Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MIND AND BRAIN APPEARS, at first sight, to be a relatively easy one to grasp, even for the amateur neurologist. Brain is the machine, mind its creation. Brain is the cinema equipment, mind the feature film. Brain is the cluster of tiny lasers on the podium, and mind the holographic image of the Fabergé egg. Brain is the instrument, and mind the consciousness that arises out of it, orchestrated by millions of neurons working in concert. It’s your brain, not your mind, that the surgeon sticks the scalpel into. It’s your mind, not your brain, that feels nervous at the prospect. Simplistic, but so far so good. It’s when you get into the relationship between brain, mind, self, and soul that things become more speculative and more prone to prejudice, not least of the religious kind.
Aristotle set the agenda in the fourth century B.C. as a materialist, arguing that the soul (mind) can’t exist without the body, which sounds impressively modern until you take into account his insistence that the heart was the location of the thinking self, and the brain some kind of body-cooling device. In general the more modern the thinker, the more integrated brain and self are assumed to be. So it’s mildly shocking to read something as recent as Carl Gustav Jung’s The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1955) and find him asserting that “we must completely give up the idea of the psyche being somehow connected to the brain.” Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement, agreed. “Give up the belief that mind is, even temporarily, compressed within the skull, and you will quickly become more manly or womanly,” she wrote. “You will understand yourself and your Maker better than before.”
In contradiction of this, the most recent crop of popular science writing is at pains to point out that in every way that really matters, we are our minds, and that our minds and our brains are wholly interdependent. In his idea that psyche is something separate, Jung isn’t far from the mind-set of René Descartes (1596–1650) and his firm division of body and self, the self (soul) merely residing in the (mortal, transient) body until such time as immortality can be earned and achieved. It’s assumed that this philosophy is biblical, but in fact you’ll struggle to find supportive evidence there: the idea of dualism is essentially Greek, and man in the Bible is a holistic, whole creature, body and soul together, anticipating bodily resurrection. The Greek idea is that immortality is a fundamental human attribute; in Christianity it’s a gift from God. Plato was Descartes’s model, in his belief that an immortal self enters the body somehow, and departs it intact after death. (Descartes struggled with his faith. Having coined cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—he worried that perhaps his thinking self was all that he was, and no more.)
It looks like a two-horse race. Either the brain is all there is to us, personalized through genetic inheritance and through the individuality of experience into a mind, creating the illusion of soul through its clever holographic tricks, and we die with our neurons, or the brain is simply the machinery the self/soul employs for its brief stay on earth and in time, and the self/soul, the ghost in the machine, survives us. Any mortal creature would wish Descartes fervently to be right. Added to which, the idea that there is some higher order of personal reality beyond the body, the state of the brain, the workings of the mind—this has a special resonance for dementia sufferers. It introduces the hope that their essential self survives the apparent disintegration dementia brings, locked away safe from the banality of disease.
Descartes thought the soul entered the body through the pineal gland, choosing this entry point because there wasn’t then any other obvious use for it, and it was thought to be specifically a human piece of kit. He was, for obvious reasons, an established church favorite, despite his doubts. The establishment was less keen on Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), inventor of phrenology (head bump reading), who having surveyed the head shapes of the criminal class, placed subtleties of personality in specific brain regions, which seem to us now entirely random: self-esteem in the parietal lobe, for instance, secretiveness in the temporal lobes, and friendship in the occipital. Less eccentrically, this led him, and the population at large, to the conclusion that self is biology. This was enough to get him expelled from Austria by the emperor Francis I.
If brain is mind, and mind’s thought equivalent to self, self equivalent to soul, theological problems are going to arise. There are neurologists writing now who are confident that consciousness itself will before long be “located” and explained as utterly physiological, a line of thought that Francis Crick, the DNA Nobel winner, popularized in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994). In his last paper (2004), Crick suggested the claustrum, a “sheet” located beneath the inner surface of the neocortex, which receives information from all areas of the cortex and returns information back into it, might be the seat of consciousness. The truth is that science doesn’t yet have the answer to the mystery: how it is that a subjective self comes about at all (known as the Easy Problem) and achieves self-awareness (the Hard Problem).
The phrase ghost in the machine, incidentally, was coined by a British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, in 1949, in mockery of Descartes’s dualism. Arthur Koestler’s book of the same name (1967) was interested in a different kind of ghost, one associated with the amygdala, deep in the limbic system, creator of impulses concerned with gut instinct, fear, aggression. He suggested that our social evolution has far outstripped our brain evolution, and that we are held back by the primitive emotions and functions of obsolete but still-powerful remnants of our prehistoric selves, which can be held accountable for our being warlike, suspicious, and bigoted.
When the frontal lobe is damaged by Alzheimer’s and the self is fractured by the forest fire of neuron death, maybe other parts of the brain rise up to compensate. When rationality is damaged or lost, it is perhaps more primitive parts of the brain and the great hidden sea of the unconscious that prompt facets to rise unexpectedly into view, redirecting the personality of the dementia sufferer into something the caregiver doesn’t recognize, with new preoccupations, hostilities, and weirdness. As Freud wrote, though we are more sure of ourselves than of anything, confident that a self is something autonomous and self-contained, the truth is that “the ego extends inwards with no clear boundary into an unconscious psychical entity.” As social philosophers of the seventeenth century might have put it, Nancy has lost her Natural Government, and is in danger of relapsing into a state of nature.
It isn’t necessarily a two-horse race. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer seems to have been an adherent of a third way, the idea that though there is no immortality of the individual earthly self, we are more than our brains, and return after death to the same state of existence we enjoyed before birth, giving up (with relief, he claimed) the painful and limited animal consciousness of being human and existing in time. “Consciousness is destroyed in death,” he wrote, “but that which created it is by no means destroyed.” He wasn’t the first to see things this way. Anaxagoras, in the fifth century B.C., is thought to have introduced the idea of mind (nous) as something infinite and immortal, emanating from The One, the collective human entity that organizes matter and survives it.
Others take a more Platonic route. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote, “If my physical frame dissolves, I can’t live in this world any more, because this world is a transform: the brain is the transformer and is itself a transform.” (A transform is reality as delivered up by our perceptions.) It’s perhaps Laing who puts the problem of brain and self most succinctly when he goes on to say, “[T]his collection of cells has the impression that it is I. This is a proposition I do not necessarily agree with.”