158 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”In the next four chapters, the important mental functions will be
examined in detail with reference to the various aspects of the human
self. Emphasis will be placed on consciousness, emotion, memory, and
free will. Their survival values will be discussed.
7.11 The Brain and the Outside World
The brain cannot perceive itself; it can only perceive something else —
a body part, another person, or the environment. An analogy is with a
mirror. A mirror can never reflect itself; it can only reflect other things.
Even if we put a second mirror in front of the first, what the second mir-
ror reflects is what the first reflects (plus, of course, the edges of the first
mirror). A mirror alone has nothing to be reflected. Likewise, whatever
the brain does has to be referred to something outside of it. When a per-
son thinks, he has to think of something, however “abstract” the subject
can be. No one can think of a vacuum or a void. Even when you think
of the word “vacuum,” certain mental pictures come to mind — a page
in a physics textbook with that heading, a sealed cylinder in a laboratory
attached to a pump, or a star-studded outer space. How about mathe-
matical thinking? Sure enough, we have mental pictures of geometric
forms (a triangle, a cylinder, a parabolic curve), or digits on our mental
blackboard. When we discuss politics, we envision voting, inaugurations,
bomb explosions, assassinations, or lengthy speeches of demagogues.
On the other hand, the brain also acts like a projector. It proj-
ects the contents of its activity (intentions, actions, feelings) outward.
An emotionally aroused person feels tension in the muscles, palpitation
in the heart, and contraction in the stomach, but nothing in the brain.
When suffering from a headache, the pain is in the scalp, never in the
neurons. Likewise, stimulating the motor cortex leads to limb movement,
not brain movement. In the condition called thalamic syndrome, lesion
in the thalamus causes intolerable pain in the extremities, but not in the
thalamus. In extreme cases, the brain can even project sensations to non
-existing body parts, as in “phantom limb” syndrome, frequently seen in