The human brain is complex beyond anybody’s imagination, let alone comprehension,” says neuroscientist Jose Delgado. “We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road. All the rest is literature.”
Michael Gazzaniga, considered by some the father of cognitive neuroscience, posits a phenomenon in the left hemisphere of the brain he calls the Interpreter. The Interpreter tells the story of why things happen. It’s perpetually writing our resume for us. Ever since I first read of this concept, I haven’t been able to get my Interpreter to shut up for a while.
The key concept in understanding status is the idea of social comparison. Tom Wolfe offers, “Every time we go into a room with other people, it’s as if we have a teleprompter in front of us and it’s telling us the history of ourselves versus these people. We can’t even think of thinking without this huge library of good information and bad information.”
As to the folly of rational thought, Gazzaniga said, “It’s as if you threw a rock in the air, and in midflight you gave that rock consciousness. That rock would come up with 12 airtight, logical esons why it’s going in that direction.”
Seed, Science is culture, August 2008
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I can’t help wondering whether our growing understanding of the brain is taking us closer to understanding the mind. The brain is a tangible (if incomprehensible) concept. The mind is not. There are recorded incidences of people functioning at a level that the physical damage to or incompleteness of their brains should have rendered impossible. Some were just for brief moments – others have been (and continue to be) for sustained periods of time.
It seems that mind trumps brain, but is the mind seated in the brain? And what is it exactly? I think we’re a L-O-N-G way from the answer to either of those questions, particularly the second.