THE VISION THING: PART THREE

Humans first located the soul in creation—sensing divine breath in the earth, water, wind and fire—and then moved it to the human heart (thanks to a fit of  Renaissance self-centeredness and the influence of Eastern medicine), before finally exiling the soul to the brain. This latest shift is the subject of Carl Zimmer's new book Soul Made Flesh: Thomas Willis, the Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World. Zimmer recounts the birth of neuroscience Oxford in the 17th century, when physician Thomas Willis founded what he called a "doctrine of the nerves." That, Zimmer says, was when scientists began to see the essence of a person as residing between the ears rather than behind the ribs. (John Locke would later call the brain the "mind's presence room.") The book is timely because of the emergence of what Zimmer calls our "neurocentric age," says neurologist Adam Zeman, reviewing Soul Made Flesh in the New York Times Book Review.

"The explosion of contemporary neuroscience is forcing philosophers into the laboratory once again to reconceive the soul," Zeman says. "Like [the 17th] century, this is a disturbing, exciting time for the science of mind." London Guardian reviewer Steven Rose is more disturbed than excited. He writes that modern neuroscience has a "commitment to reducing the soul to nothing more than flesh powered by information theory."

Several new books demonstrate this commitment. In an earlier review of Michael Morgan's The Space Between Our Ears: How the Brain Represents Visual Space, Rose details what is currently puzzling neuroscientists. Neuroscientists work with the metaphor "the mind's eye," realizing that it is in fact the brain that "sees"—composing an image after receiving electrical signals from the eyes (perhaps you could say that the eyes are the television cameras and the brain the picture tube). But what scientists don't know is how the brain integrates the visual pieces it collects. "There is no one 'visual cortex,'" Rose explains. "Rather, there are a number of discrete cell ensembles, each analysing different features of the world." That is why there are different kinds of visual impairment—some affecting perception of color, others movement, others depth. But when it comes to "perceptual unity," Rose says, "there is no homunculus in the brain putting it all together." There are other questions about "the mechanisms of perception," Rose says. Why does the world seem to stand still even when we run or jump, lurching our visual equipment around? How do we "see" a three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional drawing? Rose says Morgan has answers that are as engaging as they are technical.

An article earlier this year in Scientific American doesn't mention Morgan but does say that "the major unsolved problem in biology" is consciousness: "how billions of neurons swapping chemicals give rise to such subjective experiences as consciousness [and] self-awareness." The article recommends three relevant books, each of which discusses whether consciousness has entirely material components. Consensus on the materiality of "qualia," or "private subjective experiences," is elusive. (Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, the author of one of the books, Wider Than the Sky, was profiled in March in the New York Times .)

What none of these reviews and articles acknowledges, however, is that the profundity and texture of consciousness may be best rendered poetically, not scientifically. The aesthetics of consciousness may always be more marvelous than the mechanics of the consciousness—intriguing as they are—for the same reasons a savory steak dinner cannot be best understood through a scientific explanation of digestion. When, for example, Edelman recommends that we consider memory to be "a property of degenerate nonlinear interactions in a multidimensional network of neuronal groups," doesn't he belie the depth of the beauty (or trauma) of memory? The seemingly inexplicable way a memory can spontaneously transport you to childhood and draw a wistful or wrenched expression on your face—will we ever understand this better through science than through poetry or the arts? Is it anti-intellectual to suggest that we won't?

Related:
How brain scans work and what they tell us, from the Melbourne Age
The brain's blind spots, from the London Telegraph
Earlier:
The Vision Thing: Part One/Part Two
Neurotheology and its limits (more here and here)
Neuroscience and free will
What does the soul weigh?
Is Google a brain?

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Christian Science Monitor:

DAMASCUS, SYRIA — It used to be that visitors to this ancient Arab city had limited options for fine dining: a buffet at the Sheraton, a French bistro at the Meridian, or a Chinese restaurant in the Cham Palace Hotel. Travelers looking for an authentic Syrian culinary adventure—exploding with cumin, thyme, and garlic—settled for one of thousands of shawarma stands (serving shaved beef and chicken wraps) or else hoped for a dinner invitation from a Syrian family. That's changed in the past few years, though, as Old City Damascus—the part that's been continuously inhabited for at least 4,000 years—has been overrun by eateries. Wealthy Syrian businessmen have bought some 40 traditional Arab homes—jewel boxes of friezes and frescos, marble and mosaic—and converted them into restaurants … This has been a boon for tourists, and it has saved some 300-year-old architectural gems from decades of neglect. But critics complain that the noise and traffic these businesses bring are fraying the city's delicate social fabric and upsetting a historic mode of life for those who dwell near the new restaurants.

From the New Yorker:

Cameron County, which has a population of three hundred and thirty-five thousand, sits at the southernmost tip of Texas and consists of a smattering of small towns and two cities, Harlingen and Brownsville. … Cameron County is full of geckos, free-tailed bats, twice-fried-food franchises, and audacious contradictions. A replica of the Statue of Liberty is attended not by the "Give me your tired, your poor" inscription but by a notice that the spot is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Anglo sons of the Alamo wear cowboy hats with guayaberas made in China. The United States' richest diversity of birds shares the sky with the smoke trails of eight hundred thousand smoldering tires from a dump just over the Mexican border. And, while the rhythms of daily life often seem to have two speeds, slow and stop, the county has negotiated American economic history's two greatest transitions—from farming to manufacturing and, now, from manufacturing to service—in the space of forty years.

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.