The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

The real drive to understand the self, though, comes not from the need to develop treatments, but from a more deep-seated urge that we all share: the desire to understand ourselves. Once self-awareness emerged through evolution, it was inevitable that an organism would ask, “Who am I?” Across vast stretches of inhospitable space and immeasurable time, there suddenly emerged a person called Me or I. Where does this person come from? Why here? Why now? You, who are made of star-dust, are now standing on a cliff, gazing at the starlit sky pondering your own origins and your place in the cosmos. Perhaps another human stood in that very same spot fifty thousand years ago, asking the very same question. As the mystically inclined, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger once asked, Was he really another person? We wander—to our peril—into metaphysics, but as human beings we cannot avoid doing so.

When informed that their conscious self emerges “simply” from the mindless agitations of atoms and molecules in their brains, people often feel let down, but they shouldn’t. Many of the greatest physicists of this century—Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Arthur Eddington, and James Jeans—have pointed out that the basic constituents of matter, such as quanta, are themselves deeply mysterious if not downright spooky, with properties bordering on the metaphysical. So we need not fear that the self might be any less wonderful or awe inspiring for being made of atoms. You can call this sense of awe and perpetual astonishment God, if you like.

Charles Darwin himself was at times ambivalent about these issues:

I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.

And elsewhere:

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family of parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice…On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force.

These statements¹ are pointedly directed against creationists, but Darwin’s qualifying remarks are hardly the kind you would expect from the hard-core atheist he is often portrayed to be.

As a scientist, I am one with Darwin, Gould, Pinker, and Dawkins. I have no patience with those who champion intelligent design, at least not in the sense that most people would use that phrase. No one who has watched a woman in labor or a dying child in a leukemia ward could possibly believe that the world was custom crafted for our benefit. Yet as human beings we have to accept—with humility—that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.

GLOSSARY

Words and terms in italics have their own entries.

AGNOSIA A rare disorder characterized by an inability to recognize and identify objects and people even though the specific sensory modality (such as vision or hearing) is not defective nor is there any significant loss of memory or intellect.

ALIEN-HAND SYNDROME The feeling that one’s hand is possessed by an uncontrollable outside force resulting in its actual movement. The syndrome usually stems from an injury to the corpus collosum or anterior cingulate.

AMES ROOM ILLUSION A distorted room used to create the optical illusion that a person standing in one corner appears to be a giant while a person standing in another corner appears to be a dwarf.

AMNESIA A condition in which memory is impaired or lost. Two of the most common forms are anterograde amnesia (the inability to acquire new memories) and retrograde amnesia (the loss of preexisting memories).

AMYGDALA A structure in the front end of the temporal lobes that is an important component of the limbic system. It receives several parallel inputs including two projections arriving from the fusiform gyrus. The amygdala helps activate the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight responses). The amygdala sends outputs via the hypothalamus to trigger appropriate reactions to objects—namely, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and sex. Its affective component (the subjective emotions) partly involves connections with the frontal lobes.