this area. And this is exactly
what the neuroimaging shows.”

Hearing that the exalted mystical experience of oneness
(what Newberg calls “absolute unitary being”) comes
about through the reduction of activity in a specific part of
the brain is the sort of thing that could, as they say, take all
the fun out of it, and fast. So far, though, Newberg seemed too
good-hearted to be angling for the ultimate reductionist coup.
To make sure, I hit him with my big question straight up:
“Do you think your research shows that religious
experience is completely reducible to brain activity? Is God all
in my head?”

By his expression, I could tell he was ready for this one.
“It might seem that way,” he began, “but I
don’t think the research necessarily points to that conclusion.
This may be a simplistic way of looking at it, but if I were to
take a brain scan of somebody who is looking at a piece of apple
pie, I can tell you what their brain is doing when they have the
experience of seeing that apple pie. But I can’t tell you
whether or not that piece of apple pie exists in reality based
on the scan. Likewise, if I take a brain scan of a Franciscan
nun who has the experience of being in the presence of God, I
can tell you what her brain is doing during the experience but I
can’t tell you whether or not God was really there, whether the
experience represented a true reality. Neuroscience can’t answer
that epistemological question.”

As Newberg spoke further about epistemology—the study
of how we know what we know—it became clear that for him,
coming to grips with the philosophical and spiritual
implications of his findings is at least as important as the
findings themselves. “Let’s say we were to take the
materialist position that the only way we experience anything is
through the brain. This means that the only way we can tell
whether something is real is through our brain. The brain is the
organ that discerns what is real. Okay, now this presents a
slight problem for the materialist position because when people
have mystical experiences, they universally report that they
have experienced something that is more real than our
everyday material reality. Which means that the brain perceives
God, or pure consciousness, to be more real than anything else.
So if the brain is what determines what is real and what isn’t,
and this is a universal experience of human brains across
cultures, where does that leave us?”

In the course of our conversation, Newberg went to great
lengths to make it clear that he is, in many ways, still
agnostic on the big questions. But he also didn’t
hide the fact
that the work he is doing is only the latest incarnation of a
spiritual search that began in his youth—a fact that may
account for his surprisingly nonmaterialistic interpretation of
his own research. Although he acknowledged that his findings
could easily be used to support a reductionist position, he
feels that by experimentally demonstrating the reality of
mystical experience, he is actually doing spirituality a
service, perhaps even forcing science to take mysticism
seriously for the first time. Indeed, what probably intrigued me
most about Newberg was his conviction that mystical experience
itself may have something to offer science that it desperately
needs—the possibility of breaking the bounds of
subjectivity and opening the door to a truly objective
perspective.

“One of the limitations of science is the problem of
subjective awareness,” he said at one point while giving
me a tour of the scanning equipment used to conduct the research
on the meditators. “Even with regard to our scientific
studies and scientific measurements, science still has the
problem of never really being able to get outside of our brain
to truly know what is out there in reality. One of the
reasons I’ve been so intrigued with spiritual experience is that
it’s the only state where one at least hears a description where
a person claims to have broken the bounds of their own human
self-consciousness and g
otten into intimate contact with
ultimate reality. And I think if that’s the case, then as
scientists, we have to look at that experience very, very
carefully because that may be the only way of solving the
problem of getting outside of the subjective mind.”

As he escorted me back out to the hospital lobby, I told
Newberg more about the questions that had sparked my own recent
inquiry into brain science. To my surprise, he said he wasn’t
particularly troubled by the mind/body problem or by the
mounting neuroscientific evidence for materialism. “The
belief that matter is primary provides a good basis for
explaining the material world,” he said, “but it can
give no clear answer as to where consciousness comes from. On
the other hand, if we take a religious perspective and say that
consciousness is primary, it’s not so easy to explain the
existence of matter. My own feeling is that perhaps
consciousness and matter are two ways of looking at the same
thing. But I think the bottom line is that we really don’t know
yet.”

My encounter with Newberg opened my mind in ways I hadn’t
expected. Whereas I had gone to him bracing myself for yet
another piece of seemingly irrefutable evidence for the brain as
the sole source of experience, I left with some new perspectives
on the terrain and with a renewed confidence that our humanity
can withstand the challenges of brain science. As a reputable
neuroscientist, clearly Newberg was familiar with all the data I
had come across, and no doubt a lot more. The fact that his own
spiritual convictions hadn’t been fazed and had even been
bolstered by his studies of the brain seemed to suggest that
there must be more to the story than the neuroscientific
mainstream would have us believe.

As he reminded me, for all the evidence neuroscience seems
to present for the case that the brain creates the mind, the
reality is that nobody has yet been able to explain, let alone
demonstrate, how it could actually do such a thing. The
mind/body problem is as enigmatic as ever. And although this
doesn’t seem to be persuading the neuroscientific community at
large to question its materialistic assumptions, as I would
learn over the months that followed, there are a number of
scientists on whom the implications of this fact have not been
lost.

Emerging from the frontiers of a variety of scientific
fields, there is a growing movement of pioneers who are seeking
to counter the reductionist tendency in biology in general, and
in brain science in particular. Convinced that the real problem
of consciousness lies in the very way it is being approached
,
these new thinkers aim to root out the materialistic assumptions
that are guiding the bulk of neuroscientific inquiry and replace
them with a larger, more holistic paradigm capable of embracing
the full complexity of human experience. Some are doing so by
weaving elaborate alternative theories to account for the same
data. Others are pushing the scientific edge with their own
experiments attempting to demonstrate the existence of phenomena
that cannot be accounted for by materialism. What they all have
in common is a passion for preserving our humanity in the face
of the mechanistic worldview, and a willingness to fiercely
critique the dogmatic tendencies of scientific orthodoxy.

Into the light

Perhaps the most intriguing challenge to the neuroscientific
mainstream is emerging from the growing body of research into
what physician Raymond Moody dubbed “near-death
experiences,” or NDEs. Throughout the ages and across
cultures, people have reported a variety of mystical phenomena
surrounding the dying process. But with the technological
explosion of the twentieth century, one medical advance in
particular has opened a significant window into the
phenomenology of dying—namely, our ability to resuscitate
people, to bring them back from the dead. Beginning with Moody’s
work in the early seventies, over the past several decades, a
number of researchers have been exploring this terrain, yielding
a remarkably consistent picture of what happens when people make
a temporary sojourn through death’s door.

Thanks to Oprah and other mass media coverage of the
phenomenon, most of us are by now familiar with the basic
outline. Upon being pronounced dead, these patients experience
themselves outside of the body witnessing the scene of the
accident or operating room from above. From there, at some point
they begin moving into darkness, or sometimes a dark tunnel, at
the other end of which they are met by deceased relatives and
perhaps a “being of light” who then prompts them to
undertake a review of their life. In most cases, there is an
encounter with “the light,” which is usually
accompanied by feelings of overwhelming joy, love, and peace,
after which they either discover or decide that it is not their
time to die and are returned to their body. Although not all
NDEs contain all of the above elements (in fact, some patients
even report harrowing encounters with hellish realms, quite the
opposite of the more common positive NDE), for most who have the
experience, it is a life-transforming event, leading to a
radical change in
values and a loss of the fear of death.

It’s easy to understand why these experiences would have
such a profound psychological and spiritual impact. After an
episode like that, who could doubt the existence of
consciousness beyond the body and the reality of life after
death? Indeed, given the widespread media attention these
accounts have received, it may well be that NDEs are as
responsible as televangelism for the continued widespread belief
in the afterlife in contemporary America. And if we take them
seriously, they certainly seem like good reason to question the
notion that consciousness resides entirely in the brain.
However, as neuropsychiatrist and renowned near-death researcher
Peter Fenwick points out, “The simple fact that people
have these experiences does not in itself prove anything one way
or the other regarding the existence of consciousness outside
the brain.” Simply put, how do we know the NDE is not just
a brain-generated illusion? According to the “dying brain
hypothesis” as put forward by psychologist Susan
Blackmore, all of the specific phenomena associated with the
classic NDE can be accounted for by established brain responses
to the “severe stress, extreme fear, and cerebral
anoxia” that woul
d naturally accompany a brush with death.

Yet riddled throughout the NDE literature are accounts that
seem to suggest that there is more going on in these experiences
than can as yet fit into the materialist picture. For instance,
several physicians and nurses have reported patients being able
to describe in detail events that happened when they were
clearly unconscious, comatose, or even clinically brain dead. In
one widely reported case, a postoperative patient correctly
identified the nurse who had removed his dentures and the drawer
she had placed them in—while he was in a coma. In another,
an unconscious patient had an out-of-body experience after which
she accurately described a tennis shoe she had seen on the
outside ledge of a third-floor hospital window. But the most
dramatic case to date is probably the now-famous story of an
Arizona woman named Pam Reynolds. In a last-ditch attempt to
save Reynolds from a brain aneurysm that threatened her life,
doctors performed a rare and dangerous “standstill”
operation in which they lowered her body temperature to below
sixty degrees Fahrenheit, stopped her heart and respiration, and
drained all the blood from her body and brain. Her EEG was a
flat line, and her brain stem showed no response to the
“clickers” placed in her ears. She was, by any
reasonable definition, dead. Yet following her recovery from the
operation, doctors learned that not only had she undergone a
classic NDE, but she was also able to recount with astonishing
accuracy many of the details of the operation, from the surgical
instruments used to the conversation between the surgeons and
nurses.

So far, the research into NDEs has been largely anecdotal,
and as yet, no one has provided the kind of independent
verification of data that would stand as scientific proof. But
it is anecdotal cases like these that have inspired researchers
to focus their inquiry on documenting with increasing rigor
those NDEs that could provide hard evidence that something more
than the brain is at work. In the cardiac ward, where death
regularly comes and goes, they have found their laboratory. As
Peter Fenwick puts it,

For the scientific researcher, the interesting
question is this: When does the NDE occur? . . . If it could be
shown scientifically that the near-death experience occurs
during unconsciousness, as suggested by those who have survived
a cardiac arrest, when all brain function has ceased and there
is apparently no mechanism to mediate it, this would be highly
significant, because it would suggest that consciousness can
indeed exist independently of a functioning brain. >

Fenwick and other NDE researchers agree that further research
is required before the case can be closed with any certainty.
But initial results from several large, multihospital cardiac
ward studies are highly supportive of the notion of a
nonmaterial mind. If future studies are able to provide adequate
empirical evidence, it will indeed raise some very big questions
about consciousness and the brain.

A mind field

If the mind is not contained in the brain, then just where
exactly is it? The traditional dualist answer, around since
Descartes’ time, is that it is a separate immaterial substance
that interacts with the brain and body in some mysterious way.
Trying to figure out how this interaction occurs is what
launched the debate over the mind/body problem in the first
place. But today, thanks to advances in scientific theory over
the past century and a half, some new ways of thinking about the
matter are starting to emerge.

For renegade biologists like Rupert Sheldrake, one of the
most powerful tools for understanding the workings of life and
mind is the physical notion of the “field,” first
introduced to science by Michael Faraday in the nineteenth
century. “From electromagnetic fields to gravitational
fields to quantum matter fields, these field theories have taken
over physics in such a way that everything is now seen as energy
within fields,” Sheldrake told me one afternoon at his
home in north London. “As the philosopher of science Sir
Karl Popper put it, ‘Through modern physics, materialism has
transcended itself, because matter is no longer the fundamental
explanatory principle. Fields and energy are.’ So what I’m
asking is, When we come to the mind and the brain, what if the
brain is a system that’s organized by fields as well?”

According to Sheldrake, consciousness, or mind, is best
understood as an information field that is anchored in the brain
but extends far beyond it, that in fact, extends wherever our
attention goes. “The field of a magnet isn’t confined to
the inside of a magnet. It stretches out beyond its surface. The
field of a cell phone stretches out beyond the surface of the
handset. So my point is that the fields on which mental activity
depend interact with the brain and are rooted in the brain, but
they’re not confined to the brain any more than any of these
other fields are confined to the material object they’re
associated with.”

Approaching the mind/body problem in this way, Sheldrake
feels, allows for an explanation of both the voluminous body of
d
ata that shows the dependence of consciousness on brain
function and the mysterious evidence from his own studies of
telepathy and other psi phenomena that seem to point to the
ability of consciousness to reach beyond the parameters of the
skull. “So, just as the field around the cell phone will
be changed if you oblate a component or cut a wire in the
handset, so the fields around the brain and the fields within
the brain would be affected by changes in or damage to the
physical components. But that doesn’t prove that those fields
are entirely limited to what’s happening inside the
brain.”

Indeed, in the course of my research, the most common
metaphor I encountered among those seeking to counter
materialism’s robust claims was a notion first put forward by
William James: the analogy of the brain as a kind of
receiver/transmitter for consciousness. In Sheldrake’s
words:

If I switch on my TV set to PBS and if you measure
different bits of the tuning set, you’ll find that certain bits
are resonating at certain frequencies. If I switch it to another
channel, like Fox News, there will be measurable frequency
changes in the various bits of the TV. But that doesn’t prove
that all the content of PBS programs and Fox News is generated
inside that bit of the TV set. I think that the thinking behind
a lot of neuroscience claims is as na?ve as that, because it’s
based on the assumption that it’s all inside the brain.
Therefore the next question is: Which bits of the brain explain
it? But if the brain is not like that, if the brain is more like
a tuning system and a center for coordinating our actions and
our sensations, then there’s no reason to assume that all our
mental activity is confined to the inside of the head.

How exactly would such a receiver/transmitter model
work in the case of the NDE, when the patient shows no brain
activity at all? One idea, expressed by Dutch cardiac surgeon
and NDE researcher Pim van Lommel is that “the
informational fields of consciousness and memory are present
around us as electrical and/or magnetic fields, but these fields
only become available to our waking consciousness through our
functioning brain and other cells of our body.” According
to van Lommel, when brain function is lost, these information
fields continue to exist. Hence, brain-dead patients can still
experience identity, attention, cognition, memory, and emotion.
But these experiences will be brought into our waking
consciousness only when brain function is restored.

Admittedly, such ideas, like those of other researchers on
the frontiers of science, are far from being accepted by the
academic mainstream. In fact, in s
peaking with Sheldrake, it
became clear that he gave up trying to directly convince the
scientific orthodoxy of his ideas a long time ago and is instead
focusing his efforts on igniting a sort of parapsychology
revolution among the masses. Through his recent popular books
The Sense of Being Stared At and Dogs That Know
When Their Owners Are Coming Home and his new
participate-at-home email telepathy experiments, he is trying to
awaken in the public an interest in exploring the mysteries of
consciousness that surround them every day. His hope is that
with enough popular support for the idea of psychic phenomena,
the scientific establishment will have to start to take
seriously the powerful evidence that he claims has been
accumulating in parapsychology labs for decades.

The universe inside your head

“Evidence is not the issue,” the voice on the
other end of the line said calmly. “We have plenty of
evidence. But evidence alone is not enough. What we need now is
a theory.” I was speaking with Dean Radin, senior
scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and one of
the leading voices in parapsychology, or “psi
research,” today. Having b
egun his parapsychology career
in the mid-eighties doing government-classified research at SRI
International (formerly part of Stanford University), Radin has
worked in psi labs at a number of universities and spent several
years as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is
perhaps best known for his 1997 book The Conscious Universe:
The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. In it, he
presents an accessible and comprehensive overview of all psi
research to date, including several meta-analyses of data from
multiple studies that, taken together, make a persuasive case
for the reality of such effects as psychokinesis, remote
viewing, clairvoyance, telepathy, and distant healing—all
of which seem to lend some support to the idea that the mind
cannot be entirely contained within the brain.

In studies of psychokinesis, or “mind-matter
interaction,” for instance, researchers have found over
thousands of trials that subjects can influence the output of
electronic random-number generators to a statistically
significant degree simply through the power of intention.
“Remote viewing” research, much of it funded by
federal agencies including the CIA, has shown that skilled
psychics can accurately describe remote locations in controlled
tests with odds against chance of over a billion to one. And
despite recent controversies that have erupted around the field
of “distant healing,” studies suggest that
“intercessory prayer” on behalf of others who don’t
know they’re being prayed for can reduce secondary infection
rates and hospital stays among AIDS patients, reduce the risk of
complications during heart surgery, and even improve pregnancy
rates for in vitro fertilization (results no doubt responsible
for the 2.3 million dollars spent by the U.S. government on
prayer research in recent years).

Psi research, like most frontier or “fringe”
sciences, has been fiercely attacked by skeptics claiming
research design flaws, inadequate samples, and experimenter
bias. So I was curious to ask Radin what body of research he
felt made the most irrefutable case for the existence of psi.
While he was quick to point out that “nothing in science
is irrefutable,” for the most convincing single body of
data, he soon landed on the phenomenon of telepathy. Most of us
have at some point been surprised to find ourselves seemingly
picking up on another’s thoughts, or knowing who was calling
before we picked up the phone, or in this internet age,
preparing to send someone a question via email only to receive
their response before we sent it. While skeptics readily reduce
all such phenomena to chance, a substantial body of research has
been accumulating that aims to show just how far beyond chance
they actually are.

The most potent evidence to date, according to Radin,
surrounds what are known as “the ganzfeld
experiments.” Hypothesizing that reduced sensory input
would place subjects in a more receptive state, in the 1970s
researchers developed a basic, easily replicable experiment in
which one subject, a “sender,” views a single image
for a period of time and attempts to send it telepathically to
another subject, a “receiver,” who has been
“prepared” by spending ten to twenty minutes in a
state of sensory deprivation. After this, the receiver is then
shown a series of four images and attempts to identify the sent
image from among them. If chance were the only factor involved,
this would predictably lead, upon multiple trials, to a
twenty-five percent success rate. But in the thirty years since
its inception, this experiment has been replicated in over
thirty-one hundred sessions across dozens of laboratories,
producing an average success rate of thirty-two percent. For
those not familiar with statistics, that might sound only mildly
interesting. By the standards of science, however, it is nothing
short of astonishing, showing odds against chance of over a
trillion to one. “The magnitude of the effect is small,
but it’s stronger than the experiments that convinced the
medical establishment that aspirin reduces the risk of heart
attacks,” Radin explained. “And telepathy is only
one of many areas of successful psi research. This is why I’m
saying that no amount of evidence alone is going to be enough.
The implications for the current scientific paradigm are just
too great.”

For Radin, who has been battling skeptics for over twenty
years, the accumulation of more data has, at this point, become
a side issue. “This evidence, evaluated by the same
standards as used in the behavioral, social, and medical
sciences, establishes that psi effects are real,” he
explained. “The only reason that it’s not accepted by the
mainstream is that there is no clear, theoretical reason to
accept it. It’s not accepted because people don’t know how to
explain it.”

When I spoke with Radin last winter, he was hard at work on
his next book, Entangled Minds, in which, in addition
to updating the results of psi research over the past seven
years, he plans to present a new theory that he hopes will open
the door fo
r the scientific establishment to begin to take psi
seriously. Like many theorists attempting to explain the
unexplainable, he is looking to the mysterious world of quantum
physics for answers. “Ultimately the mystery in psi is a
mystery about physics,” Radin told me. “The mystery
is that something somehow got inside your head that didn’t come
through the ordinary senses, and that transcends time and space
in some strange way. That mystery is about physics. It’s not
about biology, and it’s not about psychology or
neuroscience.”

Drawing on the well-established idea of “quantum
entanglement,” Radin is proposing the existence of what he
calls “bioentanglement.” In a nutshell, quantum
entanglement is the notion that seemingly separate subatomic
particles, once they’ve been in contact with one another, will,
in fact, remain connected even across space and time. This
connectedness, or “nonlocality,” was first
demonstrated experimentally in 1972, and in the three decades
since, Radin explains, physicists have been learning more and
more about how widespread the phenomenon is. “It is far
more pervasive and robust than anyone had imagined even a few
years ago. And for me, the question is: What does that mean
about the fabric of the world that we live in? What I think it
means is that if in fact things are entangled, and if all that
is required for two things to become entangled is some contact
at some point in their history, the
n everything in our universe
ought to be entangled, because cosmologists tell us that it all
came from one source, the big bang.”

Extending this idea of quantum entanglement out of the
subatomic and into the “macro” realm is a
controversial move, and one that, so far, most mainstream
physicists are not yet ready to make. But for Radin, the notion
of bioentanglement may provide a way of understanding phenomena
that seem impossible to explain within a classical materialist
worldview:

If brains behave as quantum objects, then it opens
the possibility that our brains are connected, or entangled,
with everything. In which case we can think of psychic phenomena
not as a mysterious process of information being sent from one
place to another and somehow getting into your head, but more as
a change of attention within the brain. If the whole universe is
already inside your head because you’re bioentangled with it,
then if you wish to see what is in somebody else’s head or
what’s in a hidden envelope somewhere else, or what’s on the
other side of the world right now or last year, you simply need
to attend to the portion of your brain that is entangled with
that state.

The view from above

In their quest to counter the reductionist tendencies of
materialism, frontier scientists like Radin and Sheldrake are by
no means fighting a solitary battle. In recent years,
philosophers, theologians, cosmologists, and even mainstream
cognitive scientists have joined the fray, developing powerful
critiques and alternative theories that attempt to expand the
frame of our thinking about the mind and brain.

Philosophically speaking, one of the more intriguing ways
around materialism—and indeed around the mind/body problem
itself—is the increasingly popular, albeit ancient, theory
of panpsychism. Advocated by a diverse range of thinkers from
David Chalmers to theologian David Ray Griffin, this idea, and
its close bedfellow panexperientialism, navigates the mind/body
conundrum by asserting that consciousness, or experience, is a
fundamental property of the universe that can in some form be
found everywhere—all the way down to the most elementary
particles. According to panpsychism, there is no need to try to
figure out how consciousness arises from the complex human
brain, because consciousness has been interwoven with matter
from the beginning. But before you start imagining rocks having
late night talks, note that the idea is not that pebbles and
molecules and quarks are conscious in the way that we are, but
that they would have some form of what Chalmers would call
“protoconsciousness” or what Jesuit priest and
paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as
“interiority.”

One advantage of this way of thinking is that it allows for
the notion that consciousness is something that develops along a
continuum of increasing depth and complexity. Instead of seeking
for that magical circuit in the animal or human brain that
suddenly gave birth to consciousness, panpsychists argue that
consciousness has been developing steadily as an inherent part
of the process of evolution. The more complex the organization
of matter has become, the more complex the level of
consciousness it has been able to sustain. Since the human
nervous system is the most complex piece of hardware on the
planet, it’s no surprise that it is accompanied by the most
complex form of consciousness. Though still eschewed by most
mainstream philosophers and scientists, this view is gaining
ground, particularly among the alternative intelligentsia, in
large part because it provides a potentially nonreductionistic
framework for understanding the relationship between the mind
and the brain (even if some of its proponents, like Chalmers,
use it as an argument for the possibility of conscious
machines—if all matter is conscious, after all, why
couldn’t a supercomplex computer be as conscious as you or me?).

But probably the weightiest attempt to counter
reductionism—and the one closest to the
mainstream—comes from a broad category of theorists who
look to the relatively new science of complexity, or emergence,
to explain the brain’s relation to the mind. For these
scientists and philosophers, the notion that consciousness
emerges from the activities of the brain is not in question. To
say that consciousness can be reduced to the brain, however, is
another matter. As Rita Carter describes it, emergence, simply
put is “the idea that a complex system can produce
something that is more than the sum of its parts.” How
exactly that happens is, well, complex. The basic idea is that
interactions between lower-order phenomena can give birth to
higher-order phenomena with properties that cannot themselves be
reduced to the lower-order interactions. Just as the wetness of
water cannot be found in the hydrogen and oxygen molecules that
make it up, so the complex qualities of mind, like reason,
decision making, reflection, and emotion, cannot be found in the
behavior of our neurons. The appeal of this approach is that
while it does not deny the biological roots of mind, it
nonetheless acknowledges the validity of higher orders of human
experience as having a reality of their own.

Among proponents of emergence theory are many religious
thinkers seeking a philosophically and scientifically
respectable way to preserve the sanctity of our higher human
faculties. But it has also found adherents among materially
inclined philosophers and scientists who are not satisfied with
reductionist explanations. As philosopher John Searle writes:
“Consciousness is irreducible not because it is ineffable
or mysterious, but because it has an essentially subjective
first-person mode of existence and therefore cannot be reduced
to third-person phenomena. The traditional mistake that people
have made in both science and philosophy has been to suppose
that if we reject dualism . . . then we have to embrace
materialism. But . . . materialism is just as confused as
dualism because it denies the existence of subjective
consciousness as a thing in its own right.”

What the panpsychists and emergence theorist
s share is a
conviction that materialism’s failure to adequately account for
the actual complexities of human experience is itself reason to
leave it behind. In this sense, they can be seen as part of a
larger movement of holistic thinkers for whom partial,
compartmentalized explanations of the phenomena of life and
consciousness are no longer satisfying. Insisting that the only
satisfactory theory will be one that addresses the multiple
levels and dimensions of our humanity—from neuronal firing
to cosmic consciousness—these new, more integral theorists
are attempting to forge a science that while remaining true to
the results from the laboratory is equally true to the realities
of our lived experience. As Templeton prize–winning
cosmologist George Ellis told me:

The standard mistake that fundamentalists make is to
posit a partial cause as the whole cause. Yes, the neurons are
there. That’s a partial cause of what’s going on. What these
neuroscientists are missing, though, is the top-down action in
the brain, which is the part that gives life its actual meaning.
And if you only choose to look from the bottom up, you’ll never
see that meaning. Think of a jumbo jet flying. The bottom-up
view of why it flies is because the particles are impacting the
wing from below and moving a bit slower than the particles
above. The top-down version of why the plane is flying is
because someone employed a lot of draftsmen using computer-aided
design tools to design the plane to fly. The same-level view of
why the plane is flying is because the pilot is sitting at the
controls and making it fly. Now, the physicists tend to miss
both the same-level view and the top-down view. And it’s t
he
same with these neuroscientists. To return to our flight
analogy, they would say that all that’s enabling the pilot to
fly the plane is the firing of some neurons in his brain. But
then they would be missing the fact that actually he had decided
to be a pilot when he was a boy. He got enthusiastic about it,
he raised the money for his training, and all the rest of it.
They just mess all of that up. They are unable to see those
higher levels because they’re focused on the lower levels.

Taken together, these alternative theories seem to present a
formidable case for the scientific establishment to reckon with.
But the materialistic bias in Western science runs deep. And
just how exactly it might be overturned remains anybody’s guess.
With approaches ranging from Radin’s theory-making to Fenwick’s
search for more evidence to Sheldrake’s
parapsychology-for-the-masses, there is certain
ly no shortage of
good ideas. Yet some feel that one of the more intriguing
candidates for the proverbial back-breaking straw lies in the
nature of the mind/body problem itself. As futurist and popular
science author Peter Russell suggests in From Science to
God, “I now believe this is not so much a hard
problem as an impossible problem—impossible, that is,
within the current scientific worldview. Our inability to
account for consciousness is the trigger that will, in time,
push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas
Kuhn called a ‘paradigm shift.’ ”

Is it possible that it will be science’s failure to solve
the mind/body problem that will ultimately lead to materialism’s
undoing? Could neuroscience’s bold attempt to penetrate the
mysteries of the human psyche be that one step too far that
brings the entire edifice crashing to the ground? It is of
course far too early to say, but if such an eventuality were to
unfold, given the mythic implications, it would no doubt give
the gods—and perhaps even Icarus—a good chuckle.

conclusion: a higher order

As I sit writing these words, several of my hundred billion
neurons are firing off messages to some of the fifty thousand
other neurons they’re each connected with—a microscopic
electrochemical fireworks display that makes Coney Island on the
Fourth of July look like a candelabra. With the recognition that
the end of my project is in sight, a cascade of noradrenaline
molecules dripping across the synaptic gaps between axons and
dendrites quickens my pulse, bringing a renewed alertness and
excitement. There is delight, too, which suggests that a
serotonin squall is probably under way, with perhaps a dopamine
shower for good measure. To keep up with the demands of the
task, my frontal lobes are working overtime, drawing support as
needed from the language areas in the temporal lobes and the
memory networks wired throughout the cortex. My right hemisphere
is appreciating the sense of the whole picture coming together.
My left is grinding away to make sure the logic actually does
hold together.

At the same time, on another level, I am thinking
about what to say next. I’m reflecting on the points I’ve made,
the examples I’ve used, the larger context I’ve set for the
article, and what I ultimately want to communicate in its final
few pages. I’m also thinking about who might end up reading it,
and wondering what questions you might have at this point that I
could still try to answer.

On still another level, I feel myself to be participating in
a larger creative process that seems to have its own
trajectory—one that was born when life first began to
reflect on its own nature, or perhaps even long before, and that
seems intent on continuing as long as there are conscious
entities willing to partake in its unfolding.

How all of these levels fit together may be life’s greatest
mystery. And if indeed it can be solved at all, at our current
rate of progress it doesn’t seem likely that it will be giving
up its secrets any time soon. Still, in the face of such
multilayered complexity, one can’t help but feel compelled to
reach for synthesis, whether it’s God or the neurons that are
doing the compelling.

As I struggle to come to terms with my yearlong journey into
the world of neuroscience and beyond, it’s as if I’m staring
down a hallway lined on both sides with images. On the left
wall, I see Phineas Gage, his personality forever shattered by a
loss of frontal lobe tissue. On the right, Pam Reynolds,
returning from the other side of brain death with memories of
the operation intact. On the left, I see my friend’s father,
Tess, and Julia, all swaying with the changing chemistry of
their brains. On the right, Radin’s and Sheldrake’s psi
research, pointing to the mystery of consciousness beyond the
cranium. On the left, there are Roger Sperry’s split-brain
patients, trapped in a perpetual struggle between the two
“centers of consciousness” sharing their skull. On
the right, field theory, panpsychism, holism, and emergence
theory, all insisting that it’s time to leave an unworkable
materialism behind.

By any stretch, it’s a challenging picture to make sense of.
And if I spend long enough on either side of the hallway, I find
it all too easy to forget about the story on the other wall.
Finding a worldview big enough to include it all does seem to be
the elusive quarry of this quest—for the field as a whole,
and for any individual who wants to come to grips with it.

For my own part, the easiest theories to rule out are those
on either extreme. I find the materialist notion that the mind
is an irrelevant byproduct of brain function about as plausible
as the dualistic idea that consciousness is some ghostly
ethereal substance that exists entirely independent of the
brain. The truth, it seems, must lie somewhere in between. But
where exactly?

Panpsychism holds a certain allure, not only because it does
away with the mind/body problem, but because it seems to
validate a basic intuition—that whatever consciousness is,
it must have been around since the beginning. But what exactly

it would mean for a salt crystal to have
“interiority” is still a bit beyond my ken.

Sheldrake’s idea that the mind lives in mental fields
extending out from my head also seems intriguing, in this case
because it seems to provide some explanation for those
mysterious spontaneous experiences of telepathy and for the
powerful experience of collective consciousness that seems to
arise when people gather in groups. Just how the brain’s neural
network could function as a “tuning system” for
consciousness, however, is still something I’m struggling to
visualize.

I’m also tempted to go with some version of the emergence
idea, as it seems the closest to hard science to say that
consciousness in some way comes out of the brain. But as one
philosopher pointed out to me, “Until someone explains
how emergence occurs, we might just as well say God did
it.”

And speaking of God, there is, of course, still the
possibility, asserted throughout the mystical traditions, that
consciousness came first and once it reached a certain
level of complexity, matter emerged. As tantalizing as I find
these sorts of explanations, though, they ultimately just
replace one hard problem with another: How could something as
ephemeral as consciousness give rise to something as concrete as
a physical brain? And why did it need to?

Perhaps the most promising and ultimately satisfying
theories are the integral ones that acknowledge the essential
reality of different levels and dimensions of existence,
allowing interiors and exteriors, consciousness and matter, to
be seen as different sides of the same event, neither reducible
to the other. Where mind and brain are concerned, however, even
the most integral theories have thus far been unable to explain
how the two i
nterconnect, leaving the mind/body problem
a mystery for another day.

In the course of my research, one thought experiment I’ve
grown quite fond of is imagining that my consciousness really is
being generated by my brain. Think about it—this whole
three-dimensional experience of sound, color, thought, feeling,
and movement all somehow arising out of the organic functions of
this wrinkled slab of tofu-like substance in your head. It seems
hard to imagine, but if it were true, what would that say about
the nature of matter itself? In fact, if I think about it in
this way long enough, I start to wonder which would really be
more earth-shattering—to find out that the brain doesn’t
create the mind, or to find out that it does.

What does seem clear to me at this point is that no matter
how much we learn about how the brain shapes our experience, we
probably don’t have to worry about losing our humanity in the
process. As George Ellis and others have elucidated, there are
levels of who we are that simply cannot be understood by looking
at our neurons alone. Although we may not lose our humanity to
neuroscience, however, it does seem likely that as research
progresses, we will have to let go of a few ideas—possibly
even some big ones—about what our humanity is made of. The
great specter of brain science is that it will demonstrate that
we are merely conscious organic machines, that all of our
experience and behavior originates in the brain. Based on the
evidence from frontier science alone, it doesn’t seem likely at
this point that it will quite be able to do that. But let’s say
that it were able to show that most of our behavior and
experience is rooted in the brain. What would that mean? Well,
for starters, we’d have to come to terms with the fact that
we’re a lot more organic machine than we’d like to
think—that, as much as we savor the nuances of our
personal wishes, aspirations, and personalities, most of our
responses are driven by genetic and social conditioning wired
into our brains on a level we cannot see.

Now, if you look at that statement carefully, you might
notice that it starts to look a lot like a sort of
twenty-first-century version of how spiritual luminaries have
been describing the human predicament for the last two or three
millennia. From the Buddha’s elaborate teachings on the
conditioned nature of mind to twentieth-century Russian mystic
G.I. Gurdjieff’s proclamation that “man is a
machine,” a central thrust of mystical teachings
throughout the ages has been a call to transcend our
conditioned, mechanistic existence and discover a freedom that
lies beyond all conditioning. And according to sages across
traditions, the first step to doing so has always been facing
just how deeply conditioned and machine-like we are. So, in an
ironic turn of events, brain science just might end up
supporting humanity’s spiritual aspirations in a way no one
expected. By exposing the impersonal mechanisms behind our
cherished personalities, it may inadvertently be helping to
clear the way for the discovery of that which the great masters
have always said lies beyond them.

And what about “that which lies beyond”? What
about the great mysteries of consciousness—of paranormal
phenomena and mysticism? Will brain science have anything to
teach us about those? In this case, the weight of the evi
dence
would seem to suggest that the answer is probably
“no.” Whatever it is that is still paying attention
when the brain is flatlined during NDEs, whatever it is that
allows us to perceive at a distance in telepathy and other psi
experiences, and more importantly, whatever it is that reveals
itself in mystical experiences—that, I would dare
to speculate, is probably not going to be reducible to
our synapses.

In the case of our mysterious capacities to sense, know, and
feel beyond the limits of our skulls, as Radin pointed out,
these are ultimately questions of physics rather than of biology
or neuroscience. The operative question, in this case, is: How
is information being transferred through space and time in a way
that bypasses the ordinary senses? Whether we explain that with
Sheldrake’s notion of mental fields or with Radin’s
“bioentanglement,” in either case, we are well
outside the realm of the neuron.

Where mysticism and spirituality are concerned, however, I
think the issue is somewhat different. For although there are
certainly a number of New Age physicists who would argue that
mysticism, too, is a matter of physics, based on everything I’ve
seen, I think that here we are dealing with something of a
higher order—an order that by its very nature cannot be
reduced to the levels below it. This is the testimony of mystics
across the ages, and there is nothing in neuroscience as of yet
that seems equipped to refute it.

Now, the fact that neuroscience alone cannot refute the
existence of that higher order does not in itself make it any
easier to prove that such an order exists. There are certainly
many who would argue vehemently that we have no scientific
reason to believe in the claims of religion and mysticism,
however forceful or enduring they might be. Pointing to research
like that of Andrew Newberg, they would assert that biology is
perfectly sufficient to explain the experience of spirituality.
But, as Newberg himself made clear, what they would be missing
is the fact that those who have had even a taste of mystical
experience universally report that experience to be “more
real” than anything else they’ve experienced. Materialists
could, of course, counter that such subjective perceptions have
no place in the quest for objective knowledge. However, even if
we take the materialist position that the brain is the sole
mediator of experience and the final arbiter of truth, we are
left with the fact that human brains across the ages have
universally concluded that the spiritual reality glimpsed in
mystical experience is in fact of a higher order than the
ordinary reality we experience every day.

And this leads us to what may be the most interesting point
of all. For as Newberg’s research demonstrates, there is little
doubt that the brain is at least a big part of what is enabling
us to perceive that higher order. This means that, in what may
be the greatest miracle we know, life somehow managed to evolve
an organ capable not only of reflecting on itself but of
perceiving something higher than itself—perceiving, even,
that which many believe to be the very source and creative
driver of the cosmos. Looked at in this way, the brain suddenly
starts to seem a lot less like some frightening organic computer
that we’d do well to distance ourselves from and a lot more like
a rather mysterious and even spiritual event in its own right.
After all, if it can do all that, who knows what kind of genius
and untapped potential live within its folds? Given that human
evolution is still in its early days, it in fact seems likely
that the awesome powers of the human brain have only begun to
reveal themselves. If we can use our gray matter to avoid
destroying ourselves, we may find that the story of humanity’s
higher potentials is just getting started.