It’s been a hell week, one for the record books really. I certainly wish I hadn’t launched a new blog and then been totally incapable of posting to it for a week, but that’s just the way things go.

In any case, one of the things I’ve been working on has been research into neuromarketing for an upcoming column in Report on Business. One of the most interesting things I came across in the course of this research was a 1996 essay by Tom Wolfe titled, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died“.

Wolfe is one of my favourite writers and I must have read this essay when it was reprinted in Hooking Up, but it had totally escaped my memory. It’s funny how often something like that happens, a piece of writing needs to come along at the right point in your life or you can totally miss out on how great it is.

The essay was written in 1996 at the dawn of modern imaging of the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) had just been developed, and for the first time we were starting to get a grasp on how the brain reacts to various kinds of stimulation in real time. fMRI measures

the flow of blood in the brain, so as various portions of the brain demand more glucose and oxygen they “light up” the display. It’s like watching the weather patterns of the mind.

Wolfe was very impressed by the technology available at the time, but he also thought that within ten years (2006) there was a good chance that fMRI would seem primitive. That has not been the case. fMRI has not been superseded by new technologies that give a deeper insight into the brain, not yet anyway. In fact, we don’t seem to have made much progress at all, either in terms of technology or on any of the larger philosophical debates that Wolfe thought would define our discussions of morality, free will, and the nature of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

The main thrust of Wolfe’s argument is the notion that in the coming decades we’ll have so much insight into the human mind and the actual mechanics of it, that quasi-religious notions like the existence of the soul will start to seem incredibly old-fashioned. He reports that when Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” it wasn’t a pronouncement, but rather a simple accounting of an idea that had already taken hold in the minds of educated people. Darwin had replaced the need for a God in people’s understanding of the universe. Wolfe thinks that modern neuroscience will do the same thing for the soul.

I find this argument fascinating, but I don’t really buy into it. Darwin provided an explaination for why the world is the way that it is. Neuroscience, and fMRI in particular, is merely descriptive. It allows us to see what is happening in the brain, but it has yet to provide us with a deeper understanding of why the brain does what it does. It’s a weather map, not a climate model. (Look for that line to be repeated in my column when it comes out.)

Ultimately, I think that the soul and free will have a much better chance of standing up to any advances in science than God ever did.

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