The Neuroscience of Your Body’s Lamp
‘ “Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is! ‘
Matthew 6:22–23
https://my.bible.com/bible/116/MAT.6.22-23
In 2013, I was an unhappy high-earning 9to5 big-corp employee, spinning my mouse wheel the strongest I could. During that summer my dad recommended I read a book he enjoyed and during the intro, the author wrote:
“Once my mentor heard the difficult times I was going through he said that I should start reading the Book of Proverbs one chapter every day, fits perfectly”.
I started doing it too, it’s been 10 years, and my life has never been the same! I recommend you do that too, but beyond that, since I’m the son of a Psychologist and grew up listening to stories about Freud, Jung, and Skinner, I wanted to understand what happened to my brain.
Could there be any relationship between spiritual growth and changes in our brains? Did Jesus give us a lecture on Neuroscience in the above verse?
Here are a few things I have discovered, so far, from Neuroscience that might help us connect things.
1. Neuroplasticity
Probably the most basic topic in this article refers to the ability of our brains to change throughout our lifetimes according to internal and external stimuli. According to Wikipedia:
“is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization”
Although the term was coined and has been studied since the 1800s, back when my mom was studying psychology in the 90s most schools defended that the brain rapidly evolves when we are kids, but when we get to adulthood the brain stops evolving. It just feeds information and adjusts content, sometimes deleting old and useless stuff, but its physical structure, the neuronal connections are fixed.
But in 1981, researchers David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel made an experiment with cats that would change everything. Here’s a summary:
“The experiment involved sewing one eye shut and recording the cortical brain maps. Hubel and Wiesel saw that the portion of the kitten’s brain associated with the shut-eye was not idle, as expected. Instead, it processed visual information from the open eye. It was “…as though the brain didn’t want to waste any ‘cortical real estate’ and had found a way to rewire itself.”
That finding led another researcher Dr Michael Merzenach to get even deeper and treat different diseases like schizophrenia through training and “forcing” structural changes in adults’ brains. Neuroscience was changed forever.
Since the 2000s and the growth of technologies such as fMRI Neuroplasticity is more than proven.
Bear in mind: the more you train your brain the more it evolves.
2. Your Eyes are not connected to your brain
Your Eyes ARE brain that during our evolution in the womb got expelled from the skull! Let that sink in for a moment.
No wonder Jesus said that our Eyes are the Lamp in our Bodies.
That concept was highlighted by Stanford researcher Dr. Huberman during an interview and has deep implications for us to understand the connection between the brain and vision.
First, the Optical Nerve that connects your Eyes to the rear part of your Brain is the largest, most powerful, and most important nerve in your whole body.
Secondly, your eyes are connected to your brain in the Occipital Lobe, a small area in the back of your skull, but in order to process the light stimuli in your retina, we use around 40–50% of the real estate of our brains. Also, the visual system corresponds to about 80% of all sensory data we get from our environment. It drains a lot of power!
Finally, in simple terms images are formed on a two-way model, first the stimuli in the Retina, then the image created inside our brains. You see, we have the Eyes and Mind’s Eyes, a physical external structure that capture light, and a physical internal structure that processes that light and creates the image.
What’s mind-blowing is that researchers found out that imagination affects how we SEE the world. Imagination happens in what’s called a “mental workspace”, several areas working together to create an image, and because imagination takes place in several different areas, it also affects the images created by the Mind’s Eye. A two-way model.
3. Focus is Everything
When humanity started digging into the smallest parts of matter, a whole new world unfolded called Quantum Realm. If you are familiar with Marvel’s Ant-Man you kinda get it.
Many things we thought we knew started to fall apart the more we analyzed super-tiny structures. The quantum realm had its own operational model completely different from our “regular-sized” world.
The characteristics of our neuron connections - with their electrical currents and chemicals - mean they are Quantum Channels. This is a bit complicated to explain but it’s why USB Keys and Memory Cards were created, as well as Nuclear Fusion. But that also means that the brain connections should follow the rules of Quantum Mechanics.
One of these rules is the Quantum Zeno Effect which states that the more we observe a particle, the less it changes. On the brain, the effect is that the more we look at or do something, the stronger that neural pathway becomes. It’s a double-edged sword, on one hand, the more we focus the strongest the connections get inside our brains, but also the harder it is to change them.
That’s a neuroscientific explanation of why it is so difficult to evangelize people deeply rooted in other religions.
How to Walk in the Waters
Jesus was quite clear on what he was focused on:
‘So Jesus explained, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does. ‘
John 5:19
https://my.bible.com/bible/116/JHN.5.19
Even more interesting is the sense that he used, he didn’t say Hear, Taste, Smell, or Feel, he said SEE.
One of the most common sense teachings from the Bible is when Peter Walks in the Water, while he was focused on Jesus he could walk on the water, when he changed the way he was looking he fell.
Well, now that we’ve learned a bit about Neuroscience, we understand that while Peter was looking at Jesus, his brain was changing, building a very strong connection to the possibility of walking on water, but the moment he turned, the QZE showed up, and that neural pathway was broken.
That’s interesting because Solomon attests that:
‘There’s nothing better than being wise, Knowing how to interpret the meaning of life. Wisdom puts light in the eyes And gives gentleness to words and manners. ‘
Ecclesiastes 8:1
https://my.bible.com/bible/97/ECC.8.1
Do you see? Not only the Eyes are the Light to your Body, a Window to Metanoia, but Wisdom is the Light into your eyes.
Who is Wisdom? The same Solomon will say that Wisdom was the Architect with God in the very beginning, and we know that Jesus is that architect.
The Beginning and The End. The Wisdom of Truth. The Way. The Life-light from John 1.
Final Thought
You don’t need neuroscience to know that if you want a new life you just need to Focus on JESUS!
