Wilder Penfield’s Science on the Holographic Soul

Image credits belong to: 12019 - Pixabay

Introduction

The human soul, or the part of us that eternally continues forth after death, is often addressed in topics of consciousness. The soul has been treated as something immaterial or non-physical in the history of the Church. This article explores what the Bible says about the soul alongside the neuroscience of consciousness.

I know my critics expect to see empirical, measurable evidence for the thing in question before I am allowed to discuss that said thing. 

But first, I need to outline some things.

First, I am going to discuss some passages from Biblical Scripture. Later, I am going to discuss some pages from a book titled The Mind of God: Neuroscience, Faith, and a Search For the Soul, which is written by neurologist Jay Lombard who is also medical director of a precision medicine company called Genomind. And lastly, that will be discussed in relation to the scientific work of the 1930s neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. 

Biblical Scripture clearly distinguishes between mental life and physical life when we consider Jesus' words in Matthew 22:37 saying “love the Lord with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind” which are things you do not only with your body. 

Hebrews 4:12 distinguishes soul and spirit from joints and marrow, and that God discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 

Such a separation of physical from non-physical is important to note, because when we dwell on our thoughts and intentions to achieve a particular moral outcome in our relationships with others, we must do so in terms that are not fixated on brain chemistry nor anything really physical.  

We use our minds to renew our minds through introspection and careful, logical strategy on how to rise above our physical circumstances that are preying on us. We are trying to improve our mental lives instead of giving into the destructive patterns influencing us through our environment. 

Romans 12:2 says:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Genesis 2:7 says that God formed man from the dust and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. Being formed from dust of the ground can correspond with the scientific fact that our biology and chemistry is primarily composed of the essential elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and that we are composed of roughly 60% water compounds and molecules. Water and those elements are found in the soil along with the essential nutrients of phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, magnesium, calcium, iron, boron, manganese, zinc, molybdenum, chlorine, and copper  which are also found in soil. 

The same carbon dioxide we exhale is the same carbon dioxide plants need for nutrition, revealing that we have an interdependent relationship with our ecosystems and biosphere. 

But the breath of God that was breathed into man at the beginning apparently is intended to distinguish us from the rest of the surrounding physical nature in spite of all our commonalities with physical nature. For instance, plants are suggested to maybe have some cognition or consciousness. They can release chemical signals called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are similar to pheromones used by animals, and these signals help to warn  other plants of danger and prepare for defense.  

Non-human animals seem to have moral systems of empathy, benevolence, and altruism. Specifically, studies have looked at food-sharing that serves multiple functions among chimps. Chimps will share food to bolster their relationships with "reciprocating partners and allies" and to minimize aggressive pressure and intimidation from other group members. Humans are known to cooperate with total strangers, behaving in ways that suggest a fondness for giving the advantage to others even in spite of no chance for nepotism, reciprocity, or reputational gains. In that regard, it is not totally clear that chimps have the same hidden motives extending beyond kinship, relationship quality, reciprocity and conflict avoidance. That is according to a 2013 National Library of Medicine article that I cited above. 

The breath of life from God and being made in the image or likeness of God implies intent for humanity to have more  rectitude and less savagery than those of the primal, non-homo sapiens. Religion commands only homo sapiens, and no other primate, to turn away from impulsive urges and selfish lusts, and to instead focus on collectively improving our moral structures to live in better harmony with our neighbor. 

And so, how do we accomplish that with the soul or kind of consciousness that has qualitative aspects of subjectivity, feeling, intuition, logic, reason, and symbolic language that we do not see arising from water, rocks, trees, and tables? 

On pages 60 - 63 of his book titled The Mind of God, Dr. Jay Lombard discusses the 1930’s surgical work of Wilder Penfield. Lombard’s source for this are pages 80 and 81 of Wilder Penfield's book titled The Mystery of the Mind. 

In light of the fact that our beliefs and emotions influence our biological functions and processes, they must also make their abode in our biological functions and processes.

But how?

Lombard describes the mind/soul as operating like a hologram. This hologram analogy goes back to the 1930s with Wilder Penfield who found the brain's ability to produce mental images that are analogous to computer simulations of 3 dimensional images, with which we interact but absent any electronic equipment. 

The word hologram comes from the Greek word holos, meaning ‘whole’, and gramma, meaning ‘message.’ A hologram is made from the interference of light beams, moving in a rotating fashion so you can see it from all angles. 

But in this hologram analogy, the 3-dimensional image does not take up a contoured, physical region within your bioelectric and biochemical wetware in your central nervous system. That is because the images you see are imagined. 

Wilder Penfield learned about this while producing three-dimensional dreams, smells, auditory and visual hallucinations, graphic recollections of past events, and out-of-body experiences from the exposed brains of his awake patients.

Though this may strike us as gruesome and grisly, it is implied that his patients were quite okay while pinpointing exactly where they felt the muscle contractions resulting from electrical excitation to their brains. 

Lombard reports from Penfield that placing an electrode on a patient’s temporal lobe would evoke fragments of past experience. These old files, organized in the order by which they occurred, are an aspect of consciousness that could be electrically triggered. 

The revivified past can be a measurable extent of one’s inner world that holographically envelops memory. In other words, when you think about your pleasant experience at your favorite concert or favorite restaurant or being cradled by your mother at a young age, you do not see it as a flat design like a painting. Your mind replays the multidimensional past like a movie or theater of scenes in continuous sequence. You can imagine the scene rotating so that you can see the various angles. 

This is what Penfield witnessed when externally exciting the brains of patients who could differentiate their past events from their current theater of experience. Penfield understood them to have two separate "streams of consciousness" coexisting side by side. The revivified past can feel so real while knowing it is not externally real, because it is an internal virtual world, best expressible without the use of technical biochemical jargon. 

Penfield saw this as the mind being distinct from the brain, because the mind is held up by a "different form of energy." Though the brain is physical, it incarnates an experience of virtual and representational parts that are not visibly graspable in external space and time but are still presented to yourself through the medium of neurons and synapses. And according to Lombard, "Numerous subsequent studies back up Penfield's findings." 

And now for my final points:

There may be neural substrates correlating with every thought and experience imaginable, but that landscape is still not identical nor reducible to your thoughts and experiences, in of themselves. It is not identical nor reducible to you, overall.

Your neural substrates are NOT coterminous (i.e., not equal in boundaries and extent of meaning, time, and space) with the individual contents of your thoughts and experiences.

My previous post titled The Narrative and Biological Foundations of the Soul addresses those points further.

The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.

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