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This Week's Column:
"Where Is The Soul?"
Creative Loafing Column Issue Date 7/14/01; Web-Posted 7/9/01
Time Magazine, which is for many people the periodical of record for what happens in our world, refused last week to cover one of the most horrible stories of our time - about the Texas mother who inexplicably drowned all five of her children one morning, and then calmly called her husband and told him he needed to come home.
Time's Managing Editor, though, in a lengthy statement, tried to explain why they'd decided to pass on reporting about the incident, essentially saying that he didn't see what they had to contribute, except, perhaps, to ask the question, "How could a seemingly loving mother do that?" He was afraid that anything they did write would be sensationalizing, fueling our propensity towards being voyeurs.
But Time was wrong. The questions that are raised by what Andrea Yates did are so enormous that they can't be ignored, or avoided, just because they make us so uncomfortable. Beyond the obvious ones - questions about her sanity, questions about post-partum depression or psychosis, or whether or not she should face the death penalty - are essential questions about human behavior, about what can go wrong, and, maybe, most importantly, what we might be able to do about it.
What's more, barely a few days after the tragedy, a new scientific study was released that has the potential to help us begin to wrestle in a new way with what happens when someone we would otherwise have called "normal" acts with a malevolence beyond our grasp.
For all of the advances in medical and biological science over the past few decades - or centuries -- we still don't understand what are, perhaps, the most unexplained questions of all: What do we mean when we talk about the "mind?" "Is it different from the brain?" "What is "consciousness?" And then there are the ones at the very top of the list: Do we have a "soul?" And if we do, what is it, and where does it reside inside us? And these questions have to be answered before we can pass judgment on Andrea Yates.
Centuries ago, people believed that we thought with our hearts, that emotions and actions were determined by that organ. These days, we know that's wrong, that the brain and its various structures and billions of nerves are somehow connected in such a way that everything we do, everything we feel, everything we remember, comes out of a mass of grey matter inside our skulls. We can play around with it some now, but we still understand much less than we think we do. And when it comes to trying to understand one person's behavior by what goes on inside each of us individually, well, we're simply fools if we think we can judge anything about that, even though we certainly try.
How can a mass of grey matter love someone? Or kill someone? Or feel the presence of a Higher Power? How can that mass even be aware of itself, which is what we call "consciousness?"
What if the knowledge we think we've amassed is still horribly inadequate, and even completely wrong, about how our behavior is controlled? We do know now (at least we think we do) that the mind is not the brain - and the questions about a soul are even more mysterious.
There are no identifiable structures inside the brain that we can point to and say, "There! That's the mind!" We might be able to label certain things: the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, the frontal lobes, and make what we think are educated guesses as to what function each of them serves - but where's the mind? Where's the soul?
Two weeks ago, a British scientist, Sam Parnia, -- one of two British doctors who have been studying what we call "near-death experiences" – presented a paper to scientists at the California Institute of Technology in which he said, according to a Reuters news story, that in studying heart attack patients he is finding evidence that suggests that consciousness may continue after the brain has stopped functioning, and a patient is clinically dead -- which resurrects the debate over whether there is life after death, and whether there is such a thing as the human soul.
"The studies are very significant in that we have a group of people with no brain function ... who have well-structured, lucid thought processes with reasoning and memory formation at a time when their brains are shown not to function,'' he said.
"We need to do much larger-scale studies, but the possibility is certainly there to suggest that consciousness, or the soul, keeps thinking and reasoning even if a person's heart has stopped, he is not breathing and his brain activity is nil."
If the brain stops functioning, and yet people are still thinking, then that casts a whole new light on what we call the mind - not to mention the soul. Is it possible that, with all of the dissections and operations and x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging, we've missed something? Is there a structure yet to be found that we will someday identify as the mind, and another that will show us where the soul is?
And if we can find them, finally, can we figure out what's "normal," and what is not? Can we learn how to be aware when someone's mind is going off-course, like Andrea Yates's clearly did, or when someone's lost the functioning of their soul - and do something about it?
What most disturbs me, and I think has the same reaction on all of us, is the inability to explain what happened to Andrea Yates. The pictures of the family, taken once a year, show everyone smiling happily - and yet, something was clearly going wrong. But what might be even more inexplicable is that the legal system in Texas makes it almost impossible to prove that Yates was psychotic, had suddenly gone insane - and it's quite likely that the prosecutor is going to ask, at her trial, that a jury give her the death penalty.
Could you - or would you - find this woman guilty of premeditated murder, and sentence her to die? If this is not a case in which we clearly do not yet understand what goes on in the brain, or in the mind, or in the soul - then what case would demonstrate that?
And if this can happen to Andrea Yates and her family - could the same happen in yours? Or to you personally?
Maybe one day we'll have better answers. Clearly, science and the reports of people who have "died" and then been revived are raising questions for which we have no adequate answers.
Until that day comes, until we're sure we understand what happened to Yates, we have no business passing judgment on her. And we're a long way off from that day coming. For now, though, as was the case with Time, we have absolutely no business avoiding the questions.
Click Here For Last Week's Cover Story:
"Bumps In The Road"
(CL Issue Date 7/7/01; Web-Posted 7/1/01)
Column Archives
Click Here For A Complete Archive Of Jerry Klein's Columns.
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