The Human Brain is Incredible as it Operates in Service to the Mind
It is incorrect to say that the brain ‘creates’ an experience — just as it is incorrect to say that a radio creates Beethoven. The brain’s role, like a radio, is to provide a physical structure for delivering streams of input — just as a radio delivers Beethoven’s music for your listening enjoyment.
This article is part four of a series on the human brain. Before proceeding with this article, I recommend reading the previous articles in this series (click here).
At the end of article three, I discussed the ‘emotional’ and ‘intellectual’ parts of the human brain. For this article, let’s discuss intuition and empathy.
Intuition
Your intellect is part of your human evolution, which includes an insatiable need for meaning. You inherited intuition out of a different but just as powerful need — the need for values. Right and wrong, good and bad, are so fundamental that the human brain has evolved to be wired for them.
This is where the intuitive phase of the brain enters the picture. It rises above emotion and intellect, giving you an overall perspective of this 3D reality. Psychologists call this ‘Gestalt,’ which refers to something that is more than the sum of its parts. The fact that humans are intuitive is often controversial — yet whole areas of your life depend on intuition.
A sixth sense
In effect, intuition fits the bill for a ‘sixth’ sense. A sense is a fundamental, primal way to take in the surrounding world by smelling, tasting, seeing, listening, and touching. More importantly, you feel your way through life with a sixth sense. You follow hunches.
You know what’s good for you and what is not. You know where to aim for your new career and avoid a dead end. You know who will love you for decades and who is only a passing fancy. Seeing the future is intuitive as well. We are all designed for it.
Where is intuition located in the human brain?
Are you intuitive? Your intuition tells you that you are. Intuition would be less controversial if it were isolated in a specific location in the brain. But it isn’t. The most popular belief is that the brain’s right hemisphere is responsible for intuition, while the left is rational and objective. But this neat division hasn’t held up to rigorous testing.
No one has successfully located the part of the brain that supports intuition, and many neuroscientists would rather sweep the whole issue under the rug. It’s inconvenient for brain researchers that God is not, in fact, in the neurons — nor are art, music, a sense of beauty and truth, and many other of our most valued and cherished life experiences.
The intellectual brain tries to override intuition.
In many ways, the intellectual brain, which gathers knowledge and processes data, is a constant hindrance because it continually attempts to override intuition. For example, the intellectual brain aims to rationalize into oblivion any notion of other dimensions, parallel realities, and any other framework that does not fit into the confines of scientific dogma and its 3D observations (click here for my article on this subject).
Empathy
Empathy is defined as the understanding and sharing of others’ feelings. Empathy differs from sympathy, which does not involve sharing another’s state of mind. More broadly, empathy has paved the way for moral reasoning and altruistic behavior throughout the ages.
Science tells us that at the neural level and through evolution, the main area of the brain activated by empathy is the cingulate cortex. Cingulum means “belt” in Latin. The cingulate lies like a belt in the middle of the cerebral cortex and is considered part of the limbic system, which deals with emotion, learning, and memory.
This is where science says that empathy physically resides. Science also says this ‘empathy’ region of the cingulate cortex is larger in females than in males and is generally smaller in schizophrenic patients, who are often tragically isolated in their emotions and delusional about what other people are feeling.
Studies and research show that empathic bonds are very real. They can cross the space that seems to separate ‘me’ from ‘you.’ This connection isn’t physical. It’s invisible and mysteriously extends outside the brain.
The role of the human brain
A radio lights up when music plays, but it doesn’t create the music. Likewise, brain activity does not create experiences — even though science can now see which areas of the brain are lighting up.
Neural networks map out and mediate electrical and chemical activity. Neurons aren’t actually thinking. Electrical and chemical activity isn’t the same as creating an experience. Instead, experiences begin with the intentions of mind-consciousness.
There’s a vast difference between having your arm move and moving it yourself. The difference lays bare the mysterious gap between the mind and the brain. Wanting to move your arm is an intention of the mind. Involuntary movement is an action triggered in the brain. They are not the same. Just remember that you are not your brain.
The mind that gives orders to the brain is an extension of your local/universal consciousness — the only true creator. Just as Beethoven is the true creator of the music played on the radio.
So, if you believe that your brain is the creator of consciousness, then the materialists can win every argument. And not just materialists — it is also atheists who say that the mind dies when the brain dies.
And what about our memories? Asking the brain to “store” memory is impossible. Chemical and electrical reactions in the brain happen only in the present. So, the question becomes: Does the brain remember what it did last Tuesday, or is it the conscious mind that remembers?
Neuroscience can chug along without answering such challenging questions by claiming that each riddle will be solved sometime in the future. However, the scientific view of reality will remain fatally flawed unless science can show how atoms and molecules learned to think, ponder, spur action, and remember.
Some things to keep in ‘mind’ about the brain
Examine the physical structure of the brain as deeply as you wish. In doing so, there is no hint that the brain produces a 3-D image of the world. Nor does a close examination of specific brain areas explain how we convert invisible photons (the quanta of light) into sight, the vibration of air into sound, and so on through all five senses.
The notion that humans walk, talk, think, and do things because our brains control us has existed for decades. Today, the average person accepts that the brain is a machine analogous to a computer. This view suggests we are like brain puppets driven by the mechanical operation of neurons.
Science today is wholly committed to the mechanistic model. There are a few cracks in the shell, but the notion that brain = mind has tremendous staying power.
Even the statement that “a computer equipped with a camera can perceive that the sky is blue” is wrong. The wavelength of light that falls into the spectrum of blue doesn’t become a color until processed by the brain-mind connection. Photons have no color. Indeed, we have no idea if other creatures see blue as blue. What we do know is that a computer with a camera cannot perceive — that is, become aware through its senses.
When the limbic, or emotional, areas of the brain light up on a brain scan, nothing is being observed but oxygen flow to those cells. No actual emotion is being triggered. It’s the other way around. If you get bad news and become sad, that triggers the limbic system and lights up the brain scan.
Like a computer, the brain stores and processes bits of information. This is the basic operation that science mistakes for brain = mind. Science wants us to believe that the mind is fiction, and that information is real.
The notion that ‘mind = information’ is at the heart of artificial intelligence (AI). But this idea falls apart because without a mind, zeros and ones of information have no meaning.
Only the mind can turn digits into a computer language. Taking the position that the brain is all that is needed to build a model of the world would mean that zeros and ones can transform themselves into a language all on their own — absurd.
Your brain’s operation is needed to present thoughts, feelings, and sensations in this 3D reality. At the same time, thoughts, feelings, and sensations only have meaning because of the mind. Mind and brain work simultaneously and seamlessly.
The human nervous system is incredible in its design and complexity. But the mind doesn’t need the brain to exist. Consciousness, of which the mind is a part, is fundamental in ‘creation’ and precedes all living things.
Consciousness cannot be subdivided — there is only one consciousness, even though it appears to be subdivided into billions of individual minds. To use an honored analogy from the Vedanta tradition in India, pure gold can be made into countless objects, but in essence, they are all still gold.
