In
the Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer cleverly and elegantly recounts the
events that led to the acknowledgment of the brain as the physical substrate of
our perceptual and cognitive functions.  The book provides a historical context
that allows readers to better understand contemporary neuroscience and its
struggle to uncover how brain matter can potentially account for diverse human
abilities, from those shared with other animals (e.g., perception of
environmental patterns) to those that make us most unique (e.g., language and
consciousness).

The
book resembles a dramatic fiction story, which has the same vividness and
intensity as only real tragedy unfolding in front of one’s mesmerized eyes may
have.  It focuses on one central character, Thomas Willis, and touches on
other, not less interesting, thinkers, among whom there are physicians,
alchemists, philosophers, utopians, revolutionaries, etc.  Each character,
regardless of his centrality, is pictured against a colorful background of
historic dramas, including various calamities (e.g., the plague and the great
fire of London) and religious and political armed struggles (e.g.,
the English civil war and the Irish rebellion).  The narrative is exciting and
the characters as animate and tangible as if they were breathing beings acting
their intricate roles right before one’s eyes.  Thus, it comes as no surprise
if readers may be reluctant to take a break from the book and thus interrupt
the flow of interconnected events that emerge from its pages.  However, upon
re-opening the book, those same events are sure to immediately emerge from the
fog of memory in the vivid colors they had when they were temporarily
interrupted by the exigencies of the readers’ mundane lives.   

Thomas
Willis is depicted as a man of distinguished valor among a considerably
remarkable array of thinkers spanning several centuries.  Unsurprisingly, some
of these thinkers ultimately succeed first in establishing that the brain, not
the heart, is the location of the human soul, and then in claiming that the
brain is the soul itself (i.e., the engine of perceptual and cognitive
functions).  The thinkers’ investigative techniques and related discoveries,
their correct intuitions and false interpretations, and their struggle against obsolete
and misleading ideas provide an unequal insight into how scientific inquiry
works and progresses. Their personal lives and "scientific" pursuits
are exquisitely intertwined so as to provide an engaging narrative where the
characters and their paths of actions appear as tangible as those of real life
beings.  Of course, some of the accounts of discoveries are a bit gruesome and
it is difficult not to feel sorry for the animals submitted to unquestionably
cruel treatments.  Nevertheless, the narrative is engaging, thought-provoking,
and not lacking of current appeal. Indeed, the struggles that the book
repeatedly depicts between antiquated ideas and novel ones regarding human
faculties and their main physical substrate (the brain) will remind readers of
more current struggles.  For instance, those between the need of researchers to
conduct scientific inquiries, which, in an ethically sound manner, can answer
daring questions about human nature, and moral and religious dogmas, which tend
to prevent such inquiries  (see debate about stem cell research or the Bush
administration’s sudden re-examination of federally founded grants devoted to
the study of sexual behavior in its different forms).  As a result, the Soul
Made Flesh is a book not only about the history of the development of our
knowledge of the brain, but also about how independent thinkers have overcome
dogmas and improved human life with their newly acquired knowledge, a story
that cannot be forgotten in the current politicized arena of clashing interests.

In
summary, Soul Made Flesh is an outstanding book, which can be read by
virtually anybody who is interested in understanding the historic development
of scientific inquiries about human nature and of how the corresponding
knowledge that it is bound to generate can ameliorate our existence.  It is
also a book about the present, which helps readers to comprehend that clashes
between scientific pursuits (the need to know) and religious dogmas (the need
to believe) are not an anomaly but simply history replicating itself.  Among
all the books available at libraries or bookstores, Zimmer’s work is certainly
a must-read.    

© 2004 Maura Pilotti

Maura Pilotti,
Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Dowling College,
New York.

Categories: General, Philosophical