A neuropsychologist’s search for the seat of the soul
Where is the self -- the seat of consciousness, the human soul -- located? Is it found in the brain, the center point of intelligence, where our ability to reason and store knowledge is grounded? Not according to British neuro- psychologist Paul Broks. “I know, I’ve seen,” he writes in his probing collection of essays, “Into the Silent Land.” “You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There’s no one there.” It’s not that the brain isn’t necessary for consciousness, he’s careful to clarify. “Whether it’s sufficient is another matter.”
Broks artfully argues back and forth on this question of self, which forms the core of his thoughtful, accessible look into neuropsychology (the science that compares changes in the brain with alterations in personality) and what it can and cannot tell us about human consciousness. Perhaps the self is tied somehow to our faces, he posits, our eyes, where we see that spark of gleaming consciousness and we “imagine some ethereal space between the vault of the skull, lit by shifting patterns and thought, charged with intention.” In a face, he reasons, we find an “essence.”
Yet a face, he counters, is only reacting to brain impulses. If one’s brain is damaged by illness or injury, the expressions we associate with the self are also altered. The self, though, the core of our being, remains intact. Or does it?
With great clarity and easy humor, Broks grapples with philosophical questions that have kept him up nights over the 25 years he’s worked in the field of neuropsychology. He weaves personal details together with case studies of his patients, the philosophy of human consciousness as considered though the ages by Wittgenstein, Descartes and others, along with his own pondering on this topic, all of which add up to an in-depth and searching look into who, exactly, we think we are and why we think it. He illuminates the deep fissures and crannies in the nature of individuality, and the role played by the brain in creating our impressions of ourselves.
In “The Seahorse and the Almond,” for example, he profiles Naomi, a young woman who suffers daily grand mal seizures and who hopes to undergo surgery to carve away a “small streak” of scarred brain tissue believed to the source of her epilepsy. The surgery is named “amygdalohippocampectomy” because it involves removal of the amygdala (from the Greek for almond) and part of adjacent hippocampus (seahorse). Each half of the brain contains both. Before surgery can be arranged, Naomi must undergo a memory test is to see if both sides are functioning normally. “If, as planned, the surgeon were to remove the right hippocampus, but it turned out that Naomi had no spare capacity in the left, then the operation would, in a sense, cause Naomi herself to stop,” Broks explains, fully aware of the Frankenstein-like shadow surrounding the proposed surgery. “She would form no new memories ... beyond her present age of nineteen.” Broks tests her recall after half of Naomi’s brain has been effectively, if temporarily, “amputated” by a drug. “I wonder if, with half of the brain closed down, we are engaging with just one half of the person?” he writes about trying to pin down what constitutes Naomi’s whole self.
In another essay, he reports meeting a man who was convinced his head was full of water and contained a fish rather than a brain. “Most of us believe that the head contains a person: a self,” but really, he tells us, we create ourselves by inference. “The self is not an intrinsic feature of the brain, and it is possible to become derailed.” Does the “self” as we understand it even exist or is it just a construct of language? And if just a construct, what are the consequences? “Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves,” he writes. “If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?”
Bringing to his investigations an easygoing style enlivened with great enthusiasm, Broks entices readers to follow him further into the unknown region of human consciousness. His writing is leavened with wit and quirky personal tales that add a warm touch. He revels in his explorations as if consciousness were a crystal goblet he’s holding up to the light to see it sparkle, refract and display its many facets.
Yet he draws no hard and fast conclusions. “As Wittgenstein said, the philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness. But if the disease is incurable, then so be it. I’m comfortable with the idea of not having solutions.”
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Title Goes HereInto the Silent Land
Travels in Neuropsychology
Paul Broks
Atlantic Monthly: 246 pp., $24
