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 interconnect, 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 evidence 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.