My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I’ve posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf.
In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn.
Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye–number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the cellular level–the twist and turns of collagen fibers in a horse hoof or the poison-producing organelles of a rattlesnake. In the past few years a new kind of portrait has been hung in the biological museum: a portrait of the genome. In the thousands or millions of DNA base pairs, genomes can reveal secrets not only about an organism’s natural history, but its ancient history as well.
There’s been a fair amount of press about a new paper in Science that shows how the brain responds to social rejection. The kicker is that a region of the brain known as the insula becomes active. As I mentioned yesterday, that’s the same area that responds to pain and physical distress. It’s an interesting paper with historical dimensions that are missing from the news reports–historical in both the human and evolutionary sense. There’s a lot of back-story behind the word “heartache.”
One reason that I’m so riveted by neuroscience is the way it can blow the lid off of philosophical conundrums that have dogged Western thought for centuries. Case in point: in a recent study, scientists at Dartmouth asked subjects about something that was on their mind–an exam, a girlfriend, and so on. Then, while scanning their brains with an MRI machine, they told their subjects NOT to think about that thing.