The Table Video

Transcript

Thanks, it’s really been wonderful being here for this very interesting conference. And then so many wonderful people, you guys are the remnants of the last group. [audience laughs] So it’s always fun to be toward the end, because most of what you wanted to say was already said, and you get the last word. When we were talking earlier today about insect souls, it reminded me that, the story goes that somebody came to C.S. Lewis and said, “Are there animal souls? “Will I be with my dog?” And C.S. Lewis says, “Well I don’t know, but I can imagine,” as he said, as C.S. Lewis said, “I don’t know if I can imagine “how you can combine a heaven for humans “with a hell for mosquito, or, “heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for humans.” [audience laughs]

So I wanna draw some perspectives from neurobiology. Some perspectives from neurobiology to explore the notion of soul as the organizing and empowering principle of life. More specifically, to arrive on the notion of intentionality working through the capacities of intellect, imagination, will, expressed within the dynamics of desire, duty, pleasure, and pain. I wanna put the person as a participant back into our discussion on the operations of soul. The process will argue that the soul as the aligning principle of human life at once shapes our unity of body and mind, frames our identity of immediate needs, and beckons to belong to matters of the world and spiritual consummation. That the human soul is at once about our biological being and an eternal destiny that transcends the frailty and finitude of our good lives. And I wanna say from the beginning, I’m a physician, not a philosopher, okay? [audience laughs] If you start at the most basic level, and ponder the nature of desire, it’s immediately evident that we’re contending with a serious concept.

At the foundations of matter are fundamental attractions. Gravity, magnetism, the weak and strong forces that bind subatomic particles into elements, and elements into compounds. But we would not say that an electron desires a protein, or that a cation desires an anion or anything. Yet it’s clear that, through these fundamental forces, the unfolding emergence of the natural order proceeds. Matter, mathematics, playing out in a seamless, seemingly ceaseless transcendence of layer upon layer in the drama of creation. In Charles Darwin’s felicitous phrase, “Endless forms, most beautiful, and wonderful, “have been and are being evolved.” Beautiful? Wonderful? Clearly any reflection on the nature of desire leads us beyond mere methods, and directly to the phenomenon of life. Yet that immediately places us in a more problematic, conceptual realm, what Darwin called the war of nature. Prone to the perilous, animal life by its very character is precarious being. Desire, prefigured as a key, forms the central axis of survival. And then on, in the human soul, to aspirations that transcend earth and life itself. If we go back to the origins of life and ponder the phylogeny of emerging forms, we may gain some insight on how, within the cradle of the earth, the material and spiritual unfold in a pattern of ascension.

When we look back at the evolutionary process, we are at once struck by both its continuity and creativity. Every stage and level, the unfolding of the diversity forms and functions, reveals a new, previously unseen dimensions of nature. And so we have eyes into our understanding of the very nature of nature. At its most primary level, freedom within nature is prefigured. Is prefigured as a widened range of response, A capacity first expressed at the molecular level of adaptive mutation. The strategy works very well in rapidly-reproducing organisms. When they’re under threat, simple bacterium has a limited ability to adjust to a changing environment. But he can divide, and divide again and divide again and produce thousands of varied offspring within a few hours. This allows not only adaptation within a changing environment, but also extension into wider realms of environments with different conditions and new opportunities for the flourishing of life. They already, even at this level of life, simple organisms express primordial preferences that seem to presage desire. Bacteria swim after and absorb glucose until it’s exhausted. And only then consume other kinds of sugar. Now let me show you a video. This is not even an organism, this is a neutrophil, a white blood cell, in our bloodstream, going after little tiny colonies, of bacteria. And it shows you what matter in its mechanisms can accomplish even apart from inward sense of desire. So watch this. This is a white blood cell chasing a bacteria. All based upon chemotaxis. It depends on a direct stimulus and a fixed, mechanical response. It lacks completely the adaptive flexibility of genuine choice, did he get it yet?

Man: Yeah. [audience cheering]

It lacks completely the adaptive flexibility of genuine choice, self awareness, or any understanding or operation of the will. Within early lifeforms, there was adaptation through mutation and reproduction. But then on to more complex, multicellular systems soon evolved that allowed individual organisms to adjust to changing environmental conditions. This extension of the biological foundations of freedom was accomplished through an increasing range of vital powers of awareness and action. With the emergence of brains, more than 500 million years ago, the first brains were in jellyfish they think. 500 million years ago. The limited capacities of perception and locomotion in simple organisms were transcended by specialized programs of integrated organismal response. These capacities in turn allow the extension of life into more varied and challenging environments. Whereas the oceans have provided a more or less stable chemical context and a constant temperature, which made life much easier, the ascent to dry land required more complex biological regulation of internal ion concentrations, body water, and temperature. But in the process, it opened a vast new range of opportunities for the extension of life. This in turn led to the progressive refinement and integrated motor and endocrine systems that formed the biological basis of emotions. And then the foundations of mind.

Emotions had their evolutionary origins, let’s move on here, emotions had their evolutionary origins as coordinated, adaptive adjustments such as postural and visceral changes that place the organism in a condition of readiness, of response. For example, fear involves increased heart rate and protective posture. As the demands of sensory perception and action became increasingly complex, organisms evolved with more integrated, inner sense of subjective feelings associated with these primary physiological foundations of emotion. Within a rising scale of sensation and self awareness, sustained programs, and patterns of response came to be motivated and coordinated by an inwardly-felt sense of fear, appetite, or desire. The philosopher Hans Jonas considers this the essence of animal life. The animal emancipates itself from its emersion in blind, organic function, and takes over an office of its own. Its functions are the emotions. Animal being is thus essentially passionate being. The unconscious processes of plant life are now transcended by the inner awareness and purposeful desire that form the central axis of animal life. Charles Darwin, in his research on orchids, surely a category species to be included in the endless forms most beautiful and wonderful. In his work, it led him to the conclusion that, and this is a quote, “The final end of the whole flower “is the production of seed.”

But John Ruskin, the foremost art critic of the Victorian era, objected. He said, “The flower exists for its own sake, “not for the fruits’ sake.” And though these controversies eventually undercut Ruskin’s religious convictions, he was right. At least he was right at the level of animal life. Regarding means and ends, Jonas goes on to explain not duration as such, not duration as such, but duration of what, is the question. This is to say that such means of survival as perception and emotion are never to be judged as means merely but also as qualities of the life to be preserved, and therefore as aspects of the end. It is one of the paradoxes of life that it employs means, which modify the end, and themselves become part of it. The feeling animal strives to preserve itself as a feeling, not just a metabolizing, entity. That is, it strives to continue the very activity of feeling. Leon Kass explains desire, not DNA, is the deepest principle of life. Desire distills as an inwardly-felt sense of self. If we go on from animals to humans, you can start to see it integrated completely with the human form. Desire, integrated in purposeful identity, urgently engaged in the essential tasks of life.

As a self-sustaining being, an organism is the executive of its own existence. Desire subordinates and coordinates the elemental parts into a cohesive unity of a larger enlivened whole. It regulates and motivates, aligning, sustaining, and empowering, effortful engagement that bridges the span across time and distance to the objects of action. Desire drive the organism outward into active commerce within the wider world. With further evolutionary elaboration, these properties are present even in lower animals, I mean, higher or lower animals, but not humans yet. But then with further evolutionary elaboration, more capable and conscious animal kinds are interwoven in deeper articulation with the multifarious forms of an evolving ecological whole. The varied senses are extended and refined, allowing a fuller disclosure of the world, not just in breadth and precision, but in the causal connections across time and space. Desire becomes the seed of comprehension and control. These are fundamental dimensions of survival, but they beckon on, they lead us onto more comprehensive understanding, and more effective control. These phylogenetic refinements ultimately culminate in the human form, with its capacity for resonant rationality, and relationality. Human beings, intelligence within an intelligible order of being. Our transformation to upright posture, to upright form, is reflected in nearly every detail of our deep structure, both somatic and psychic.

And here I use this to explain how the human form is a rational form. It’s absolutely astonishing, I mean you could spend a whole conference talking about the ways our body puts us into an intelligible, an intelligent interaction with the intelligibility of the world we’re in. For example, the upper limbs and the refinement of what Aristotle called, “The tool of tool,” our hands, allows the emergence of greater fine motor control, but along with it, the cerebral capabilities that could coordinate and sustain more complex and creative actions within the world. Our hands are absolutely amazing, amazing, tool of tools, our arms move in ways that no other animals move in quite that way. We can do things with our body that other animals simply cannot do. And our minds coordinate with this. Likewise, you don’t think of it much, but our larynx is a fine motor control, extremely fine to the point where you can change the intonation of a word even mid-word. We are very deeply refined in our rationality and expression. Furthermore, as sight replaced smell as the most prominent sense. You know, in most animals, the eyes serve the snout.

But in human beings, we stand up, we’re the beholding creature. Sight then allows the perception of objects and actions at great distances. The cerebral processing and storage of visual images, in turn, led to the emergence of imagination and creative powers. Sight allows insight, insight allows extension, and comprehension and control. This increasing freedom, breadth, and awareness, and self governance, is in turn extended by the extraordinary adaptive benefits of the creative imagination. Here are the primary principle, first expressed as mutations of matter in the bacteria I talked about. Primary principle of freedom, first expressed as mutations of matter, is now an imagination extended and transcended by permutations of mind. Mutation onto permutations of mind. The self generated mental production of possibilities independent of the constraints of immediate physical reality.

Grounded in the raw materials of memory, the symbolic mind is capable of detaching image from object, recombining images in ways that are new, envisioning scenarios and sequences apart from time and space, and anticipating their implications and outcomes. This is yet another powerful form of freedom in which the organism can imagine possibilities and sort of mentally try them out in a kind of dress rehearsal, without the expense of time and risk of resources in the process.

Human capacity for imagination, however, goes far beyond adaptive anticipation. Imagination is not merely replayed memory or imitation, but envisioned creation. Forming mental images, maintaining them in the mind, and achieving their realization, signifies intention, planning, and implementation of ideals. This imagining and realizing of ideals is the fullest manifestation of natural human freedom. Whereas most creature exist in an unbroken immediacy of life humans have the capacity to draw both the past and the future into the present. From learning stored as memory, and the anticipation of creative imagination. The immediacy of animal existence becomes in humans the mediated flexibility and freedom of human consciousness. Together with the ceaseless drive to organize the unexplained, which has been called the cognitive imperative, the capacity to calculate, extrapolate, and recombine are used to reconfigure that which is into that which could be.

While most creatures are pushed by biological and ecological exigencies, we are humans are pulled into the future by our desires, dreams, and images of fullest flourishing. From the human capacity for imagination and the drive to pursue the possible comes something unprecedented in the history of nature. The freedom of aspiration toward an envisioned ideal. The human ascent to a coherent moral ideal is the fullest extension, the culmination of the most profound developmental thrust in living nature. Desire, not DNA, is the deepest principle of life.

The story of life began within the constraints of chemistry, yet has ascended to the open possibilities implicit in the capacity forming and implementing ideals. Whereas the earliest life forms adapted by mutation, the proliferation of a multitude of new living forms, human beings are the culmination of an evolutionary trend with exactly the opposite strategy of survival: the production of variation by reproduction is transcended by flexible internal anticipation and adjustment. A multitude of short-lived organisms gives way to a distinct and defined self, a long-lived, highly complex, and integrated individual being. One that adapts not by intergenerational genetic change, but by its own responsive ability to think, and will, and act.

We are a species that adapts by adaptability. We are made not for a particular niche, but for unanticipated, unpredicted possibilities. We are made for comprehension and control, for flexibility and freedom, and thought and action. For extension into the fullness of the cosmos. Desire grounded in the most primary purposes of our biological being becomes the means and meaning of a spiritual quest for the transcendent truth. The drama of this phylogenetic process, and its evident moral meaning, is replayed in the developmental unfolding of every human life. I wanted to show you some pictures of embryos here, but you can just picture them in your mind. We’ll go back. The drama of this phylogeny we’ll look at now through the lens of the individual person. The drama of this phylogenetic process, and its evident moral meaning, is replayed in the developmental unfolding of every human life. Microscopic, and without visually evident human form, that single cell, the union of sperm and egg, contains within itself the distillation of nearly four billion years in the history of life. From conception, our unique genetic endowment organizes and guides the expression of our particular nature in its species and individual character. In both character and conduct, the zygote and subsequent embryonic stages differ from any other cells or tissues of the body. That’s why, by the way, the embryo is not, as we said in the stem cell debates, a clump of cells. The embryo contains in itself the organizing principle of the full human organism. This is not mere abstract or hypothetical, potential in the sense of mere possibility. It’s not like the potential of separate reagents sitting on a chemist’s shelf waiting to be mixed.

But rather, from conception, there is a living process. There’s a potency, an engaged and effective potential in process, an activated dynamic of development in the direction of human fullness of being. Unlike an assembly of parts in which a manufactured product is in no sense present until there is a completed construction. A living being has a continuous, unfolding existence, that is inseparable from its emerging form. The form is itself a dynamic process rather than a static structure. In biology, the whole, as the unified organismal principle of growth, the whole precedes and produces the parts.

The philosopher Robert Joyce explains living beings come into existence all at once. And then, gradually unfold to themselves and to the world what they already, but only incipiently, are. To be a human organism is to be a whole living member of the species Homo sapien, with a human present and a human future evident in the intrinsic potential for the manifestation of the species’ typical form. Joyce continues, “No living being “can become anything other than that, “other than what it already essentially is. “It is this implicit whole, with its inherent potency, “that endows the embryo with its human character, “and its unique and unrepeatable human destiny.” Such a view of the primary motions in the emerging embodiment of the human person magnifies and dignifies the meaning of human life. It recognizes that the earliest stages of human development serve as the indispensable and enduring foundations for the powers of freedom and self awareness that reach their fullest expression in the adult form. New insights from developmental biology are deepening our appreciation. Especially, by the way, developmental neurobiology. Deepening our appreciation of the dynamics of emergent being, and the formative role of action and affect. By the 10th week, a fetus can suck its thumb, and by the 10th week, 80% of fetuses have already chosen which handedness they’re gonna be, isn’t that amazing? By the end of the second trimester, emotional expressions such as laughing and crying are evident. And muscular motion not seen again until the second year of life, are already observable in the weightless suspension within the fluid of the womb. You can see on 3D, or 4D sonograms, that the baby in there is moving around, doing little walking actions and so forth. Moreover, indications of likes and dislikes are already present. Pleasure, pain, and even purposeful actions are apparent. One study of fetal motion reports, and this is a quote, “By 22 weeks of gestation, “the movements seem to show the recognizable form “of intentional actions with kinematic patterns.” That is, motion patterns, that depend on the goal of the action suggesting a surprisingly advanced level of motor planning. So for example, motions where the fetus moves its hand toward its eye are more cautious and controlled than motions toward a less sensitive area of the body. Clearly, even in the womb there is already a dynamic of desire and discovery.

An unmistakable development of the psychophysical unity of being that is the human person. Governed by body awareness, pre-biased perceptions, and a natural quest for self understanding and self control. This exploration, all expressions of the human soul. This exploration and extension continues in the newborn where the earliest motions and emotions reveal what the psychologist Andrew Meltzoff calls, “The scientist in the crib.” You know, I have colleagues in biology and medicine who think babies are not conscious. And you may not know this, but they actually used to do surgery on newborns without anesthetic because they assumed they were not conscious, can you imagine? Just, watch a baby, first few minutes of life and see it.

So the scientist in the crib, an extension of understanding and patterning of personal identity are already taking place. And a quest for understanding of the physical and social world are underway. Did you know that at nine minutes after birth, a baby will preferentially respond to an organized picture of facial parts over and against a disorganized jumble of facial parts? They come already wired for social engagement. It’s here in the stretching forth of intentionality, that was this slide, stretching forth of intentionality that the most primary expression of human nature is evident. A thoughtful reconsideration of the actual operations of ourself within the world will lead us to a recognition of the inseparable connection between conscious experience, memory, and personal identity. Through conscious intention, this is a way a child develops, through conscious intention we place ourself and our actions on the world within the circle of cause and effect. In experiencing the connection between free agency, action, and outcome, we probe and penetrate the world, learning at once both the nature of the world and our place and powers within it. Each experience is consolidated as memory, flexibly available to be recalled for specific situations while providing the platform for both continuity of personal identity, and an ever-widening comprehension of the world. Stretching forth with a compelling intensity and urgency, that’s what childhood is. Cognitive imperative that I think could be more fully described as a cosmological imperative, the desire to make order of being, order of the world we’re part of and our place within it.

This rational body in a perfect resonance with the intelligibility of the world seeks a coherent comprehension. And a kind of accord with the world. Rationality, if I understand it correctly, is the Latin translation of the word logos, which means an adequate account of being. Let me show you a few things that bespeak that. First, imagine what the baby has to do. Primary perception, primary sensation, becomes perception, discerning, pattern discerning, with greater clarity, distinctions, going on to see pattern as picture, picture as meaning, meaning as part of a larger construction of culture, that’s old Stanford Memorial Church. The baby increasingly layers in the significance of the world it’s in, both its basic perceptual dimensions, its physical parameters, and then its cultural, moral, and spiritual meaning. Just think of how a baby operates in the world, seeking to control, constrain, and train its body to the fulfillment of its desires. A baby, watch a young child, maybe 12, 14 months, try to get the spoon to its mouth. And you can just imagine what’s going on in the brain, they’re trying to recruit the muscular motions. First, of course, recruiting the neural connections that make the muscles move.

And I wanna show you something that’s very remarkable, but it’s just to give you a heuristic, it’s not to talk about this specifically. But this is a monkey who has a microprocessor attached on top of its cortex, which is reading its brain signals. And using this, and not any muscular motion, the monkey is drawing a marshmallow to its mouth through a computer-controlled robot that’s reading its muscle intentions. [man speaking faintly] Cool little guy, huh? All he does is he thinks, and he gets that thing in his mouth. But that’s basically what a baby does, it starts to try exploring the thought patterns of its intentional production of its mind that then moves the muscles. And there’s an absolutely astonishing plasticity to this process. As the body experiences the world around it, body and mind inseparably of course, the cortex codes in what it’s experiencing. So for example, if you tie two fingers together, pretty soon the pattern is treated like a single finger. Or this vibration device expands the region of cortex that discerns refinement of vibration detection. Furthermore, if you take a individual and you blindfold them and try to teach them braille, they actually do better than the person who’s watching, looking as they go. And it turns out the very regions of the visual cortex that serve to read, the visual signals are then recruited to detect the braille signal. So we have huge plasticity in response to the environment we’re in. Moreover, for the blind it’s actually possible to take a little tiny array of stimuli on a little pad, put it on the tongue, and they actually can recruit the tongue to see the world around them, to pick up the differences that are detected in what feeds into this little plate. Moreover, if you…

Announcer: It’s a technological marvel, that almost defies explanation. Lance Corporal Craig Lundberg was left totally blind after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq. There’s no way his sight can be restored, but he’s learned to see with his tongue thanks to a new device that could revolutionize treatments for blindness. Is looks and sounds like something from science fiction. But the brain port converts visual images into electrical pulses which stimulate the surface of the tongue. Different kind of tingles enable the user to read words, identify shapes, and walk around unaided.

I might get the objective of someone drawing on my hand, and I can go, oh okay, so you can describe to me what a table looks like. And go, well a table’s, on the hand, draw a rectangle on me, and I go oh okay. That’s sort of what this is, but it’s a lot more pixelated and it’s on my tongue.

Announcer: Lance Corporal Lundberg was told he would spend the rest of his life relying on a cane or his guide dog. Instead, he’s the first soldier to test what could become a common sight in the future.

Isn’t that amazing? So not only that, but if you take the inputs that normally go to the eye, and redirect them in the wiring of the brain to the auditory cortex, it’s not just mere recruitment, it’s not just using spare computer power. The auditory cortex now getting visual signals will actually reconfigure itself so that it can detect, not just detect, but decode the visual signals. Now, you ask yourself, how do these things operate? What is at the base of the human mind, brain, soul, body, being, that organizes these recruitments and reworkings of the possibilities in our mechanism of being. Something is in there that is seeking out, questing, organizing, engaging, extending. Moreover, it’s not just a matter of plasticity.

If you actually destroy portions of the brain, say by stroke, whole regions of the brain will recover the function and take over. Furthermore, you can even, if it’s early enough in development, lose an entire hemisphere of your brain, that’s essentially half your brain. At least, half the higher centers. This young girl had a disorder that caused her to have to have a hemispherectomy, and here’s what a pediatric neurosurgeon, Ben Carson, who by the way was a fellow member of the President’s Council with me. This is what he said when he performed this operation. Having done more than 80 hemispherectomies since 1985, he was optimistic, he says, “If you see the patients “who have had hemispherectomies, “you’re always amazed.” He said. “Here they are, running, jumping, talking, “doing well in school. “They’re able to live a normal life, “despite losing half their brain.” There she is, half her brain is gone, yet she’s capable of a normal, happy life. Including her creative artwork.

So there’s something at the bottom of our being that organizes our body to its higher purposes and callings. Not only that, but the mind itself is doing this even in the absence of actual motion. So this is a study in which they put the hand into a operation where the little finger was supposed to push a lever, okay, and what happened was what that one person pushing, physically, and yes they got better, 53% more strength. But the next group, they said, “Just imagine pushing it. “Imagine making the motion.” And they got better too, 35% increase. But the controls had no increase.

See, just imagining rewires the brain, intentiates the system. Moreover. If you, with certain types of thinking, you can reorganize your brain to bypass pathologies or distortions, or deformations of being. If Jeffrey Schwartz was still here I’d let him tell you about this, his treatment of obsessive-compulsive disease and the PET scan that shows that the brain was actually reconfigured in response to this therapy, purely ideas reshaping the brain. Moreover, we all know about the placebo effect and how it operates. The brain recruits areas, or relocates areas of ways to do some things, and in fact in this case, produces endogenously released endorphins. And if you block the endorphins with a particular substance, an antagonist, you can show that the placebo effect is eliminated. So ideas actually control the release of substances within our brain. Moreover, that’s that one, hold on. [chuckles] Moreover, here’s an amazing one for this context, in our religious community. This is a study done in China where they tested people’s, what did I do wrong?

One more.

One more, okay. Yeah, that’s right. They tested people’s personal evaluations of virtue in other people. And as you can see on the top, that’s the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the bottom region is the ventromedial. Well, turns out that when we evaluate other people as though we’re looking at them objectively, we use the dorsomedial. And when Christians are asked to evaluate themselves, they too use the dorsomedial, not the internal, more self-centered perspective. They actually, through their faith, are able to look at themselves in moral valuation more as God does, from the outside. Isn’t that an astonishing finding? In other words, we can remove ourselves from the egocentric self perspective and actually see ourselves more clearly and objectively. Not only that, but ideas. “Ideas have consequences,” Dostoevsky said. Ideas of religious perspective, particularly attendance of religious services, correlates with increased life expectancy. Ideas have consequences, on our physical form, and our psychological existence. Now I wanna show you something amazing, watch this.

Announcer: After only a 45 minute helicopter flight, we’ll ask him to draw a 5 1/2 yard panoramic picture of the historic City Center. Without having a second glance of it. Stephen has three days.

William: This is a case of savant syndrome.

Announcer: 5 1/2 feet of paper looks scarily empty. Stephen starts the drawing as we would, with the church’s impetus. He doesn’t do any sketches, or roughing out of the space for the drawing. It’s as if the panorama already existed within his head. With all the proportions, all the roads, all the details. At the end of the second day, Stephen’s a good halfway through his creation.

Alright, well I just showed you part of that, but basically what that is is a guy with savant syndrome, a hyper focused use of one portion of his brain. But you know, you might think, well that’s astonishing. It is, one 45 minute trip and he’s able to draw all the windows in the correct spots on the buildings of Rome. But it’s a distortion. The human being is a balance of being. The challenges of our lives are what give us the general purpose capacity, we’re a general purpose organism, which is of course the heart and the depth of wisdom. All this, all this is formulated in the healthy person in a balanced way, to penetrate from comprehension, understanding, and capable action within the world. This is the highest adaptation in the history of life, and ultimately it’s the key to our sense of spiritual significance.

To understand this more deeply, we need to explore how desire operates in the individual life, embedded within the matrix of material and social existence. Advances in neurobiology are clarifying the connection between desire and reward, and their role in development and behavior. Considering the central significance of reward, and consolidating learning, aligning, intention, and motivating action, and the destructive power of its pathologies, it’s surprising how little we actually know about the biology of desire. The famous so-called pleasure lever of, oh, this is out of place too here, nevermind.

So the so-called pleasure lever, you’ve seen that, the monkey with, or the rat with a pleasure lever. It shows experiments done by James Olds provided a dramatic window into the primary power of reward. Pressing the lever sent an electrical stimulus through electrodes deep into the midbrain structures. The male rat would press the lever up to 7,000 times an hour, preferring this direct stimulus to water, food, and females in heat waiting willingly. And would even cross a foot shock delivering grid to get to this lever. At first, the experimenters thought they’d located a single pleasure center. But further studies delineated a more distributed reward circuitry with multiple connections, and varied contributions in the mediation of pleasure, and its purposeful connections.

The elucidation of these circuits has led to more recent work focused on the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Research studies have established the ancient phylogenetic origins of the rewards system, including deep homology between humans and even insects. So maybe they do have souls. Including the pervasive role of reward in shaping the full range of animal behaviors. It’s now clear that dopamine, far from being a pleasure chemical, is an essential element in circuits modulating and coordinating motivational, emotional, cognitive, motor, and endocrine functions. The biology of desire is the central axis uniting all aspects of animal life.

These discoveries have, in turn, allowed scientists to identify distinct components of the reward system and to begin to gain insight into the relationship between pleasure, performance, and the pathologies of desire. The current terms of inquiry parse the reward system into three specific psychological components. Associative conditioning and learning, affect and subjective hedonia, and motivation.

For our purposes, a few simple conclusions suffice to set the foundations for further discussion of the individual and cultural implications of the biology of desire. First, it’s clear that reward plays a crucial role in learning by setting up systems of anticipatory response and goal-directed actions. And this connection between reward and learning can be below the threshold of consciousness. Moreover, the associative connections that trigger response are pervasive and subtle. Even subliminal cues using images of drug apparatus will trigger craving in former addicts. What they aren’t even aware of taking in affects them. Likewise, in experimental settings, addicts’ behavior, including performance of work tasks, can be altered by administering low doses of stimulants, so small that they produce no subjective effect and no autonomic response. In other words, reward is very deep in us, it’s encoded as conscious desire, or preconscious conditioning. And it plays a powerful role in shaping behavior, including behaviors we cannot justify or explain.

Second, it appears that there are neurological differences in the operation of the appetitive behaviors and the consummatory behaviors. Acquiring and desiring are different than engaging and consuming. In the language of neuroscience, a distinction is now drawn between liking, the conscious awareness of subjective pleasure, and wanting, the motivational state of active anticipation that needs not be accessible to the conscious awareness. Generally when we use the term desire, we’re referring to both of these components of the reward system and their broader effects in shaping the attitudes and actions of animal life.

However, this distinction turns out to have important implications for understanding the nature of the human mind. There’s a rare neurologic condition called athymhormic syndrome. It’s characterized by extreme passivity and apathy. From the outside, it appears to be a loss of ability for voluntary motion. But from the inside, it’s experienced as a lack of self motivation. These patients report a nearly complete absence of mental life, a mental blank. Yet if commanded from the outside, they’re entirely capable of thought and action. So it appears that motivation constitutes more than meaning. It’s the very infrastructure of mind. Desire, in the sense of quest, is essential to having a mental life at all. You know, in California we used to say, “You are what you eat.” So it is perhaps more true to say you are what you want. Desire, more than pleasure, defines and sums up personal identity. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Broadly speaking, liking appears to involve a common neural mechanism for primary natural pleasures such as food, satiation, and sex, and the direct action of pleasure-producing drugs. They all use a common pathway. Objective liking is manifest with observable motor responses, patterns and evident affect: facial expressions that are homologous across wide ranges of the animal kingdom, from rats to humans. It’s very ancient mechanisms. The outward and observable expressions of liking provide an important component of interpersonal communication, and the solidarity of social life which we’ll explore in a minute.

It’s instructive to consider how deeply and thoroughly this basic component of experience is tied in with the mechanisms of mind that shape our personal and social identity. Neural structures involved in the cognitive dimensions of liking include the orbitofrontal cortex, which plays a role in mediating the planning behavior associated with sensitivity to reward, the value of judgments and decision making, impulse control, and empathy. Cognitive liking also involves the insula, a deep cortical structure, crucial for internal body awareness and body representation, body regulation, and subjective emotional experience. The insula appears to mediate a mirror neuron-like link between external and internal experiences, essential for self identity, admiration of others, and the inner subjective awareness necessary for the social and spiritual emotions.

The point I’m telling you all that detailed neuroscience is that desire, liking, is operating at these very very crucial central structures and processes of our being. Dopamine, once thought to be the pleasure chemical, turns out to be neither necessary nor sufficient for generating either the objective liking observed with taste, rewards, and animals, or the subjective pleasure reported by drug rewards in humans. Rather, dopamine appears to play an important role in incentive salience, establishing the reward learning connections that form the neurological basis of wanting and the associated state of attention and arousal that constitute motivation. Of course, wanting and liking are fundamentally, functionally interconnected. But the dopamine-mediated learning that established incentive salience promotes a mere sensory input into a motivational, it promotes a mere sensory input into something much larger, a motivational magnet, and evokes from it the instrumental response of anticipation in action. Of course, we all know the tragic consequences of inappropriate connects between stimuli and anticipated reward everywhere evident in human life.

The power of addiction appears to be not so much a desire for reward, as a compelling sense of wanting. They’re not seeking pleasure, they have something in them that is longing or wanting. It’s driven by an overpowering feeling of lack, defect, or deficiency. Addicts hate their addictions. The primary biological role of desire and its power to disorder human life seems evident in a report from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Beyond the personal tragedy of addiction and its damaging effect on families, a study from this center stated that, this is just the costs, federal, state, and local governments spend, how much does addiction cost our society? According to this account, $468 billion a year. But a more thoughtful examination of the root causes of addiction reveals a broader significance to desire and its deficiencies in human social and spiritual life. A further insight in the formative force of the human soul and its compelling quest for completion of being. Far from a simple behaviorist model of positive and negative valences, and pleasure, pain, desire is inseparably central to our social and spiritual quest. For one thing, it appears that observing others experience states of arousal and reward can activate a resonant response. So we get a lot of our desires by watching other people and what they want. Even if we have just self-generated fanciful creations of thoughts, connections, vivid cognitive images, so-called cognitive incentive representations of reward, they can do the same, they establish desires that are not merely biologically given, but constructed, and then communicated within a frame of shared experience and aspiration. And of course, the most extraordinary motivating power of it in human nature, I mentioned earlier, the idealizing imagination. It has to be rooted in a tangible neural substrate tied in with desire. Without this cognitive connection between image, action, and motivation, there could be no effective goal-directed strategies beyond those produced those produced by mere associative response.

And so I wanna close now with just a couple of comments about something very, very interesting, and on the forefront of neurobiological exploration. And that is the study of the social and spiritual extensions of desire through the fascinating findings regarding the tiny peptide oxytocin. A neural modulator that plays a powerful and pervasive role in a range of basic biological processes related to reproduction and sociality. Oxytocin is released in both sexes during sexual orgasm. It maintains uterine contraction during childbirth, and plays an essential role in the production and release of breast milk during lactation. These oxytocin-driven reproductive functions appear to set the relational foundations for broader dimensions of human sociality. Romantic affiliation activates oxytocin, rich brain areas. During pregnancy, oxytocin levels rise in mother and father and show sustained synchrony in both the post-partum period and six months later. Moreover, mothers who deliver vaginally rather than by cesarean section, are, according to one brain imaging study, significantly more responsive to the cry of their babies. And less at risk of postpartum depression. In other words, the natural release of oxytocin may be crucial. Likewise, the earliest and most intense interpersonal experience of the infant are in the context of lactation’s oxytocin-driven bonding. Upwards through life, oxytocin appears to establish and sustain pro-social exchange.

And you know, if you have children, you get addicted to hugging them. This is a picture of my wife hugging our little fellow, and when I travel, like to conferences like this, I just can’t wait to get home and have my oxytocin fix. [audience laughing] You can see I get more of it than I anticipate. And you know, it just binds you to these little children so powerfully. This is my little four year old. And a few months ago, I was sleeping late ’cause I worked late, and she just came in my room and she clawed her way up and cuddled under the covers with me and said, “Quick, daddy, let’s snuggle away the monsters.” [audience laughs] This was all driven by biological mechanism of desire, whatever else it is. Wonderful, extraordinary thing.

So it intensifies the social salience, alters the speed and accuracy of affect registration for social information such as facial expressions, vocal tone, and body motions, and promotes the encoding and retrieval of social memories. All those things, done by oxytocin. See, it’s not just like the behaviors, there’s a pattern within which our body mechanisms operate to beckon us beyond into relationships, social and then onto spiritual.

Through these basic cognitive recruitments, oxytocin facilitates cooperation, promotes trust, and reduces anxiety over interacting with strangers and interaction together. Moreover, this establishes a whole new level of biological inclination and reward. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak states, “Oxytocin constitutes a positive side of personal relations. “It literally feels good when someone seems to trust you, “and this recognition motivates you to reciprocate.” He goes on to explain, “Oxytocin causes the release of dopamine “in midbrain structures associated with rewarding behaviors “such as sex and food acquisition.” In other words, it’s all a seamless piece.

This pleasure of social interaction appears to play a crucial role in binding children to parents, and later sustaining the social solidarity essential to cooperative community. In a progressive pattern of neurologic extension and integration, a child will undergo a process of development from facial and postural imitation, and generalized emotional resonance, to an increasingly conscious capacity for cognitive empathy, and direct and intentional imitative learning. All mediated by oxytocin, and at every stage, it appears that primary, well what happened here. At every stage, it appears that primary desires and deeply satisfying fulfillments promote this ascent. Shaped by common values, concepts, and beliefs, the child is drawn deeper into a social solidarity that carries enormous practical advantages and personal satisfactions. Social community itself becomes a new environment of essential adaptation with its own challenges, demands, and fulfillments. Successful navigation and negotiation within community requires highly refined perceptual skills, dispositional balance, and acuity of interpersonal attention. Like cultural filters of fitness, the rapidly changing patterns of fashion, the subtlety of shifting status, and the varied requirements of cooperation, have all throughout human history shaped and sculpted our species’ basic biology, and genetic heritage.

Likewise, through community life, new needs, desires, and joys, have solidified deep within our nature. Though we generally would not use the term desire for such longings, there is perhaps no deeper sense of fulfillment in human life than to be socially affirmed, admired, and lifted up in honor. Science may be interesting, but the culmination, and I’ve known several people who’ve received this, the culmination moment for a scientist is walking onto the stage to receive the Nobel Prize. Certainly there’s no personal pain. If that’s the great joy of human life, the highest pinnacle, there’s no greater personal pain than stigma, social shame. It’s the single most powerful force in reigniting the desperation of addiction. So I wanna close by showing you a study done at Stanford in a nursery school that shows these young children, these little, little creatures, just making their way out into the world. And somehow they know that the challenge of their lives in this environment of reality with its pleasures and pains, needs the self control of desire in order to reach out and extend itself to the highest order of fullness and freedom of life. They’re told, let’s see if it says it loud enough.

Okay, sit in that chair. Alright, here’s the deal, marshmallow for you. You can either wait, and I’ll give you another one if you wait, or you can eat it now. When I come back…

See they get one, if they wait they get two.

Stay in here, stay in the chair till I come back, okay? [audience laughing]

These guys aren’t so different from us, are they? We know inside that there’s the immediacies of our needed desires, but then there’s larger, longer goals to our existence. [audience laughing] She didn’t wait at all. And the amazing thing is that it turns out that the study of these children now, it’s gone for years and it turns out, these little guys who can hold and on wait go onto the most successful academic careers, at least. Who knows what else. That’s crucial. You see how pervasive and fundamental the desires, the natural desire of first biological inclination, moving on to the higher order of desire for a comprehensive understanding and engagement of the world. It elevates us, lifts us, it’s the soul, the intellect and the will operating within human life to lead us beyond life itself to the higher order of existence. I think that our future, our deepest destiny as human beings, is there from the very beginning, operating and guiding us upwards and forwards.

I wanna close with a quote from C.S. Lewis, from his wonderful essay called “The Weight of Glory.” And he says, “We are warned that it may happen “to any one of us, to appear at last before the face of God “and hear only the appalling words, “‘I never knew you, depart from me,’ “In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is, “unendurable to the feeling, “we can be both banished from the presence of Him “who is present everywhere, “and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. “We can be left utterly and absolutely outside, “repelled, exiled, estranged, “finally and unspeakably ignored. “On the other hand, we can be called in, “welcomed, received, and acknowledged.” And there are suggestions that, just as oxytocin operates to bind child to parent, parents to each other, solidarity within groups of people, it also extends out, it appears, into those higher, more exalted, inclusive, concepts of human existence. And perhaps is the foundation for moral elevation, and spiritual fullness of life. Basic mechanisms of being, like fractals, operating small in one direction of life, onto another, bigger and bigger, until it opens us to the cosmos. Beauty and order, the very word cosmology means beauty, order, and arrangement, and in spite of the suffering and struggle of existence, we know it’s there, we know there’s something calling us and beckoning us to move beyond our selfishness, to defer direct desires for high desires. To operate in the matter of love, to be like the chambered nautilus, by the way, the symbol of the Templeton Foundation. Starting from our basic, most primary biological being and opening into ever greater chambers of awareness until we are open to the fullness of life in all of its manifest expressions. C.S. Lewis goes on to say, “We do not want merely to see beauty, though. “God knows even that is bounty enough.” Even though seeing beauty is bounty enough, but he says, “We want something else “which can hardly be put into words. “To be united with the beauty we see, “to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves. “To bathe in it, to become part of it.” In this current reality of the world we’re in, that means desire, starts from the bottom, is overarched, and contained with a larger comprehension of the rational mind. To engage ourselves in the fullest participation, in the very source and significance of the universe, love himself, thank you very much. [audience applauding]

Well, thank you, Bill. I wanna pick up one aspect of what Bill said with regard to the quote from Joyce. Living beings come into existence all at once and then gradually unfold themselves into the world that they already but only incipiently are. I’m gonna modify that by saying we come in with potentialities that unfold through developmental experience. One of the things that, from my perspective as a clinical psychologist, that I see needed in the discussion of the soul is to, assuming we have one, how do we shape that soul into character and virtue? And how do we shape that to achieve the highest levels of the aspirations that Bill alluded to? And I want to read briefly from the writings of a fellow who works a lot with autistic children. And he talks about the developing mind and one of the aspects of interpersonal neurobiology that’s quite informative these days is about the details of the development of the self, in understanding more and more the neurobiological underpinnings of that. It says that the mind’s highest capacities develop from consciousness to intelligence, are built upon certain fundamental building blocks during infancy and childhood. Each of these building blocks, in turn, is based on the human being’s capacity to experience emotion.

Now, I kinda unpacked that more, but that relates to that desire piece that Bill’s talking about. The ability to perceive and attend to the environment while regulating arousal is a fundamental beginning that Bill alluded to, just forming this perceptual clarity. And then the ability to connect and engage in attachment relationships. One of the things that I would emphasize in this discussion is we don’t become embodied souls by ourselves, that human beings develop to maturity primarily in relationship with other human beings, and one of the videos I wanted to show you, although I don’t have time, I recommend it to you, it’s called the Still Face Experiment on the web, you can easily find, just Google Edward Tronick, T-R-O-N-I-C-K, and still face experiment, and you’ll watch about a 2 1/2 minute video of a mother and a baby interacting. And you see the power of this relational dynamic in shaping the child’s sense of the self.

The ability then, once connection is formed, the ability to be intentional is the ability to create and direct desire for a purpose. Again, related to this. But this is developmental achievement that’s shaped through interaction with human beings and caretakers. The ability to form complex interactive intentional patterns and to signal to others one’s intention is the next level of maturity that emerges. And then the ability to create symbols, images, and ideas, the basis for reasoning that then become the basis for reasoning and emotional coping. And then finally, the ability to connect images and symbols, the infrastructure of the mind, in its ability not only to picture one’s own feelings and desires, but also to intuitively grasp the feelings and desires of another, all the while comprehending the emotional signals the other person is sending, a very complex social task.

I have a perspective on the soul that I call developmental incarnation. When I teach parenting classes, I want parents to know I see parenting as an incarnational activity. That the child is a living soul, but becomes a mature living soul through the process of shaping and interacting and caretaking. I call it learning to be an embodied soul. I find one of the most profound statements in scripture, Hebrews 5:7. In the days of his flesh, Jesus learned obedience by the things that he suffered. So even Christ himself experienced a growth process. We find, I find encouraging and helpful to the extent that I can understand it, the philosophy of mind and the arguments for a soul. But we also need a perspective on how the soul becomes mature, and shapes over time. And the neurobiology of the soul is really a deepening understanding of the human psyche and its developmental dependencies, its developmental needs, and its developmental capacities.

Let me read to you a story in this regard that’s quite inspiring. This is the treatment of an autistic child. The two year old girl neither spoke nor made any response to those around her. But would spend hours staring into space, rubbing persistently on a patch of carpet. We saw, the therapist saw, in her abnormal repetition, a sign of interest and motivation, nascent though it was. Perhaps it could serve as an opening wedge of emotional connection, and later learning. We had the girl’s mother place her hand next to, right on the favorite spot of the floor. The child would push it away, but the mother would gently push it back. Again, she pushed again and the hand returned. A cat and mouse game ensued, and by the third day, this rudimentary action, by this rudimentary action, the little girl was smiling while pushing her mother’s hand away. From this tiny beginning grew emotional connection, a relationship, and then thoughts and words.

From pushing away the obstructing hand to seeking out the hand, and then offering flirtatious giggles and grins. The girl progressed to using gestures in a reciprocal non-verbal dialog. When she began repeatedly flinging herself at her mother, the therapist suggested that this behavior gave her sensory pleasure. He instructed the mother to whinny like a horse, not sure how the therapist came up with that but it sounded pretty creative, each time her daughter lunged at here. Soon she was whinnying too, imitating her mother. Before long, she had started making her own sounds and her own words. The therapist, thus, had helped mother stretch the sensation into richer, more complex interaction. Over time, mother and child pretended to be neighboring horses, mooing cows, and barking dogs. As their imaginary menagerie became more populous, their social and emotional interchange grew more complex. It wasn’t long before stuffed animals were fighting and hugging. Symbolic play-along, way to language and thought.

Today, at the age of seven, this girl has a range of age-appropriate emotions, warm friendships, a living imagination. She argues as well as her lawyer father, and scores in a low superior IQ range. A phenomenal testimony to the power of relational impact on the maturity of the soul. And while we are souls, or have souls, or we’re bodies that have souls, or souls that have bodies, I’m not sure philosophically how you wanna couch that. What’s clear in human existence is it’s the interpersonal transaction with culture, with those close to us, that our maturity of souls grows in which character is developed, virtue evolves, and we do begin to manifest those higher patterns of behavior that Bill alluded to, that we aspire to based on our faith. They emerge, they are not given. We have capacities, but don’t have capabilities. Those get developed in relationship, and even as Christ developed the maturity of his disciples, we need theology that recognizes the importance of this kinda developmental process for the maturing of souls, the creation of character, and the bringing of love to the world, thank you. [audience applauding]