Letters: Feb. 12, 2007

Finding Your Way Around Your Brain

Our series of reports charted the world of complex networks inside our heads, the intricate wiring that channels our senses, movements and self-perception. Readers valued the new scientific mappings but were circumspect about their contribution to theories of the soul and afterlife

New findings on the brain and its relation to the human mind may be scientifically sound but philosophically defective [Jan. 29]. Scientists like to break a rose, say, down to its atomic and subatomic particles. Likewise, they view consciousness as merely impulses within the brain. While this is sound science, it dismisses other routes to truth and meaning, such as philosophy and theology. The whole is greater than--or at least different from--the sum of its parts.

RICHARD W. METZ Sanibel, Fla.

A particularly intriguing aspect of consciousness is the pleasure of hearing a melody, reading Shakespeare, discovering an idea or appreciating a good joke. Moreover, most people are endowed with compassion toward others. Nothing in biological or physical science teaches us how to synthesize that kind of consciousness. How could those attributes arise unless they were already in nature? If assemblages of neurons cannot be viewed as the building blocks of consciousness, then consciousness must be a primary principle.

ROBERT G. TABOR Austin, Texas

Mapping the brain and tracing how its different parts interact can offer real hope for people with injuries and disabilities. But I do have one misgiving: I'm not sure I'll ever have the same degree of self-respect now that I know I'm just an illusion created by 100 billion jabbering neurons.

GREGORY DOBBINS Columbia, S.C.

Whether or not Steven Pinker is correct that conscious and unconscious thoughts must be in the brain, the question remains: Where is an idea, an inspiration, an intention before it appears in the brain? It is in the collective consciousness, which our world calls by many names: God, Yahweh, Allah, Source.

(THE REV.) TIM O'CONNOR Cumming, Ga.

I came away from Pinker's article doubting whether we have a soul. If consciousness is just a by-product of electrochemical reactions inside our brain, then where is our soul? Is our soul a separate entity from this collection of tissue and neurons that keeps our body running? Or when our brain dies, are we snuffed out like a candle, and that is the end? The more science discovers about the brain, the more I'm convinced that after our brain dies, we die with it.

BILL SIMON Lansing, Ill.

Concluding that neural firings are the only reality denies a more transcendent meaning. We all grow old, and like Woody Allen, we wish we would not. Our soul is an immortal, stationary bedrock, evidenced by our acute perception of time passing. We perceive time because it is separate from us. If we were caught up in it, we would not perceive it. Time takes bits and pieces of what lies on the bedrock--our health, our looks, our energy--but the bedrock of our soul, with its desire for life, joy, meaning and immortality, is only shaped and smoothed by time, never destroyed.

OTILIA E. HUSU Phoenix, Ariz.