We have been taught that the brain is the center of human thought, and therefore the center of humanity. The Bible tells us both are wrong. The reason they are wrong is that humans do not think with or hold beliefs in the brain, but rather in the soul, which we have begun to discuss and will continue to refine. We will show how the essentially human cognitive functions occur in the soul, including thought, decision making, self-awareness, beliefs, memory, emotion, dreaming, conscience, and other high level cognitive functions. Human science attempts to convince that the brain is the center of human life and the source of humanity, because it cannot find the soul. However, the Bible clearly describes the immaterial human soul as the true human, the location of thoughts and beliefs, and the center of our humanity. In fact, the Bible never mentions the brain, although people have known it exists from very early times.
Please do not misunderstand, the brain is a wonderful organ designed by God, and incredible in its function. It is generally an artificial intelligence supercomputer with sensory connectors to the five main senses, plus a central controller for the physical body. However the brain is overrated by those who attempt to attribute the higher level soul functions to it. This misguided approach is based mainly on the premise that if the soul cannot be discovered in a physical way, then it must not exist.
What, therefore, is the role of the brain? And how does it interface with the human soul?
The brain plays a major role in acting as the central controller of the physical body, including autonomic functions (heart rate, breathing, digestion, etc.). But its primary function as related to the inner human is to feed the soul with sensory data brought in by the five main senses which are sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Although the brain serves as a filter to process those raw sensory inputs into a more refined form of data, it is the immaterial soul which takes that semi-processed sensory data and turns it into actual information (as opposed to data), and eventually forms thoughts and beliefs based on that information.
The brain relieves the soul of much of the drudgery of life, allowing the soul to live at a higher level than would otherwise be possible. The soul would be completely overloaded if it was required to remember how to perform all the basic tasks required just to survive and be mobile. Therefore the brain relieves the soul from thinking about how to perform countless menial tasks, and frees the soul to engage in more meaningful endeavors, and truly live, not just survive. In this regard, the brain has been delegated certain tasks to perform apart from direct soul involvement. This is designed by God to enable the survival of the person, control basic body functions, interact with the outside world, allow repetitive actions to be performed with ease, and so on. Meanwhile the soul can focus on higher order living which makes life more enjoyable, and provides the ability to interface with God.
The brain has basic memory functions related to performing its assigned tasks. Brain memory includes sensory memory, which remembers and categorizes sensory inputs which are visual, smell, taste, touch, and sound. The brain also has what is referred to as "muscle memory," which enables repetitive muscle movements such as walking, reaching, chewing, turning one's head, physical labor, sports and innumerable other repetitive actions. While these types of memories are based in the brain, it is not the storage location for high level human memories related to humanity which differentiate us from animals. Therefore our higher order memories are located in the soul.
Several types of tasks are delegated to the brain. It performs emergency actions apart from direct soul involvement based on real-time sensory data due to the constraints of time, including emergency "fight or flight" actions. This allows humans to pull back from something hot, step away from a hazard in the path, turn away from an oncoming car in our lane, flee from danger, or grab a child about to fall down the stairs. As such, the brain plays a primary role in the basic survival of the person.
As mentioned, the brain is delegated sensory based tasks and memory associated with the five senses. Sensory information is funneled from each of the senses through the brain, where the brain acts as a sensory gateway between the body's senses and the soul. Sensory data is initially filtered and integrated, such as when a sight and a sound go together to provide a more complete picture of the sensory experience. We hear screeching tires and then a crashing sound while our sight observes the accident. One sense supports another. The brain therefore interfaces with both the physical universe and the immaterial soul in a two-way manner, both in and out. Brain sensory memory holds information about previously experienced visual inputs, smells, tastes, touches, sounds and other sensory type data which are used to identify incoming sensory inputs based on prior experiences. This sensory memory is why we can relate to the world around us instead of everything being new to us. It makes our surroundings familiar, so we can focus on specific tasks and interests at higher levels. The primary mechanism of sensory memory is pattern matching, whereby the memory of a previous experience by our senses matches what we sense later, and a match is made, whether exact or similar in some way. It is how we recognize people, grass, and sky, why we know certain foods when we taste them, or know a car or lawn mower when we hear them, or a breeze when we feel it on our face. It is the brain which makes the match, then the soul deals with higher level understanding associated with what was sensed.
Additionally, many human actions in life are repetitive ones which use muscle memory information stored in the brain, and these occur apart from direct involvement of the soul. This muscle memory is what allows someone to walk, reach for something, tie their shoes, pick up an item, ride a bicycle, play sports, dance, type on a computer, perform repetitive tasks at work, and engage in countless daily activities without thinking about how to actually perform those tasks. Life would be burdensome if we tried to walk using our soul, thinking about how to make our various muscles put each foot in front of the other and in the correct direction, with the proper balancing of weight, and using a slight forward momentum. It is hard to learn to walk or ride a bicycle, but once it is mastered, it is not forgotten, unless maybe there is a brain injury. The brain can perform thousands of daily tasks without any deep thinking, all of these directly controlled by the brain without constant soul involvement. After the soul decides what will be done, the brain executes most of the task, allowing the soul to focus on the experience itself.
The brain can therefore act on its own to walk or run, avoid a hazard, swing a golf club in the way it learned, shoot a basketball, recall a smell we remember from long ago, test something we are cooking for proper taste, drive a nail with a hammer, execute a triple axel in ice skating, play a musical instrument, and perform other repetitive motion tasks which have been learned and stored in the brain by practice, by repeating the motion over and over. Muscle memory and sensory memory are functions of the brain, so they are actually brain memory, or brain programming. They are stored in and performed by the brain instead of the soul, unless the soul decides to get involved. So the actual golf swing is brain memory, but the memory of your first hole-in-one or the putt you made from 50 feet or how you felt when you made the golf team in high school is in the soul. The brain performs repetitive work and collects sensory data, but the soul thinks, expresses beliefs, and enjoys the activity. The difference is a matter of low order task accomplishment vs. higher order living as a human. Think about the intricacies involved in walking and running, a golf or tennis swing, ice skating, bicycle riding, basketball shooting, baseball and football throwing, and so on which are based on muscle memory stored in the brain and only supported from the soul. Consider how much time it takes to learn these tasks, let alone to perform them well. The soul remembers why the action needs to be done and makes decisions about doing the action, but the physical brain is programmed to remember how to accomplish the act, and executes previously learned complex tasks with amazing ease, apart from the soul. And practice can lead to increased skill levels as the brain stores additional, more refined muscle memory data.
So the decisions to go for a walk, to choose a book to read, to ride a bicycle on a certain trail, what color to paint a door, whether to go out and play tennis or golf, deciding to go to a dance, or to go meet a friend, are all soul decisions. Then when those actions are to be performed, the brain takes over and allows the soul to enjoy the experience as humanity. The brain relieves humans of much drudgery during daily tasks by using learned muscle memory and sensory memory once the soul has decided what to do in a general sense. The brain therefore acts as a two-way interface and sensing device which translates incoming sensory information into inputs for the soul, then takes soul commands and translates them into outputs which control the body senses, muscle movements, and other actions.
Brain damage can interfere with soul outputs and inputs, but such damage does not change the soul, or eliminate what was already contained in it. Therefore a person with memory diseases such as Alzheimer's or dementia cannot get what is in the soul out through the brain, meaning the core person and their memories are not lost or even changed. The soul can be closed off to some degree by the body, but that does not destroy what was already in the soul. This will be discussed in more detail later.
Because the brain is used to store basic sensory data, this greatly reduces memory storage requirements for the soul, allowing the soul to focus on higher order memory which is essentially "life memories." Among other things, brain memory enables pattern matching for the five senses, such as when we are looking for an object, the pattern of the object (shape, color, etc.) is in the brain, so when we see a possible match, or hear a sound from it, or smell or touch it, we focus and then understand that it is either the object or not, based on brain memories and pattern matching. For example, when looking for someone we know in a large crowd there can be numerous false alarms from the pattern matching in the brain, but once the soul focuses to differentiate, maybe on the color of the clothing, height, shape, hair style, and so on the brain narrows the search, rejects close look-alikes based on further analysis, and we ultimately know it is a correct match when we find the person. We recognize them from the brain. But we "know" them in the soul, as a spouse, friend, co-worker, or whatever relationship we have with them. While looking for that person we are also walking around and turning our head and doing many other body movements, all brain muscle memory, so that our soul does not need to expend effort thinking about how to perform those basic repetitive tasks.
The brain does not simply dump all sensory data it collects directly into the soul, since that would overload it. Think about driving down a road, and all the potential sensory inputs as the scenery goes whizzing by us. All that sensory data would quickly overwhelm the soul if it were just dumped as raw, unfiltered data into the soul. The soul functions at a high level, so most sensory data must be sorted and filtered in the brain before being turned over to the soul. During this process, which turns raw data into information, most of the raw data is disregarded as irrelevant. How many times have you driven on a freeway and never realized a certain store was along the way? What colors were the cars which passed by you today? You may recall a few, but most are disregarded unless they cut you off and you got mad about it, or some other action required focusing on a few cars. For the data which is passed on from the brain to the soul, the soul takes the semi-processed sensory inputs which have been prepared by the brain for soul use and turns them into higher order information which can be acted upon. Some of that higher order information becomes the source of thoughts and thinking. And these occur in the soul, not in the brain. The brain performs numerous basic tasks to allow the soul to function at a high level without being overloaded, but the essential part of being human is that we know we exist, we think, we make decisions about important life issues, and we form beliefs -- all in our inner human soul, not in the brain.
Sometimes the brain and soul get in each other's way. That happens when the brain muscle memory knows how to perform a task, but the soul decides to try to "help." For instance, Olympic level ice skaters can routinely perform flawlessly in practice, but under the intense pressure of competition the soul starts thinking about consequences, about winning and losing, whether something will disappoint family and friends, what the news will say about any failures, and other higher order thoughts, but not necessarily helpful ones. At that point the soul tries to help out with the task, and gets in the way of muscle memory, and the results are not elegant at all. The brain tries to perform the task, while the soul thinks of the results in terms of consequences of failure. The soul may even make suggestions in the middle of a complex task. A discordance occurs, and the brain cannot concentrate. The Reader knows the rest of that story. We have all been there. Not necessarily ice skating, but many things in life go like that. The point is that if the entire task were done from muscle memory out of the brain, without soul interference, then all the practice would result in a much better outcome. But we have two parts, brain and soul, which can become involved when the stakes are raised. That is where the soul enters the picture, at the higher level. And this is why people who play sports at a high level must perform from their brain with a quiet soul. Not always easy to do. The soul can be very insistent, and that is when pressure is felt, and the consequences of failure are considered.
The soul is therefore the part of us which must perform higher order tasks, including thinking and forming beliefs. So when you remember your first day at school, your childhood friends, names of people and places, major events in your life, beauty in nature, how and where you met your future spouse, why 2 + 2 = 4 as related to your fingers, how you felt when you won an award, where you were when something important happened, and such information, those memories are stored in the soul. The brain does not remember human life events, but it does remember sensory information it encountered in the past. Sights, smells, tastes, things touched, and sounds which were experienced and are now in memory as brain patterns can be used for matching. It also remembers how to perform repetitive tasks without thinking about how to perform them. The brain remembers sensory inputs and stored programming data, while the soul remembers life.
The interactions between the material and immaterial parts of humans, and describing the characteristics of both, are key to understanding the inner human and how it functions in relation to the material world. We have discussed the sensory functions of the body, how the five main senses provide empirical sensory data to the brain. But then what? Where are the connections between brain and soul? Science cannot find them. The connections between the material and immaterial are mostly on the immaterial side, meaning it is the human soul which provides the primary interfaces with the material brain. There are no material "dangling wires" in the brain which lead to an unseen soul. Rather, the soul-brain interfaces are equivalent to a wireless connectivity driven by the soul, which is why science cannot locate or study them even though the brain and soul are co-located inside the head. Science can see the oscillating electrical voltage and brain waves, but it does not understand that these are manifestations of a system of transceivers providing a wireless connectivity with the soul. When the electrical signals are gone, it shows the soul is gone, even if the physical body continues to function otherwise to some degree.
The brain was designed by God to enable humans to sense and interact with the universe He created, and ultimately to allow humans to focus on higher order living. Thoughts and beliefs go way beyond the senses and interaction with the universe and muscle memory. Our thoughts and beliefs occur inside the human soul, which is the inner human, the image of God, which He designed to enable humans to have thoughts and beliefs as He does, and therefore to be capable of understanding and interacting with Him, and also loving Him. And only a soul can truly love, and have thoughts and beliefs related to love. And once the human body ceases to function, the real person will continue to live on into eternity because God made that part immaterial.
Therefore we can understand why the human brain is not the true human. It performs the lower order functions for the person, and does not survive beyond death. The brain supports the true human, which is the soul. The brain provides sensory data to the soul, and also relieves the soul of menial tasks. Therefore the brain is not the source of thought, beliefs, emotion, conscience or storage for higher level human memory. Higher order cognitive activities do not occur in the brain. Figuring out complex relationships does not occur in the brain. True love does not come from the brain. Trusting God does not occur in the brain. The list could go on and on, but we can begin to understand that although the brain passes data into and out from the soul, it is the soul which performs the higher order thinking and decision making. The brain supports the soul, enabling it to form thoughts and beliefs. Then the soul pushes out decisions regarding desired actions which the brain implements. This makes the brain the physical intermediary, not the true human.
So we can begin to understand the functions of brain and soul, and which does what. Now we can focus on the higher order functions of thoughts and beliefs which occur in the soul. But first, let us take a short side-trip to examine how and why humans are different than animals.