The sense of touch incorporates many distinct elements: pressure, pain, heat, cold, and touch. The body has 450 touch cells per square inch of skin. We can detect a smooth plane of glass from one etched with lines only1/2500th of an inch deep.21 We can “feel” a pressure on our fingertips or face that depresses the skin a microscopic 0.00004 inch. We can tell the difference between a letter weighing 11/4 ounces and one weighing 11/2 ounces, but not between 10 pounds and 101/4 pounds—the difference needs to be at least 2 percent.
The Scriptures are full of references to these senses brought into the spiritual realm. We are to be a sweet fragrance;22 to taste that the LORD is good;23 to touch no unclean thing.24 In the manifestation of each sense are two potent reminders: first, that God is an aesthetic genius; and second, that all His gifts are for the purposes of His glory, never to be abused.
The BRAIN and
NERVOUS SYSTEM
“IN man is a three-pound brain, which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.” Thus wrote scientist and author Isaac Asimov.1 In so stating, it appears to me that he was giving God a compliment, even though he remained an avowed atheist until his death in 1992.
The brain—pride and joy of the nervous system—is staggering in its abilities and complexity. Despite all of our modern scientific research, we are only beginning to penetrate the brain’s secrets.
The basic cell of the brain is called the neuron, of which there are ten billion (some estimate as high as 100 billion). This seems like a large number, but it requires only thirty-three doublings of the first neuron cell to arrive at the ten billion.2 In addition to long extensions called axons, each neuron has ten thousand tiny branching fibers and filamentous projections called dendrites, a name derived from the Greek word for tree. Each neuron is thus in contact with ten thousand other neurons, for a total of 100 trillion neurological interconnections.
If you were to stretch out all the neurons and dendritic connections in the brain and lay them end to end, they would reach for 100 thousand miles and circle the earth at the equator four times. (That’s why it takes two Valium.) One way to visualize these dendritic connections is as light switches, in either the off or on position. The brain holds 1014 bits of information and thus has a storage capacity one thousand times that of a Cray-2 supercomputer.3
The capacity of the brain is such that it can hold information equivalent to that contained in twenty-five million books, enough to fill a bookshelf 500 miles long. In contrast, the Library of Congress has seventeen million volumes. The deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-based human genome is spectacular in its own right, as we shall see in the next chapter. But the human brain has ten thousand times the capacity for storing information as the human genome.4
Assuming that 10 percent of the brain cells are firing at any given time, this implies a rate of a thousand trillion computations per second. It makes you wonder why balancing the checkbook is so hard.
Unlike the parts of a computer, nerve cells are highly individual. No two cells are exactly the same, nor do they respond to the same incoming information in the same way. Each neuron is unique in all the universe. God, it seems to me, really outdid Himself.
Even though the brain triples in size from birth to adulthood, we do not add any new neurons. The orthodox position for decades has been that neurons don’t replace themselves and don’t regenerate. They are capable of living for a hundred years, but when they die, they die. When it happens, we have no choice but to subtract one from the IQ column. Now, however, new research indicates that neuronal regeneration does indeed happen, and perhaps commonly.5 Still, the clinical fact remains—neurological disease and injury are almost always tragically permanent and irreversible.
Neurotransmitters
Neurons work by a combination of electrical and chemical signals. Within the neuron itself the signal is electrical. But where one nerve connects with its neighbor, in a connection called a synapse, the signal switches into a chemical message. This chemical signal must be ferried across the synapse by a neurotransmitter. There are more than one hundred different neurotransmitters, including such headline grabbers as serotonin and dopamine.
Imagine it like this: we travel down the road at 400 mph in a supercharged electric car—no exhaust, no noise, just speed. When we come to a river, however, we stop the car, load it on the ferry, dawdle across the river, unload the car—and then resume our furious dash down the road. In much the same way, the speed of electrical conduction down the nerve is rapid (maximum speed actually is 400 mph), but the chemical transport at the synapse is much slower—rather like waiting for a web page to download. It is not slow by normal human standards, for it happens in a few thousandths of a second. But in terms of the nervous system, that’s like waiting for a glacier to move.
A great deal of current brain research is being conducted in this area of neurotransmitters. With a newer and clearer understanding comes the hope for precise medications targeted to specific neurological dysfunction. I suffer from migraine headaches, for example, and some of the new neurotransmitter-based medicines have been of great benefit in arresting such headaches while still in the early stages.
Brain Waves, Prayer, and God’s ESP
The electrical activity of the brain not only generates current running down the neurons, but also is responsible for brain waves. A tracing of brain waves, called the electroencephalogram (EEG), is obtained by placing electrodes on various portions of the scalp and recording what comes through from the brain. (Never mind that a playful professor once hooked up a bowl of Jell-O to an EEG machine and obtained a readout that was “virtually identical to the brain waves of healthy humans.”6 That, as far as I am concerned, is just more evidence of God’s sense of humor.)
There are four basic types of waves obtained by the EEG recorder:
alpha waves relaxed but aware
beta waves fully alert
delta waves sleeping
theta waves drowsy
A recent development in the application of brain waves is provocative in both its medical and theological implications. Work is now being done in patients who have paralyzing illnesses, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). In advanced stages this disease leaves the body completely paralyzed but permits otherwise normal brain functioning. (The noted British physicist Stephen Hawking has ALS, although a more slowly progressing variety than usual.)
It has now been demonstrated that ALS patients, with electrodes on their scalp, can control a computer screen by manipulating brain waves called slow cortical potentials. 7 Using a “thought translation device,” these patients can “amplify and dampen their brain waves in a way that allows them to select letters on a video screen and spell out messages.”8 “For the first time,” says one of the researchers, “we have shown that it is possible to communicate with nothing but one’s own brain and to escape, at least verbally, the locked-in state.”9
This provides exciting possibilities for fully paralyzed people—even those with feeding tubes and respirators—not only to spell out letters on the computer screen, but also to turn on and off the lights, run electronic equipment, and even “think” directions to their own wheelchairs. Taking it one step further, the possibility exists of going wireless: “If the electronics are sensitive enough, they might be able to grab brain waves out of the air.”10
What “theological implications” might this have? I occasionally wonder how God reads thoughts. I’m sure most believing Christians have never concerned themselves with such a question but instead simply accept by faith that a sovereign God can do anything He wants, including getting inside our brains and easily reading our minds. “You perceive my thoughts from afar,” wrote David in a much-loved psalm. “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.”11 Most of our prayer life, specifically silent prayer, functions precisely along the lines of such orthodoxy. And I am not sure that we need to do anything more theol
ogically than to leave it right there.
Still, at other times we act as if we naïvely assume our thoughts are private and thus exempt from God’s monitoring. I don’t believe it for a minute. If we speak words, He hears. If we merely think silent thoughts, He hears just as clearly. We can’t hide inside our craniums, so it is no use pretending about it.
I have never personally stumbled over this issue of God’s ESP, nor entertained doubts. But I have from time to time wondered, “How does He do it?” Now we have perhaps the beginnings of a mechanism in biophysics that explains one possible scenario that God could use, should He choose to do so. (And this is not to say that God in fact needs such a mechanism.) If in the process of “thinking,” we generate electrical signals, and if in some general form these electrical signals can penetrate the skull and be picked up on the scalp and even in the air beyond the scalp, then it is certainly possible for God to intercept such thoughts at any point in the process.
If you think this is a superfluous science fiction discussion, then for you it is. But if you are among those who are both skeptical and cynical about how God performs such ESP, understand that there is an increasing foundation in biophysics behind God’s claim for sovereignty in the realm of continuously discerning our thoughts.
There is one additional aspect of prayer that mystifies some people and that perhaps we can touch on before leaving the subject: How can God hear a billion people pray at the same time? C. S. Lewis dealt with this precise issue:
A man can put it to me by saying “I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.” … The whole sting of it comes in the words at the same moment. Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in.
Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty—and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.12
There is abundant reason in the study of contemporary physics for us to view God as having “all the time in the world” to do whatever it is He wishes to do—and that includes listening to and answering our prayers. And there is new evidence in modern biophysics to suggest a mechanism whereby God can actually read our thoughts (again, this is not to say that He requires such a device). The conclusion: if we have a problem believing any of the specifics of how prayer works, the problem is ours and not God’s.
Memory
Even though we know that the brain generates both electrical and chemical activity, we still do not know precisely what thinking is, or intuition, or consciousness, or what distinguishes the mind from the brain. Some believe it is only a matter of additional research before all becomes clear. Others disagree. To them, the brain is a black box that will always be more than the sum of its parts.
For example, how did Einstein’s brain do it? In 1905, he was poor, underemployed, estranged from the world, rejected by Europe’s academic establishment, without a country, and stung by his parents’ disdain for his older Serbian wife. Yet somehow in that “one miraculous year,” at the age of twenty-six he published five papers that changed our fundamental understanding of physics forever. Any one of these papers, dealing with such topics as time, space, light, energy, speed, relativity, and E = mc2, would have secured his place in history. One paper won him the Nobel Prize. How does a brain overturn firmly entrenched paradigms with impossibly complex levels of abstract thought that have nothing to do with measurable day-to-day experience? “The level of genius,” wrote one observer, “is practically incomprehensible.”13
Other stunning mental accomplishments come from the experience of autistic savants. These are people with severe mental handicaps juxtaposed with prodigious mental abilities, usually in the area of mathematics, memory, art, or music. They have “the puzzling paradox of being backward and brilliant at the same time,” explains savant authority Darold A. Treffert, M.D.14 Savants reveal phenomenal abilities of a special type— very narrow but exceedingly deep, sometimes called “islands of intelligence.” Take, for example, the following cases:
George and Charles, identical twins, are calendar calculators. Give them a date and they can give you the day of the week over a span of eighty thousand years—forty thousand backward or forty thousand forward. Ask them to name in which years of the next 200 (or any 200) Easter will fall on March 23 and they will name those years with lightning rapidity. They cannot count to thirty, but they swap twenty-digit prime numbers for amusement.
Leslie is blind, is severely mentally handicapped, has cerebral palsy, and has never had any formal musical training. Yet, in his teens, upon hearing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for the first time, he played it back on the piano flawlessly and without hesitation.
Jedediah has a mental age of ten and is unable to write his name. When asked the question: “In a body whose three sides are 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards, and 54,965 yards, how many cubicle1/8ths of an inch exist?” he provided the correct twenty-eight-digit figure after a five-hour computation. “Would you like the answer backwards or forwards?”15
What does this tell us about the inherent capacity of the human brain—about how it learns, how it calculates, how it performs? What does this tell us about the Mind of God, who designed and wired such a brain?
One Indian student memorized the non-repeating number Pi to the thirty-thousandth digit, only to be outdone by a Japanese man who remembered it to forty-two thousand digits. One German musician read an unfamiliar symphony only once before conducting it from memory later that evening. An Edinburgh mathematician was asked to divide four by forty-seven. After slightly more than half a minute of giving numbers, and having reached forty-six decimal places, he said he “had arrived at the repeating point.” Wolfgang Mozart reported that “an entire new composition” would suddenly arise in his head.16 What do such prodigious feats reveal about the brain’s inherent capacity? How will this brain perform when fallenness is removed and it assumes its glorified and fully redeemed state?
The study of how memory works is still progressing, but some factors have been clarified:
Memory is not necessarily a function of study or time.
Short-term memory and long-term memory are two different commodities.
Emotional states and moods can greatly affect memory.
Visual images and linguistic memories are stored differently.
Learning and memory are highly individual experiences.
Forgetting is as important as remembering.
Memory is not necessarily a function of study or time.
The amount of effort we put into learning is not necessarily the most important thing. It turns out that meaning is as important to memory as intention. In other words, just because we open up a history book does not mean we will remember history. “Remembering does not happen as a matter of course whenever a person is exposed to information,” states education and information expert Jeremy Campbell. “It does not even happen automatically if the person wants and intends to commit the information to memory. … Questions such as how long a time was spent in trying to store it in memory are of surprisingly little importance.” Campbell summarizes by stating: “Clearly, meaning is an important ingredient in remembering.”17
Short-term memory and long-term memory are two different commodities.
These two types of memory are apparently located in different places in the brain and etched there by different mechanisms. Short-term memory is held for only a matter of minutes and can be maddenly unreliable. (Where did I put those keys?) “You are more likely to remember your childho
od,” observed Bill Cosby, “than the place you left your glasses.”18 It is the short-term memory that is most affected by aging and illness. Long-term memory, however, seems to result in a “memory trace,” a molecular and cellular alteration, being etched in the brain structure. Long-term memories can often be recalled by people with perfect clarity, even decades later.
Emotional states and moods can greatly affect memory.
Something that was joyous or tragic seems to etch itself more clearly in the brain. If you were at a Chicago Bulls championship game, you will most likely remember what the weather was like. And among those of us who were alive then, who doesn’t remember what he or she was doing when JFK was shot?
Visual images and linguistic memories are stored differently.
When we hear something, the memory goes down one pathway and is stored in a certain way. When we see something, the brain uses a different pathway and different storage venue. Visual images can be powerful triggers for remembering. It has been asserted that by the time we are thirty, each of us carries around with us a mental videotape cassette containing some three trillion pictures and holograms of ourselves in action.19 These pictures are indelibly imprinted, which is one reason R-rated movies are worrisome. Once those images are stored in the film archives of our brains, there is no delete button.
Not only is the visual versus linguistic distinction important in memory, but it apparently is true even in the initiation and conceptualization of thought. “Contemporary authorities agree that the form a thought takes in our minds is usually verbal, but not necessarily so,” explains creative thinking authority Vincent Ryan Ruggiero. “Just as we may express an idea in mathematical symbols or pictures, in addition to words, we may also conceive of it that way.”20 At age thirteen, for example, Einstein envisioned himself riding on a beam of light. His visual imagination thus helped him transcend fixed bounds and creatively explore a new and counterintuitive realm.
More Than Meets the Eye Page 4
