Embodied soul

Originally published 6 December 2004

Last week CBS’s 60 Min­utes did a sto­ry on a 12-year-old musi­cal prodi­gy named Jay Green­berg. Jay has been com­pos­ing since he was two, and appar­ent­ly his music is of a pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty. He is now study­ing at Juil­liard in New York, and his teach­ers com­pare him to Mozart.

“It’s as if the uncon­scious mind is giv­ing orders at the speed of light,” says Jay. “You know, I mean, so I just hear it as if it were a smooth per­for­mance of a work that is already writ­ten, when it isn’t.”

He writes it down, right out of his head, sym­phon­ic com­po­si­tions for entire orches­tras, with no revisions.

Some­times Jay hears more than one com­po­si­tion at a time. “Mul­ti­ple chan­nels is what it’s been termed,” he explains. “That my brain is able to con­trol two or three dif­fer­ent musics at the same time — along with the chan­nel of every­day life.”

What’s going on? Where do such prodi­gies come from? What’s dif­fer­ent about their brains? It would be inter­est­ing to have a PET scan of Jay’s brain as it was hum­ming with music.

Some peo­ple have extra­or­di­nary gifts for music, math­e­mat­ics, feats of mem­o­ry, cal­cu­la­tion. It’s not the size of their brains that is rel­e­vant, although cer­tain parts of the brain may be hyper­de­vel­oped. It may have some­thing to do with the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of synap­tic con­nec­tions between neu­rons — more neu­rons are fir­ing, faster, with greater coordination.

But if truth be told, no one has a clue. Maybe we will nev­er under­stand the brain com­plete­ly for the sim­ple rea­son that con­scious­ness is more com­plex than the cog­ni­tive instru­ment we have been giv­en to under­stand it.

The human brain con­tains about 100 bil­lion neu­rons, or brain cells. Each neu­ron has a cen­tral body and about 1000 ten­drils reach­ing out towards oth­er neu­rons, almost touch­ing, like the fin­ger­tips of God and Adam in the famous paint­ing by Michelan­ge­lo. The con­nec­tions between ten­drils are called synaps­es. There are about 100 tril­lion synap­tic con­nec­tions in the brain.

Each con­nec­tion can be in one of about 10 dif­fer­ent lev­els of activ­i­ty. The num­ber of pos­si­ble states for the brain is 10 raised to the 100 tril­lionth pow­er, a num­ber greater than the num­ber of par­ti­cles in the universe.

There is not yet a com­put­er on Earth remote­ly as com­plex as a human brain.

Which is not to say that com­put­ers can’t do some things faster and bet­ter than brains. Com­plex­i­ty isn’t every­thing. Brains have more to do than computers.

My guess is that what makes a Jay Green­berg is the right chem­i­cals in the right con­cen­tra­tion at the right places to cre­ate the right webs of neu­rons. And that is some­thing he was born with. It was in his genes. Mozarts are born, not made.

But chem­istry is chem­istry. As we learn more about the chem­istry of the brain it will be pos­si­ble to enhance mem­o­ry, cre­ativ­i­ty, mood, alert­ness, self-image, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. It’s already happening.

It fact, it’s been hap­pen­ing since the dawn of time. Alco­hol, cof­fee, choco­late, pey­ote, med­i­ta­tion, phys­i­cal rig­ors: all have been used to mod­i­fy and enhance con­scious­ness. What is new on the hori­zon are design­er drugs tai­lored for spe­cif­ic pur­pos­es, with min­i­mal side effects.

How soci­ety will deal with this remains to be seen. If you are suf­fer­ing from Parkin­son’s dis­ease, or have a chron­i­cal­ly depressed child, you will no doubt wel­come the new chem­i­cal tech­nol­o­gy. But what about pills that give you an edge in school or on the job? Or pills to make your child bet­ter at math, or more like Jay Greenberg?

Descartes was wrong. We are not body and soul. We are body. We are colonies of cells who make music, write poems, remem­ber expe­ri­ences, invent gods, love, hate, build cathe­drals, go to war. Most mys­te­ri­ous­ly of all, we are self-aware. Each of us is a chem­istry set that knows it is a chem­istry set — a chem­istry set unlike any other.

We may not like to think of our souls as tan­gled webs of 100 tril­lion elec­tro­chem­i­cal con­nec­tions, each one medi­at­ing in some infin­i­tes­i­mal way our inter­ac­tion with the world. But we bet­ter come to terms with it soon if we are going to nego­ti­ate the excru­ci­at­ing moral dilem­mas that will con­front us in the near future.

Jay Green­berg does­n’t need to reflect on why he is a prodi­gy; the music just plays in his head. There is a music of sorts play­ing in each of our heads. It is called the self.