A REASONABLE 4 FAITH Introducing the Sea of Faith Network Fleshing Out Faith A new resource book from SCM examining the ; relationship between our bodies and our faith. ¢ Will Christians ever learn to love the flesh? * Is there a difference between fashions in clothes and fashions in bodies? * Is the Body of Christ wellproportioned? at This accessible but challenging book is the latest in the acclaimed series of resource books from SCM. 44 pages of mind-stretching, bodyembracing material available for £5 5 SOF 43 / September 2000 by Alison Webster — ® = o E rr © ® secretions of reality When I tuned in to Brain Story (BBC2, 9pm, Tuesday August 1) I found myself unexpectedly reunited with Kantian philosophy — plunged, indeed, into a SoFic weltanschauung when I had anticipated mere dry and empirical “science”.
This edition, entitled “The Mind’s Eye”, explored the concept of “vision”, beginning with the question: what is the process by which human beings make sense of the world through the activity of “seeing”?
It was a delight.
Presented by Professor Susan Greenfield (a sort of Margaret Beckett without the caravan), the programme-makers’ methodology was to focus on individuals with specific and unusual forms of brain damage in order to draw conclusions as to how “normal” brains work. This entailed some fascinating case studies: two men were featured who'd suffered brain damage in car accidents: one can still see perfectly well but can’t recognise faces, including those of his nearest and dearest. The other can’t recognise any kind of objects at all, though he could draw pictures of objects from memory on request (but, interestingly, couldn’t recognise the pictures he’d drawn later when these were shown to him again).
Greenfield’s basic message was that everything we see has to be constructed inside our heads.
Nothing in the world is simply and straightforwardly “there”. It all has to be assembled first in the brain. This of course is bang on the philosophical notion introduced by Kant that we “see” by ordering our perceptions via categories which pre-exist in our heads and precede sense perception. “Seeing” is therefore a process of active decision-making through which we (at various levels) “decide” what it is that we want to see, and what it is that we need to see. Faces are so important to human beings, it seems, that there is a whole special subsection of the brain dedicated to processing our recognition of them.
And humans “decide”, for instance, to see a face in the most basic of patterns: two dots and a curved line, say. Mention was also made of a phenomenon known as “change blindness” where we simply don’t notice unexpected things, even when these seem perfectly obvious to those who are expecting them.
Most of the time we use our memories of everything we've ever seen in the world to imagine what is “out there”. So “seeing” means creating images and projecting them out.
This is how human beings manage to “take a massive universe and fit it into a tiny head”.
One scientist went so far as to doubt that there was anything at all “really” out there, and to speculate that the brain is, in fact, a “dreaming machine” — “secreting” reality and limited by the senses — rather than the senses helping us to straightforwardly record reality.
Feel good, think good The previous week’s programme focused on the emotions, and Greenfield challenged the traditional idea that the “rational” and the “emotional” are governed by different parts of the brain, dating from different evolutionary eras (with rational being the most advanced, of course!).
Rather, she argued that emotion and thought are inextricably interwoven in the brain’s processes.
Facial expressions, apparently, are the way in which we let others know what we are feeling, and there are six “universal” expressions: happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, anger and fear. The conclusion was that the emotional life is what makes life worth living; intense emotional experiences take over our whole body; the search for things that “feel good” motivates everything that we do. In short, unconsciously, emotions are guiding our every move, but are integral to our thought processes.
Having worked backwards through the series, let me talk about the first programme, in which the search was on to explain the phenomenon of religion. An experiment attempted to replicate “religious experience” through subjecting specific parts of the brain to external stimuli.
Unsurprisingly, the experiment was successful (there have been countless previous experiments SOF 43 / September 2000 6 The emotional life is what makes life worth living; intense emotional experiences take over our whole body; the search for things that “feel good” motivates everything that we do. like it). And so, the scientific argument went, since such experiences are not dependent on the existence of an external “God” to explain them, this must count as an argument against the existence of such a god.
Religion on the brain This argument is rather fatuous — for even those of us who aren't keen on the idea of an “external God” may concede that the production of “religious experience” in humans may not be such a God’s primary raison d’etre. But such experiments seem to assume a widespread fear amongst “religious people” that a very clever professor, able to isolate a part of the brain which is exclusively set aside for “religion”, will give religion a totally physiological explanation and, hey presto, render it valueless.
But it seems to me that if religion is not about everything that I’ve just explored as the subjectmatter of the second and third programmes in the series, then it is surely about nothing much at all. “Religious experience” may be identifiable with one particular part of the brain, but religion in its widest sense is not so easily locatable. For religion must be a key factor in what we learn and choose to see, and the value systems we create around what we decide to see; it must be about always seeking to avoid “change blindness”, being open to the challenge of seeing new things which have previously been out of our purview. It must link into our emotional reactions to the myriad of human faces that surround us: the need in them; the joy in them — it must seek to alleviate the fear and sadness in them and to maximise the happiness and (perhaps) the surprise in them.
If it is not about all this, then what is religion about? The search for a “religious” area of the brain makes sense only if we divorce religion from all other aspects of being human — aspects which Greenfield’s series shows up as both miraculous and wonderful. dot comma Tom Owen, well-known to all SoF conference addicts, has produced a volume containing 72 of his best poems, composed over thirty years. As fellow Lancashire poet Phoebe Hesketh testifies, “Tom certainly has the spark of poetry, with striking lines and strong rhythms to fit his themes”.