be related to the mechanism of [the)body simply as a collateral product ofits working, and to be completely with-out any power of modifying that work-ing as the steam-whistle which ac-companies the work of a locomotiveengine is without influence upon itsmachinery." Cartesian dualism mayhave prevailed among scientists longafter Huxley's pronouncement, butevents were already conspiring to tumthe mind's doubt about its impressionsinto a creeping certitude that the minddidn't really exist.

The twentieth century did little toreverse this course.' Even as Freudmapped the terrain of the psyche, doc-tors were discovering that many cas-es of insanity were caused by thesyphilis spirochete, which took up res-idence in the brain and could be treat-ed with a timely dose of penicillin.Psychosurgery and psychiatric drugsshowed that changing the brain's

anatomy and biochemistrycould radically alter con-sciousness, and advances inelectron microscopy allowedscientists to see what it wasthe surgeons and pharma-cologists were doing. Scan-ning devices-MRIs, CTs,PETs, SPECTs-were ableto catch the brain at workas people dreamed, learned,remembered, and evenwatched pornography. Thebrain's supremacy was con-firmed by presidentialproclamation when GeorgeH. W. Bush declared theNineties "The Decade ofthe Brain," committing thegovernment to increasedfunding of neuroscienceand a campaign to "en-hance public awareness" ofthe benefits afforded bystudying the "3-pound massof interwoven nerve cellsthat-controls our activity."As the twentieth centurydrew to an end, most neu-roscientists were in agree-ment With Nobel LaureateEric Kandel, who an-nounces in his contribu-tion to Best of the Brain thatthe "mind is a set of oper-ations carried out by the

A MIND OF ITS OWNResisting the tyranny of the brain

By Gary Greenberg

Discussed in this essay:

Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Mauer, and Tomorrow's Brain,edited by Floyd E. Bloom. Dana Press. 270 pages. $25.

The Self and Its Brain, by Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles. Routledge. 616 pages.$55.95.

The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams,and God, by David Linden. Belknap/Harvard University Press. 276 pages. $25.95.

The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul, by Mario Beau-regard and Denyse O'Leary. HarperOne. 368 pages. $25.95 ..

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our ExtraordinaryPotential to Transform Ourselves, by Sharon Begley. Foreword by the Dalai Lama.Ballantine. 283 pages. $14.95 (paper).

The' modern age ofneuroscience mayhave begun in

1848, when a poorly loadedexplosive charge sent atamping iron through theskull of Phineas Gage,a Vermont railroad work-er. Gage survived, but hewas impulsive and irrita-ble where he had oncebeen steady and affable-a change that doctors even-tuallyattributed to the dam-age done to his frontal lobes.We could also look for neu-roscience's beginnings in theearly 1860s, when patholo-gists used autopsies to pin-point brain lesions associat-ed with the inability tospeak or to understand lan-guage. In any event, by 1874enough evidence of themind's material origins hadbeen collected for the Eng-lish biologist Thomas Hux-ley to conclude that con-sciousness in humans as wellas animals "would appear to

Gary Greenberg's most recentosticie for Harper's Magazine,"Manufacturing Depression," ap-peared in the May 2007 issue,

Altered book by Brian Dettmer. courtesy Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago.Dettmer's work is currently on display at Kim, Tillou + Feigen, New York City REVIEWS 83

brain, much as walking is a set of op-erations carried out by the legs, ex-cept dramatically more complex."

In a single month last fall, a casualconsumer of media could glean that"the sleeping brain is actively workingon the day's streaming video of infor-mation"; that because of "a design flawat the interface where the brain en-counters a computer screen," email"generally increases the likelihood ofconflict and miscommunication"; thatthe impulse to dance to music arisesbecause "the motor cortex andcerebellum-the parts of the brain re-sponsible for initiating and coordinat-ing movements-c-are active during mu-sic listening"; that if I drop the wordfuck into an essay, I am "pinging youramygdala"; and, if you happened to bereading the Fitness Foals comic in]ackand]ill magazine, that your hypothala-mus "tells you when to breathe." Thisis all before you've heard from your pe-diatrician about the frontal-lobe deficitsthat have impaired your child's "exec-utive function," or from your friendabout the antidepressants that havecured her neurochemical imbalance, orfrom the book Your Money and YourBrain about how the "science of neu-roeconomics can help make you rich."Now that we've turned Huxley's heresyinto orthodoxy and discovered how thebrain generates its steam, it seems wecan whistle all the way to the bank.

And, as one enthusiastic neurosci-entist, Y. S. Ramachandran, has said,"If all this seems dehumanizing, youhaven't seen anything yet." One hun-dred years after Freud invoked hisstrange language of complex and cathex-is to tell us how our history makes uswho we are, neuroscientists are deliv-ering a different verdict in the lan-guage of neuron and synapse: what mat-rers is not biography but biochemistry.Our brains are us.

But before we surrender to ourbrains, and to the doctors and the drug-company scientists who claim to un-derstand' and treat them, we shouldbear in mind something that Karl Pop-per said in 1977. In The Self and ItsBrain, which he coauthored with pio-neering neuroscientist John Eccles,Popper objected to what he called"promissory materialism": the tenden-cy of scientists to behave as if theyhave already demonstrated that the

84 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2008

mind is no more and no less than whatthe brain does, assuming that eventu-al proof is inevitable. This approach, hewrote, "offers us the promise of a bet-ter world, a world in which mentalterms will have disappeared from ourlanguage, and in which materialismwill be victorious." Findings reportedby neuroscientists can be read as fur-ther evidence for that world, of course,but, as Popper points out, they canalso be read as a form of propaganda:

With the progressof brain research, thelanguageof the physiologistsis likely topenetrate more and more into ordinarylanguage and to change our picture ofthe universe, including that of commonsense. So we shall be talking less andless about experiences, perceptions,thoughts, beliefs, purposes and aims;and moreand more about brain process-es.... When this stagehas been reached,mentalism will be stone dead, and theproblem of mind and its relation to thebody will have solved itself.

Thirty years later, neuroscientistshave not yet put paid to the promisso-ry note, though this doesn't stop themfrom talking as if they had. And youshould pay attention to what they aresaying to you. Because if you are goingto live, whether you like it or not, inthrall to your brain, then your future be-longs in some way to the doctors whoclaim to be the only people qualified toexplain you to yourself.

There are approximately onehundred billion neurons in yourbrain, about the same number as

there are stars in the Milky Way. Neu-rons sprout tendrils that can reach fromthe very bottom of the brain stem to thefrontal lobes, forming a pulsating tan-gle of fibers laden with amino-acid-richjuices that are in tum soaked up by oth-er tendrils connected to other neurons.There are perhaps five hundred trillionof these synapses; the number of possi-ble circuits among neurons is thus, asone scientist has put it, "hyper-astronomical": in the neighborhood often followed by a million zeros.By com-parison, the number of particles in theknown universe add up to ten followedby a mere seventy-nine zeros.

Whether they believe, along withneurologist Mark George, that the brain"is fundamentally an electrical organthat transmits electrical signals from

one nerve cell to the next," or prefer in-stead Kandel's formulation-"a com-plex biological organ of great compu-tational capability"-the prominentneuroscientists who contribute to Bestof the Brain are sure that a full explica-tion of its operations is just a supersizedtechnical challenge that will soon bemet. "By 2050," Antonio Damasiopromises in his chapter, "sufficientknowledge of biological phenomenawill have wiped out the traditional du-alistic separations of body/brain,body/mind and brain/mind." What wewill be left with is biology, with a littlechemistry and physics thrown in forgood measure.

Of course, the resulting explanationwill be of vastly more significance thanan account of, say, how our legs propelus forward. Having observed the brainat work, scientists will pronouncetruths on that most elusive of subjects:human nature. They will tell us-withthe certainty of science and withoutthe messy complications of meta-physics or ideology-where we comefrom, how we emerge from the "massof interwoven nerve cells," what wecan expect of ourselves, and what weshould do when we don't measure up.There may still be some doubters-"naysayers," Damasio calls them, whoinsist that "the exhaustive compila-tion of all these data adds up to corre-lates of mental states but nothing re-sembling an actual mental state"-yetKandel is confident that they are du-alist dead-enders who will soon beswept aside by "a science that uses thepower of molecular biology to examinethe great remaining mysteries of life."

These halcyon days have yet to ar-rive, but if you listen to the way the sci-entists are talking, you begin to sus-pect that the fix is in. According toour leading neuroscientists, the brain isa "creature of habit" with a "naturalintentionality." It "constructs our sen-sory experiences, regulates our thoughtsand emotions, and controls our ac-tions." It "issue]s] fine corrections" and"formls] a prediction," "becomejs] awareof ... difference" and "createjs] memo-ries," "talkjs] to the reward pathway"and "bestowls] moments of illumina-tion." Its "hardworking neurons" are"born cartographers." Its left hemi-sphere "analyzes" and its right hemi-sphere "interprets," one side keeping

the other "in check.". And the mostimportant piece of all: "The frontalcortex is the substrate of our individu-ality .... Not just our cognitive capac-ities but our character-our person-hood, so to speak-resides in this." Thebrain, it seems, has a mind of its own.

W·ho can blame these men forcreating the brain in theirown image? As a neurosci-

entist will no doubt someday discover,metaphor is something the brain doeswhen complexity renders it incapable ofthinking straight. One cannot reallywrite about the source of human agencywithout indulging in the pathetic fal-lacy; what differentiates these writersfrom Cartesian dualists is the natureand location of the agent. "There is noseparate spectator for the movie-in-the-brain," writes Damasio, using his ownmetaphor for our sense that we are anarrative held together by an interiorauthor. "No ghostly homunculus hauntsthe theater. Objective brain processesknit the subjectivity of the consciousmind out of the cloth of sensory map-ping." Behind the curtain is no littleman but only the all-powerful brain,and selfhood is a bootstrap operation: ofthe brain but not in it. 'The brain lordsover us, makes us out of neurochemicalsand meat in the same way that we usedto think God made us out of dust.

And if you still think God made us,there's a neurochemical reason for thattoo. "Our brains have become partic-ularly adapted to creating coherent,gap-free stories," writes David Lindenin The Accidental Mind.: How BrainEvolution Has Given Us Love, Memo-ry, Dreams, and God. "This propensi-ty for narrative creation is part of whatpredisposes humans' to religiousthought," and that propensity can befound in the left cortex. (We knowthis because people with surgically splitbrains-most of them epileptics whoseseizures can be controlled only by sev-ering the connections between thehemispheres-consistently use onlytheir left cortices to construct narra-tives that explain their behavior in cer-tain experiments.) The narrative driveis so powerful that it cannot be shutoff, even during sleep-s-which is why,according to Linden, the fragmentedand illogical is spun into story in ourdreams. In dreaming, he argues, our

brains learn "to make the cognitiveleaps that underlie nonnatural istic .thought." Applying this lesson to themysteries of existence, the left cortexcomes up with religious explanation.

One wouldn't want to take the factthat the brain is equipped for religiontoo far-to believe, for instance, thatthe brain is designed by an intelligencethat wants to be recognized:

Nothing couldbe further fromthe truth.The brain is, to use one of my favorite

. words,a kludge (pronounced "klooj"), adesign that is inefficient, inelegant, andunfathomable, but that neverthelessworks.Moreevocatively,in the wordsofthe military historian Jackson Gran-holm, a kludge is "an ill-assorted col-lection of poorly matching parts, form-ing a distressingwhole."

According to the Oxford English Dic-tionary, Granholm coined "kludge" asan ironic twist on kluge, German for"smart" or "clever," but the hackers andgeeks among whom the word is a pop-ular term to describe a jerry-built com-puter system claim that it is related toa Scots word for "latrine." Either way,Linden's point is made: the magnifi-cent brain and the mind that it fabri-cates are just more accidents of evolu-tion, a series of modules of variouscapacities that developed for differentreasons and then piled on top of one an-other like, as Linden puts it, so manyscoops of ice cream melting togetherin messy, if often delightful, ways.

Invoking natural selection may re-assure us that our destinies are dealt bya rational (if invisible) hand ratherthan by an irascible (and hidden) God,but these explanations of our complexbehavior do beg an important ques-tion. When neuroscientists tell uswhere storytelling comes from, or whywe can't tickle ourselves (our cerebel-lum, stimulated when we move ourown hands, cancels the tickle signalfrom the somatosensory cortex-some-thing we know because scientists havetickled people in MRI machines), orhow "mirror neurons"-brain cells thatare activated both when we perform anaction and when we witness someoneelse performing it-appear to accountfor empathy, it's hard to understandwhat difference that explanationmakes. What exactly do we know thatwe didn't know before?

REVIEWS 85

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Well, if you persist through suchsentences as these from The Acciden-wi Mind-

Neither glutamatebinding alonenor de-polarizationof the membrane alone willopen the NMDA-type receptor's ionchannel. Background activity will pro-duce the former but not the latter, butburstsofhigh-frequencyspikeswill pro-duce both glutamate binding and depo-larizationand the ion channel willopen.

-then you will get to know some brainchemistry, which can be gee-whiz fas-cinating. (I cannot fault Linden, whois an agreeable enough writer to spendan afternoon with, for these eye-glazingpassages. This is brain science, andwhen you get down to specific cases, it'sabout the unexciting details of bindingand receptors and depolarization.) Isuppose it's nice to know that there isa reason you can't tickle yourself (al-though this explanation leaves youwondering why you can masturbatesuccessfully; I'm sure some willingonanists will soon be climbing into thescanners so scientists can find out).And even the hardest-hearted skeptic,presented with the fact that empathyhas a basis in biological processes, mighthave to acknowledge empathy's im-portance, so perhaps there is some so-cial value to this research.

Nevertheless, this kind ofknowledge-which, after all,merely reiterates the indis-

putable and unremarkable fact thatour conscious life is totally dependenton having a functioning brain-oftenseems more a restatement than an ex-planation of the phenomenon. I say"fuck" and your amygdala pings; I say"tuck" and you snap to attention, takeoffense, maybe swear back or take aswing at me. Is this a phenomenonand an explanation? Or a phenomenonstated in two different languages? Thefact that your amygdala is pinging maybe of interest if you want to take drugsto stop your reaction to cursing. But itdoesn't really tell me why you do thosethings, any more than a cell-by-cellaccount of how my nerves and musclesmake my arm move when saluting theflag answers Wittgenstein's famousquestion about what is left over whenI subtract the fact that my arm goesup from the fact that I raise my arm.

86 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JUNE 2008

For all their fascination and revela-tion, these books may not do muchmore than tell us about our pipes andwires, about the infrastructure of per-sonhood, about the necessary, but notthe sufficient, conditions of being aself. Telling me about my high-frequency spikes and my ion channeldoesn't explain why I have an experi-ence of myself as the narrator of my lifewho feels love and loss, just as a care-ful analysis of pigment and texture andshape, or even of the physics andgeometry of the human smile, doesn'ttell me why the Mona Lisa moves me.

What this account does do is reiter-ate the belief that what matters is mat-ter. No number of biochemical assaysor brain scans can actually prove thatbrain states are mental states. To put itin terms Popper might have used, thatclaim is, at least for now, non-falsifiable.It is, in other words, a matter of faith,which means that the scientists whomake it are not only dispassionate re-porters of nature's facts but also apos-tles of materialism. Which is whyDamasio refers to those who resist thenew orthodoxy as "naysayers," and whyLinden urges his readers to "fire off ane-mail" the next time their "misguidedcongressman" opposes funding for neu-roscience. It is also why it might not besuch a good idea to ask a neuroscientistwhether the mind is really nothingmore than brain chemistry-for thesame reason you wouldn't want to aska barber whether you need a haircut.

Carl Woese, one of America'spreeminent biologists, has dis-tinguished between two kinds

of reductionism-"empirical" and "fun-damentalist"-in scientific inquiry:

Empirical reductionism is in essencemethodological; it is simply a mode ofanalysis,the dissectionofa biologicalen-tity or system into its constituent partsin order to better understand it. Empir-ical reductionismmakesno assumptionsabout the fundamental nature ... of liv-ing things.Fundamentalistreductionism... on the other hand, is in essencemeta-physical. It is ipso facto a statementabout the nature of the world: livingsystems(like all else) can be complete-lyunderstood in terms of the propertiesof their constituent parts.

Fundamentalist reductionism hides itsmaterialist metaphysics under the guise

of science, and at least according toMario Beauregard, a faculty member of.the University of Montreal and a self-described "nonmaterialist neuroscien-tist," most of his colleagues are guiltyof this bad faith. "Neuroscientists havenot discovered that there is no you inyou," he writes in The Spiritual Brain:A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existenceof the Soul. "They start their work withthat assumption. Anything they find isinterpreted on the basis of that view."And, worse, these materialist meta-physicians can count on the massmedia to spread their gospel.

The culture of popular science is oneof unidirectional skepticism. , .. It isskeptical of any idea that spiritualitycorresponds to something outside our-selves, but surprisingly gullible aboutany reductionist explanation for it.

His book is a broadside against thatassumption and a plea for the return ofsome form of dualism.

Beauregard doesn't stop at logicalobjections to materialist neuroscience.He cites some cases that contradict it,notably people who report mental ex-periences even when their brains arepresumably not working: a woman who,her body cooled to sixty degrees for asurgical procedure, her EEG flat, givesan accurate, bird's-eye-view descrip-tion of her operation; a once-comatoseheart-attack victim who, after his re-vival, "recalled" that a nurse put hisdentures in a drawer while he was be-ing given CPR; the blind people whosenear-death experiences include vision.If mental life is only what the brainprovides, Beauregard argues, then "cas-es like these should not only be veryrare; they should be impossible."

Beauregard reports on research intoother brain-related weirdness: mysticalexperiences (which he sayshe has had),telepathy and telekinesis, phantomlimbs and placebo effects (quoting ap-provingly from an article I wrote onthe latter subject). But he also relates afinding from mainstream contemporaryneuroscience, one that he takes as ev-idence for a brain-independent mind:brain plasticity. During the Decade ofthe Brain, the old neuroscientific cer-tainty that the structure of the adultbrain is more or less fixed-that ex-cepting traumatic damage and age-related decay, the brain you develop in

your childhood (and presumably theself it knits) is the one you're stuck withfor the rest of your life-fell by the way-side. It turns out that we do grow newbrain cells, wire together new neuralnetworks, and make basic changes inthe fundamental structures of the brain,and that we do so according to experi-ence. If the brain is plastic, Beauregardreasons, there must be a you in you,shaping the brain to its needs. And ifthat is the case, then, as Sharon Begleyputs it in her book's title, you can "trainyour mind [to] change your brain."

Begley, a senior editor at Newsweekand one of the few science journalists ofwhom Beauregard seems to approve,argues that everything the neuroscien-tists are telling us is true, with one im-portant exception: the "causal arrow" is"two-way ... with mind being both theexpression and the cause of physicalchangesin the brain." This is not, how-ever, your grandfather's ghost-in-the-machine Cartesianism but the updatedversion, dualism for the self-help soci-ety, in which "connections among neu-rons can be physically modified throughmental training just as a biceps can bemodified by physical training." Havinga mind is like walking, so there's noreason one cannot learn how to run amental marathon; what's left over afrerI subtract the fact that my arm goes upfrom the fact that I raise my arm maywell just be my personal trainer.

Or, in the cases Begley is most fondof, it may be the Dalai Lama, whoseinterest in neuroscience has led himto encourage his monks to strap on theEEG electrodes, to climb into the MRI,and to meditate for science. Whichhas resulted in the discovery that whenmonks meditate, their brains flex likePopeye's forearms afrer a can of spinach.The areas of their brains linked to rna-ternallove and empathy percolate withactivity. Their gamma waves (brainwaves that are a "signature of neuronalactivity that knits together far-flungbrain circuits-consciousness, in asense. They appear when the brainbrings together different sensory fea-tures ... that lead the brain to its aha!moment") go "off the charts," an ef-fect that persists at a lower level evenwhen they aren't meditating. This, saysBegley, is "evidence of the effect ofmental training not on an in-the-moment brain state but on an enduring

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brain trait." Hit the brain health club,she says, and you can do a lot betterthan not being depressed or obsessive-compulsive. "What we learn from [theBuddhist meditators] may provide thekey to raising everyone-or at leasteveryone who chooses to engage in thenecessary mental training"-to a "hap-piness baseline ... that most mortalsachieve only transiently."

Both Begley and Beauregardrecognize that such forms of self-improvement have significant so-ciopolitical consequences. The one-way causal arrow of the materialistneuroscientists points to "neuroge-netic determinism" and a blame-the-brain, no-you-in-you morality. "If willis an illusion, then what is the basis forpersonal responsibility?" Begley asks.None, Beauregard answers, and worsethan that, he says, echoing the reli-gious right's complaint about materi-alism's evisceration of our moral lives,"If the will is an illusion, the very ideaof evil is evacuated .... What fills thevacuum? Desires and dislikes." But useyour mind to modify its (temporary)home, guiding it with the appropriateteaching, and you have a way 'not on-ly to reclaim ethics but to bring a mus-cular brain to bear on your dilemmas.

It isn't an accident that Begley andBeauregard use monks and nuns asexemplars (or that Beauregard'scowriter, Denyse O'Leary, describesherself on her "Post-Darwinist" blogas a "Roman Catholic Christian" andhas written books like By Design or byChance? The Growing Controversy onthe Origins of Life in the Universe). Talkabout dualism cannot go very far with-out running into religion. Indeed, thetwo may be inseparable, at least so longas our choices are spirit or matter,Descartes or Kandel. If there is a you inyou, it must come from somewhere,and where else could that be but sometranscendent realm? Of course, theneo-dualists are no more able to provethat mind exists than their materialistcounterparts can prove the opposite,'and if their relative honesty about thefact that they possess a metaphysics is

• Beauregard told me that he doesn't thinkneuroscience can prove the existence of thesoul. When Iasked him about his book's sub-title, A Neuroscientist's Case for the Exis-tence of the Soul, he responded that the pub-lisher made it up.

88 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JUNE 2008

refreshing, their moralizing i; not. Suchis life in a culture war. I watch thestraw men shoot at the clay pigeonsand I just don't know whom to root for.

Now, I don't know about you,but I am dead certain that thesun rises in the morning,

moves across the sky, and then sets atnight. Five hundred years after Coper-nicus swatted the earth out of the cen-ter of the cosmos, I still live in a Ptole-maic universe, at least when I'm justlooking out my window. If I had tolaunch a mission to Mars or figure outthe time of the next eclipse, I would,of course, become (or at least hire) aCopernican. Likewise, when my wifeand I discovered that our son wasdyslexic, we turned to neurosciencefor understanding and help. Were I tostiffer a brain injury, I would consultDamasio before the Dalai Lama.

But unless I miss my guess, you alsobelieve that you are in there, behindthe eyes that are reading these words. Asillusions go, the cogito is a convincingone, and I cannot imagine even a thou-sand Kandels at a thousand typewriterspersuading me otherwise. If Popper wasright, however, they wouldn't have toundertake such a project. He forecastnot sudden dislocation, not the aha!moment when I realize that my brainmade me, but the death of "mentalism"by a thousand cuts, and he worriedabout its impact not on the treatmentof disease but on how we think of our-selves, on the way we conduct our lives.

By changing how we understandthe heavens, Copernicus also revolu-tionized human understanding of thedaily lives that take place beneaththem. But just as intimations of ourcosmic insignificance no longer neces-sarily bring Copernicus to mind, so,too, will people soon forget thetwenty-first-century neuroscientistswho invented the neurochemical self,with future generations living happilyas neuroscience's invention. Your de-scendants will heed the neurosciencegospel and give obeisance to theirbrains, ply them with exercise anddrugs and whatever else they demand,and think it was mighty strange thatyou thought of yourself as the agent ofyour own life, as a consciousness in abody, with no idea whether you werethus trapped or blessed or how you

ended up in there in the first place yet.certain that there was a you in you.

Of course, I think my grandchildren,if I ever have them, will be missing outon something, but that's what it meansto be a grandfather. And if I complainout loud to the whippersnappers, whosebrains will no doubt have been trainedand bettered and perhaps even per-fected, the loss I will regret the most isthe uncertainty, the not knowing howthe mind emerges from the brain, andthe teasing possibility that there issome-thing else lurking among my molecules.I still believe that cultivating the "re-maining mysteries" is as close as'we canget to transcendence, and if they dis-appear under the light of scientific cer-tainty, I will surely mourn them. Neg-ative capability undoubtedly has itslimits, but the certainties of carbon, hy-drogen, oxygen, and nitrogen seemdispiriting in contrast with what hascome before.

There is hardly any point in reiter-ating that scientists have yet to showthat the brain is both the necessaryand the sufficient cause of our minds,or that elucidating neural circuitry inall its glorious detail is not the samething as explaining how that circuitrygives us the strange experience we callconsciousness. Nor, for that matter,need we trouble ourselves about thefact that no one really knows whereconsciousness comes from or where itresides, that it may well inhabit a placewhere no one has thought to look andbe of a composition that cannot yieldto our instruments any more thanfeathers can make themselves apparentto a magnet. Because these objectionsdo not matter: We are what we per-ceive ourselves to be. We have beenthinking about who we are, revisingthat perception and reinventing our-selves, for a long time, and it is a cred-it to our species that we put in thattime to do so. Given our apparent corn-pulsion to try to figure ourselves out, itisn't surprising that ideas outlive theirusefulness, that people get sick of theboundaries of themselves, that old self-hoods wither away and new ones ariseto take their place. Nor is there muchto be gained in lamenting this, at leastnot for too long. It is disconcerting,however, to live while it happens, tohave your self pulled out from underyou while you watch. _