LINE BREAKS & OTHER VIOLENT CRIMES

Iain McGilchrist on the limits of neuroscience

It’s a mistake to think that this kind of thing will tell you more about what a human being is. There was a huge amount of excitement a few years ago when somebody found what they called the love circuit, what lights up when you fall in love. Well, did you expect your brain to be a virgin when you fell in love? Of course, something in your brain is going to light up. Something in your brain lights up when you eat a cheese sandwich. This isn’t very interesting. It’s interesting in a way in putting into context what bits of the brain may be doing, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the experience of falling love. Brains don’t tell you about persons, they don’t tell us about consciousness, they don’t tell us about life.

This reminds me of a passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience (which, I know, shut up about that book already, but I can’t help it) in which James is talking about how scientific study of religion can’t ever really explain religious feeling:

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,—that to understand the causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true; and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout … If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

I underlined a lot of this passage in my book because I often make the mistake of expecting my knowledge to stand in for experience. And boy, it really doesn’t. I need the reminder that there are currents in life—the experience of falling in love, the experience of spiritual feeling, the experience of deep grief—that simply have to be lived. That can’t be summed up in a lab report or a textbook or an essay.

[Perhaps this is also what leads me to feel angry at (or about) the Internet some days … it seems sometimes that the entire Internet is just a collection of people talking ABOUT things (very intelligently sometimes!), writing ABOUT things (often very eloquently!), PRETENDING to be things (frequently very well!). Where is the living it? It can only be off the screen. And yet I still sit and click around and tell myself I’m getting informed.]