Spiritual Brain: Me 'n YouTube: Discussing my "Hot Apple Cider" essay

Here. The clip is short, and talks about an aspect of The Spiritual Brain - spirituality helps your health.
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Hot Apple Cider is a collection of Canadian writers' work.

I'll be at Faith Family Books & Gifts on Friday, November 20, along with many other, more distinguished authors and excellent performers, so if you are in the area, come and have a coffee with me.

Spiritual Brain: Polish translation rights bought

I am pleased to report that The Spiritual Brain is going into Polish translation.

Maybe this is hopeful. For a long while we couldn’t sell TSB abroad because some commentators said the book was “too religious”.

I have no idea why.

The book isn’t especially religious unless … you mean if any book threatens materialists … ?

But wouldn't people want to know why materialism probably isn't true? Well, I guess Poles do, and good for them.

Subversive Thinking blog's interview with me

Here's my interview at Jime Sayaka's Subversive Thinking blog.

Excerpt:

4) Materialists complain that science is based on naturalistic assumptions; and enabling supernatural religious ideas like the soul or similar into science is giving a unjustified concession to religious dogmatism and obscurantism. What do you think about this idea?

Well, first we need to ask, what is and isn't part of nature. Quantum mechanics and relativity showed clearly that what people thought was nature - a clockwork regularity - wasn't really a good description of nature.

In medicine (a key focus of The Spiritual Brain), the question of what the patient thinks about a treatment is often critical to its effect. The brain is highly plastic, reorganizing itself in relation to the mind's focus of attention.

I certainly wouldn't wish to give a free pass to superstition, but clinicians have not always done a good job of understanding how the mind and the brain interact.

Medicine is the point at which most humans interact regularly with science, so I would suggest looking there first. Basically, most humans will go with a treatment that, in their experience, "works", whether it is digitalis or Lakota Indian horse medicine (excellent for arthritis). It is difficult to fool people about whether they experience less anxiety or pain; that's why I wouldn't, in general, worry too much about religious dogma or obscurantism, provided we just stick to medicine. People's own bodies will tell them whether a treatment works or not.

More here.

Skeptic’s Review of The Spiritual Brain

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line. He writes,

The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come.

Mesner sounds like a male Amanda Gefter. (Hey, I am all for equal opportunity, so that's fine with me.)

He wants a free exchange of views, but sadly, one thing that is not free is my time just now, so I must decline.

I am not sure why he references the stem cell debate, but if people like Gefter and Mesner are entitled to private definitions of creationism, I guess they can apply their definitions and worries to the stem cell debate, wind energy, or the assignment of parking spaces in municipally owned garages - or anything else they want to.

Having almost finished Alva Noe’s thoughtful Out of Our Heads Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness and having read Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself, I would say that the skepticism (= materialism) espoused by Mesner is dead in the water and electrification of the corpse by a long discussion will not help. Things have just moved on.

The Spiritual Brain: A "great primer" on the mind-body debate, says reviewer

Here's a review of The Spiritual Brain by Denver Seminary student Jeff Stauffer (June 2008). I loved this part:

One does not have to possess a Ph.D in the medical field to grasp the philosophical nature of this issue, nor to follow the arguments presented.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jeff Stauffer! The Spiritual Brain is not hard to understand. Hard for some to accept, perhaps, but not hard to understand. He concludes,

I found this book to be compelling in terms of showing the nature of the mind to be more than mere atoms-in-space. As Christians, we need to incorporate scientific findings into our worldview if we are to hold to a realist, correspondence view of truth. Beauregard's book helps in this regard by positing a dualist notion of mind/body as the best explanation of the evidence from neuroscience. Overall, Beauregard does a much better job of critiquing a materialist account of nature than he does of providing empirical evidence for a spiritual brain. However, I do not take this to be an argument from ignorance, but one where a non-materialist account seems to be the best hypothesis going based on the evidence. This is a refreshing position from within the academic world on a subject that, oddly, many strive to eliminate: the existence of the human mind. I would encourage this book to those interested in the mind/body debate as a great primer on the subject.

Hmmm. What Mario and I did is called an "inference to the best explanation." In many situations, a slam dunk proof is not possible, but we can infer reasonable conclusions from a line of evidence.

For example, if spirituality is clearly and obviously good for human health (see Chapter 8), that suggests (though it does not prove) that spiritual forces underlie the universe. The alternative is to assume that a delusion is good for one's health - but all other medical evidence shows the contrary. So the assumption that spiritual forces underlie the universe is not proven by the fact that spirituality is good for health but it is far more consistent with that fact.

The rest of the review is here.

Reviewer thinks The Spiritual Brain should have been longer?

Quite a favourable review of The Spiritual Brain by Derrick Hassert, associate professor of Psychology at Trinity Christian College (University of Southern Illinois), appeared in Christian Scholar’s Review ((Volume XXXVII, Number 4 Summer 2008)). It ends with:

Overall, one is left with the feeling that, given more time, each section of the text could have been developed into a stand-alone volume. While this may be one of the book's weaknesses, it may also be one of its strengths, for in one unintimidating volume, the reader is exposed to current and past neuroscientific attempts to explain religious phenomena, empirical and philosophical problems with an eliminativist approach to the psychology and philosophy of mind, and cutting-edge research examining the neurological correlates of religious experience. It is recommended to general readers as well as those with an interest in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.

This sounds like a somewhat academic way of saying, "If you read this book, there are books out there that you needn't bother with."

By the way, Dr. Hassert notes, "Each section of the text could have been developed into a stand-alone volume."

Sure it could, but I don't think our publisher thought the market was quite ready for a ten-volume set? Maybe in a couple of years ....

The Spiritual Brain: Vindicating Alfred Russel Wallace, the "other" discoverer of natural selection?

Mike Flannery, a Wallace fan and scholar, thinks that Mario Beauregard's and my The Spiritual Brain is a vindication of Alfred Russel Wallace, among other things. Wallace was Darwin’s co-author of the theory of natural selection (survival of the fittest).

But Wallace became estranged from Darwin’s circle, because he saw natural selection only as a mechanism by which one species might slowly transform into another. He did not see it as explaining life, the universe, and all that - and certainly not the origin of the human mind. Anyway, Flannery comments,

The human facility for mathematics, for music, for art, for reasoning, for metaphysics, even for humor, where do these qualities come from? Answer: “the facts, taken in their entirety, compel us to recognize some origin for them wholly distinct from that which has served to account for the animal characteristics – whether bodily or mental – of man.” That “origin” and all the evidence “point clearly to an unseen universe – to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate.” Such was the conclusion of the co-discoverer (some would say sole discoverer!) of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Now Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary in their carefully researched and tightly argued The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of Soul agree, lending a modern scientific perspective in their analysis of the religious, spiritual, and/or mystical experiences recorded by all cultures at all times and studied in detail among Carmelite nuns.

Few remember Wallace because his eminently reasonable conclusion was drowned out by the rank materialism of Charles Darwin. When Darwin insisted that human faculties were derived from the lower animals, Wallace protested that such a conclusion “appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence.”

Neither is it supported by modern neuroscience say Beauregard and O’Leary. Wallace vindicated! The Darwinists will cry “NO!!!” just as Darwin himself did when he first read Wallace’s 1869 paper objecting to the Down House patriarch’s materialistic absolutism, but nonsense then remains nonsense now. Darwin’s reductionist speculations now appear as old and threadbare as the Victorian scientism from it sprang. “If we are to make significant breakthroughs with regard to our understanding of human mind and consciousness as well as the development of the spiritual potential of humanity,” write Beauregard and O’Leary, “we need a new scientific frame of reference.”

A century and a half of neglect is too long. Has the near-forgotten Wallace finally been heard?

Well, we hope so. If I ever get a chance to visit Wallace's quiet grave, I will place on it a morning glory, like the one from my garden, pictured above.

By the way, Flannery's reference to "(some would say sole discoverer!)" refers to long-standing suspicions that Wallace should properly be credited with first outlining the theory of natural selection, but Darwin's aristocratic associations led to his getting the credit instead. Start here for more on that.

The Spiritual Brain gets Award of Merit at Write! Canada, plus Mario gets tenure

At Write! Canada's 2008 Gala, June 11, The Spiritual Brain received an Award of Merit in the Leadership/Theoretical category of the Canadian Christian Writing Awards.

It had been shortlisted in three categories, a fact that offended some persons. I said at the time that it was a darn tough field and the offendees should be just as steamed about the other entries.

I also received an Award of Merit for “Anti-God books: The God they don’t believe in is certainly not great”, which appeared in the St. Michael's (University of Toronto) Alumni Magazine, and is posted here. The whole awards list is here.

The big news: Lead author Mario Beauregard got tenure! For any young academic, that is a worry, but he says "The tenure battle is behind me now: I will be able to finish my neuroscience career at the University of Montreal (I am very glad)." And so should they be, in my view.

Also, while Bradford McCall's review of The Spiritual Brain in the American Scientific Affiliation's journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, won't be out for a while, here's an excerpt that especially pleases me,

Beauregard concludes with the contention that though studying what occurs within people’s brains cannot directly prove or disprove spiritual experiences (or, for that matter, the realities that said experiences point to), they nonetheless can give credence to such extrapolations. I heartily advocate the purchase of this book.

Yes, of course the review pleases me because, in it, he is encouraging people to buy our book. For one thing, I want to write another book, and selling this one is a key step. But also, McColl grasps our key point: We are not saying that we can prove that people who have spiritual experiences contact a reality outside their physical selves. We say that there is good evidence for that, so it is reasonable to believe it.

As for proof, well, it is actually very difficult to prove anything at all outside of mathematics. Someone will always raise an objection, perhaps one that sounds reasonable from his point of view but unreasonable from yours. (For example, "Maybe the whole universe is just a dream I am having.")

So the only available approach to most questions of fact is to assemble the evidence on both sides and see which model fits best.

(Note: Dr. McCall is with the Divinity Department of Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.)

The Spiritual Brain is not a brainiac menace!

Here are some kind words about The Spiritual Brain from Brian T. Olszewski of the National Catholic Reporter's Book Club column:

For the initiated ... The Spiritual Brain is a fascinating exploration of relationships between God and neuroscience. Since it is not possible to determine how God "thinks," the exploration that takes place does so through the eyes and experience of science. Even those for whom discussions of God and neuroscience are foreign matter might be intrigued by such questions as "Is there a God program?" and "Does the God module even exist?"
Beauregard and O'Leary are thorough in presenting the cases, and in demonstrating for their peers how God, despite science's best efforts, still transcends the laboratory, the research and the theories.

Actually, while Olszewski really likes our book, he makes The Spiritual Brain sound much more formidable than it actually is. Look, if that book were half as learned as he makes out in his column, I could never have co-written it.

Here's an easy test: This is the Introduction . It actually does not get harder than this. And parts of it are very, very funny - but it was mostly materialists supplying the fun, not usually intentionally.

Introductory Chapter at a Glance

The Spiritual Brain: Introduction
Part One: Neuroscience as if your mind is real
Part Two: Who has enough faith to be a materialist?
Part Three: The uses of non-materialist neuroscience
Part Four: Materialism is running on empty

Zombie lurches across screen intoning "The ... Spiritual ... Brain ... is ... not ... a brainiac ... menace ... " No wait, cut, cut! That graphic is for a different blog.

Spiritual Brain reviewer: Many scientists too gullible about materialism

The Charleston Post and Courier's Religion Editor (ret.) Skip Johnson, reflects on what we are trying to say in The Spiritual Brain. About Mario, he says, quite rightly,

... he calls on his fellow scientists to lay down their prejudices, open their minds, study the evidence with today's sophisticated equipment and see where it leads.

The major obstacle preventing such a study, Beauregard contends, is that most scientists who call themselves skeptics — a solid majority of scientists — are not skeptics at all; they are materialists. They are skeptical and often downright hostile to anything that smacks of religion, mysticism or spirituality, but they'll readily accept as fact almost any unproven materialist explanation if it seems reasonable. Anything that indicates humans might be more than biological automatons ("meat puppets"), or that otherworld explanations of some phenomena might be real, could shatter some of their most cherished dogmas.

I hear the sound of dogmas shattering on a daily basis, actually. Science is not confirming materialism. What's out there (and in us) is much richer and more interesting.

The Catholic Register likes The Spiritual Brain ... and the fun part is ...

The fun part is that Dorothy Cummings's review picks out the very thing that I found funny about materialist approaches to spirituality, and she enjoyed it too:

The chapter entitled "The Strange Case of the God Helmet" is alone well worth the work involved in reading a book that is, after all, about neuroscience. The Spiritual Brain is hardly a beach book. But it has its rewards, and among them is the account of Michael Persinger, a researcher at Laurentian University who invented a machine he claimed could induce mystical experiences. As Beauregard and O'Leary explain, "Persinger proposed that… electrical microseizures within the temporal lobes generate a wide range of altered states, resulting in religious and mystical visions, out-of-body experiences and even recollections of abduction by aliens." From experiments inducing electrical microseizures in students with his "God helmet," Persinger concluded two things: "that the experience of a sensed presence can be manipulated by experiment, and that such an experience ‘may be the fundamental source for phenomena attributed to visitations by gods, spirits and other ephemeral phenomena.' " However, as Beauregard and O'Leary point out, "The first conclusion is a research result that should be able to be replicated if it is valid. The second is, of course, an opinion." As a matter of fact, Swedish researchers were unable to reproduce Persinger's results. But the God helmet did manage to convince some very influential and credulous people — the pop-science media.

Well, yes, I nearly split a gut laughing, myself, over how credulous self-confessed skeptics can be.

Listen, I learned far more about religious people from being a deputy warden at an Anglican church for some years than they will ever learn from reading village-atheist books. They need to get out more. If they want to know about religious people, they could try going to church, for example, and meeting some of them.

The Spiritual Brain reviewed in Jesuit thinkmag America

I was a bit nervous when I heard that our Spiritual Brain had been reviewed in America. Mario Beauregard is a research scientist and I am a journalist. Our evidence is good, but a philosopher could probably tie me up for hours in mind games (though he might not fare as well with Mario).

However, John F.Kavanaugh, S.J., reviewed the book and actually had good things to say about it, for example,

The fact that most humans report religious, spiritual and mystical experiences has sent some materialists on a scavenger hunt for a "God-spot" in the brain, a "God-gene" hiding in some chromosome and even a "God helmet" that stirs up an electromagnetic field to give the brain a spiritual buzz. Beauregard's fMRI work shows that, while all human cognitive experience is accompanied by firings in the neural network, the experiences themselves are utterly unlocalizable.

The workings of the brain accompany spiritual experience but do not fully account for it. What is more, although human experience requires the brain as a necessary condition for our embodied personal acts of self-consciousness, mindfulness, freedom and love, the brain cannot adequately explain them. Beauregard examines cases of the paranormal, the placebo effect and therapeutic auto-suggestion, all under fMRI conditions, to show that the brain-driven content of our experience is different from our self-directed consciousness of the content. Most remarkable here is the report of a near-death-experience of someone clinically dead, with a flat EEG but nonetheless aware.

Kavanaugh, who teaches medical ethics at St. Louis University, Mo., is himself the author of Who Count As Persons? (Georgetown Univ. Press, 2002).

And more. I don't think this article is on line yet, but you can register to read the whole for free.

Psychiatrist reviews The Spiritual Brain in The Anglican Planet

The Anglican Planet, a Canadian Anglican publication, edited by Toronto photojournalist Sue Careless, published a review of The Spiritual Brain by Toronto psychiatrist John McCormick which said, among other things,

Dogmatically holding that only physically observable phenomena are real is incompatible with honest, open scientific inquiry. Studying mystical experiences can and should be done using a harmonized framework of biological, psychological, social and spiritual approaches. The brain may be seen as a transducer of spiritual realities, rather than an originator of them, much as a television set receives and interprets radio waves broadcast from elsewhere.

I recommend this book for the thoughtful general reader. It is an excellent review of the philosophical questions faced by people who take their science and religion seriously. It has helped me further pull together related fields that are too often not on good terms with each other.

Enough technical material is presented to support its contentions but not to overpower the reader. The depth of scholarship is apparent in the 146 pages of references and notes. A six-page glossary is not exhaustive but covers some of the main anatomical, psychological and philosophical terms. A number of black and white diagrams orient the reader to the main neuroanatomical structures. Sidebars give further detail to technical concepts. As one who works daily with patients, I found this book heavy and substantial reading, but well worth the effort. It is one book I plan to read several times.

And, while we are here, I recommend The Anglican Planet to all who are interested in global Anglican/Episcopalian affairs. (Anglicans (called Episcopalians in the United States) are the English-language Reformation church.)

The Spiritual Brain as an audio book: Hear a sample!

The Tantor audio book sample is now available. Hear Patrick Lawlor read from The Spiritual Brain.

Should evangelicals be worried about The Spiritual Brain book?

Now that a number of people whose opinion I justly respect have read The Spiritual Brain, I have experienced two equal and opposite reactions - a good sign!

On the ONE hand, a conservative evangelical friend told me last Saturday, "I don't agree with your book. You say all religions are the same All roads lead to God."

I challenged him to tell me where we had said anything of the kind. Well, he said, that idea was "implied".

Actually, it wasn't implied. In fact, it was denied!

On the relative truth of religions, we explicitly said:

"If indeed religion is more adaptive than irreligion, the most likely explanation is this: the mystics are right. Materialism is false, but most nonmaterialist systems contain at least some elements that are true. As we might expect, some contain many more true elements than others. (P. 212)

That is a point often overlooked in the struggle between materialism and theism.

The falsity of materialism does not make all non-materialist belief systems equally true - or equally emotionally healthy.

It means that we face a cosmos in which meaning and purpose are real, consciousness and free will are real - and all the other facts are just as real as they were before!

And we must make sense of them using our minds, because science has NOT shown that we are just robots, or whatever.

On the OTHER hand, complaints come in twos, it seems. I also learned recently that some people are very worried about The Spiritual Brain because it is allegedly "too religious."

These complainers mean that we start out with the assumption - in our online Introduction - that spiritual experiences could be real:

Most scientists today are materialists who believe that the physical world is the only reality. Absolutely everything else, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena--leaving no room for the possibility that religious experiences are anything but an illusion. Materialists are like Charles Dicken's character Ebenezer Scrooge who dismisses his experience of Marley's ghost as merely "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."

Vincent and I, on the other hand, did not approach our research with any such materialist presumption. As we are not materialists, we did not doubt in principle that a contemplative might contact a reality outside herself during a mystical experience. In fact, I went into neuroscience in part because I knew experientially that such things can indeed happen. Vincent and I simply wanted to know what the neural correlates—the activity of the neurons—during such an experience might be. Given the overwhelming dominance of materialism in neuroscience today, we count ourselves lucky that the nuns believed in our sincerity and agreed to help us, and that the Templeton Foundation saw fit to fund our studies.

In other words, Mario and his colleagues - and I, coming on board as a writer - did not start out to show that spiritual experiences must, by definition, be false. If that makes us "religious", some young neuroscience researchers are going to be very, very surprised by their public profile ....

I certainly do not ask my conservative evangelical friend to abandon his concern for purity of religion. But I hope he will see that the main conflict today is not between Jesus and Buddha but between people who think that the material world is all there is and people who don't.

I ask only this: Let's make sure that we have the story right on the main conflict before we sort out the conflict between claims for Jesus and claims for Buddha.

Theories of brain evolution: Evolving brain or revolving door?

At the end of a long discussion of useless theorizing about how the brain might have evolved, Creation-Evolution Headlines kindly says of The Spiritual Brain:

Given the standoff in evolutionary explanations, how about a radical alternative? It’s not really radical; in fact, it is time-tested, logically coherent and self-evident. It enjoyed epistemic priority throughout the classical, medieval and Enlightenment periods. It is the non-reductionist position that the mind is non-material; the brain is an instrument of a spiritual reality that, while constrained by matter, cannot be reduced to its material components. A new book has dusted off this long-accepted truism and explored it within the findings of modern neurobiology. Written by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain is getting lively and enthusiastic reviews on Amazon.com.

Obviously, the brain evolved. We have brains. Stromatolites didn't. But I suspect that many people who are currently enquiring into brain evolution are looking for something that isn't actually there: How intelligence arose without any order, meaning, or purpose in the universe. They will not get real answers because they put all their energy into protecting their kludges.

Sure, I love praise from people I respect - who doesn't?

Someone I respect writes to say about The Spiritual Brain:

"Wow, what a story. I want to let you know that I was sick at the end of last week and spent most of my sick-day reading your book. Wow. Excellent. Since I know your 'voice,' I could hear it loud and clear through the pages. I was absolutely captivated by the book and I learned a ton and found it thoroughly enjoyable. Great work, and thanks for all the time you put in. I can imagine recommending it to various friends in the future."

As long as they find it as much fun as you do ...

Great review of The Spiritual Brain in Quill and Quire

The November edition of Canadian litmag Quill and Quire has a wonderful review of The Spiritual Brain by James Grainger:

Read through the Ideas or Books section of any weekend paper these days and an unquestioned orthodoxy quickly asserts itself from behind the veneer of open- minded enquiry. That orthodoxy is the doctrine of scientific materialism, the belief that the great questions of human existence that have troubled us for millennia have been, or are about to be, answered by science. Why we love, why we hate, why we believe in God: scientists have proven that these seemingly complex yearnings are merely by-products of evolution, genetic coding, and brain chemistry. Case closed.

Questioning this orthodoxy will likely get you laughed out of the smart cocktail set, so one can only imagine the professional and personal risks that Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the Université de Montreal, is running by publishing a book that claims not only that there is scientific evidence for the existence of God and the soul, but that the tenets of scientific materialism are based on bad science and wild speculation. Beauregard is too good a scientist to claim that he can prove, once and for all, that human beings possess a soul that exists both inside and apart from the material world. The same goes for the existence of God, whether conceived of as the paternalistic deity of monotheistic religion or the more abstract “ground of all being” of Buddhism.

It gets better. I will post the link to the rest later, when available. Reviewer James Grainger loves our book, and best of all he loves it for the same reasons as we wrote it: The things we all need to know about our real selves.

Spiritual Brain: Mario's and my interview with MercatorNet

In response to MercatorNet’s Michael Cook’s question re our recent book, The Spiritual Brain:

Quite a few widely-publicised articles in leading scientific journals have made astonishing claims about the scope of neuroscience: that God, altruism, morality, and emotions are all figments of the brain. It all sounds very convincing. But how close are these researchers to proving their case?

I reply,

Let me say something first about how such claims arise. The materialism that underlies them is assumed. It is not demonstrated. A materialist explanation is assumed to be better than a non-materialist explanation even if it is silly. All the claims I examined had fallen apart by the time I got to them. But why believe me? The fact that consciousness is referred to in the trade to this day as "the hard problem of consciousness" demonstrates better than I can how far they are from proving any case at all.

Note: If you are not a materialist, consciousness isn’t a problem in the same sense. It is a state that you cannot explore using the tool set and assumptions mandated by materialism. But so? To a non-materialist, that just means developing and working with other tool sets, other assumptions.

And we nosh around further, with Michael asking,

Are there many major neuroscientists who do not accept that all of our mental processes can be reduced to biological processes?

In the journal Nature Neuroscience, some researchers recently argued that American liberals and conservatives think differently because of the way their brains are structured. What are the implications of reducing ideas to circuitry? What comes next?

What indeed? See MercatorNet for my comment.

Michael asks Mario,

Do you think that neuroscientists think much about the ethical implications of their work?

and Mario replies,

No. Most neuroscientists prefer to leave the critical reflection about the ethical implications of their work to theologians and philosophers.

Hey, Mario! Is that how one of them ended up working for the CIA?

I fear so. One can't just park one's conscience at the Park n' Fly in any profession.

The Pharyngulite really, honestly, sincerely struggles with The Spiritual Brain

A kind reader wanted to know if I was going to respond in detail to this hit piece against The Spiritual Brain. No. And why should I? The author acknowledges at the outset,

I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable.

As he is the only person I have heard of who found The Spiritual Brain hard to read - it is widely praised for its clarity and usefulness, after all, by people coming from a variety of viewpoints - maybe he suffers from "alexia sine agraphia" (the rare "can write but can't read" syndrome). Good to know there's hope.

More likely, he is playing to a crowd of supporters. In that case, speaking of hope, I hope that monkey with the tin cup is still in good health.