neuroscience

Review: The Sacred Art of Slowing Down

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Cover image of "The Sacred Art of Slowing Down" by A. C. Seiple

The Sacred Art of Slowing Down, A. C. Seiple, foreword by Chuck De Groat. Tyndale | Refresh (ISBN: 9798400506321) 2025.

Summary: Explores ways to become aware of our inner state, to tune into our bodies, and tend our souls.

Dallas Willard often advised his mentees as follows: “Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” But how do we eliminate hurry and slow down? Especially, how do we do so when our mind is racing and our body is tense? Licensed counselor A. C. Seiple combines therapeutic practices and spiritual insights to slow down, tune in to our bodies, and tend to our souls. In fact, those three phrases form the outline of this book. She approaches us as integrated beings woven from cognitive, emotional, somatic and spiritual strands combined with the narrative strands of our life story.

First, she explores how we can slow down. Seiple describes how in her own life she had two gears–go and stop, gas pedal and brake. Mostly, she was go, go, go until she crashed. She was caring for a husband with a traumatic brain injury. She didn’t feel any margin existed for stopping. But she was weary. A counselor helped her understand how her body was geared up to go, a function of her autonomic nervous system’s response to crisis. Often our bodies are trying to tell us things through pain, tension, or weariness. She describes her own experience of learning to listen to those messages and offers exercises for readers to practice the same. She also helps us hear with compassion the embedded beliefs that may be driving or dogging us.

Then she explores how we may tune in with the body. She explains neuroception and the subconscious ways our bodies respond to different situations. We may think our brain is driving, but not always. She helps with exercises to discern who is driving and whether that part is stepping on the gas or the brake, perhaps explaining why we want to slow down but can’t. She identifies three states–safety, stress, and shutdown–and our autonomic responses to each. Then she explores how we may anchor ourselves with God in a sacred space amid each of these states. She helps us reflect on our life story, and how different parts of us have responded in different episodes–how we fight or self-protect or freeze or flee.

Thirdly, she discusses how we use all this to tend to the depths of our souls. She offers help in tending to the forgotten or neglected parts of our lives. Then she turns to the places where we’ve been wounded. Finally, Seiple helps us explore our longings and steps that might be new movements for us.

Seiple illustrates ideas from her own experiences. Each chapter has “Pause and Play” sections where we can explore the concepts she’s shared in our own experience. Throughout, one has the sense that Seiple is a caring counselor, walking alongside and extending compassion, creating the safety to look at different parts of our lives. She invites curiosity rather than judgement or shame. She helps us find rest for every part of us, the place where we both know ourselves and are unafraid to know God. And she translates the “relentless elimination of hurry” from abstract advice to lived experience.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Body Keeps the Score

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Cover image of "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780143127741) 2015.

Summary: An account of the growing understanding of the effects of trauma on the brain and the body and promising treatments.

Since its initial publication in 2014, The Body Keeps the Score has prompted a widespread conversation about the effects of trauma on the brain and body. Particularly, in recent years the focus on #MeToo and on race-based trauma have extended the conversation.

For Bessel van der Kolk, his awareness of trauma began with some of the Vietnam war veterans he was seeing. They suffered from nightmares, waking flashbacks, hair-trigger anger responses, alcoholism, depression and suicidal ideation. They also often felt detached from their lives. This book traces the growing understanding of the effects of trauma that didn’t fit existing clinical diagnoses or treatments. Often, efforts to treat symptoms brought little relief.

This book chronicles the learning journey of van der Kolk and other clinicians to understand trauma. A key to all of this was the growing field of neuroscience. They found that the brains of the traumatized were not like others. Either they were in an amygdala-triggered hyper-vigilant state that bypassed the pre-frontal cortex, or they were shut down. Not only this, effects of trauma were also evident in the body from auto-immune issues, headaches, and a number of other somatic complaints. They discovered genes that turned on under stress. Hence the book’s title: the body does keep score.

While his work began with soldiers, van der Kolk began to realize the ongoing marks on mind and body of childhood traumas. These include physical and sexual as well as emotionally abusive situations. They learned to take trauma histories. But they also learned that people were not always consciously aware, or could only remember bits and pieces. And these memories were not integrated parts of one’s life story.

The final part of the book describes a variety of therapeutic approaches. In one sense, trauma cannot be undone. But people can learn to manage the feelings, the triggers that bring up the past. They can learn to be present to others. And they can stop keeping secrets from the self. The author describes the use of neurofeedback, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy. He devotes a chapter to finding the language to name one’s experience. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is another approach he describes in processing trauma. Because mind and body often detach in trauma, he also addresses approaches like yoga, theater, choral singing and others that re-establish that connection, often in the context of community.

The book combines explanation of neuroscience and physiology with case studies. Another aspect of the book is how the author describes his own learning journey. He considers patients his first teachers. But he also learns from other clinical approaches and allows himself to be the subject of those approaches, sharing how he changes through them. While not ruling out using medications, he prefers other approaches. This makes sense if the goal is for a person to be able to integrate traumatic memories, self-manage, and be present.

Two things I wonder about. One is the “grabbag” of therapeutic approaches. It seems important over time to develop standards of care, identifying the most effective therapies where possible. It also seems like we are in a pendulum swing from not recognizing trauma to possibly applying the label overly freely. I hear people describing listening to the news as traumatizing. Distressing, yes. But traumatizing? It doesn’t seem to be the same thing as childhood sexual abuse or rape. I wonder if clinicians will develop greater precision in what is labelled as and treated as trauma.

Still, I found this a fascinating book and can understand its path-breaking nature. Van der Kolk describes his own journey to understanding trauma’s effects on brain and body when there wasn’t a category for this. And he offers hope that, while we can’t undo trauma, what we’ve learned about neuroscience and therapy can help people get their lives back and understand and not just react to trauma. There is hope.

Review: Free Agents

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Cover image of "Free Agents" by Kevin J. Mitchell

Free Agents, Kevin J. Mitchell. Princeton University Press (ISBN: 9780691226231) 2023.

Summary: An argument based on the evidence of the development of nervous systems, for the evolution of individual agency–free will.

Philosophers have long debated whether human beings have free will or are creatures determined by the various forces that impinge upon us. Then enter the neurobiologists who have been able to increasingly map the fine structures and neural networks of the brain. They have accounted for a vast array of animal and human behaviors For many in the field, they have concluded that ultimately, we only have the illusion of free will. We only think we are thinking and deciding.

Kevin J. Mitchell, while accepting the evidence of evolutionary neurobiology, argues otherwise. He believes there is evidence that human beings, and perhaps other species, have agency that is not an illusion but an evolved quality. There are at least two strands to his argument. First, he traces evolutionary history from single-celled organisms to human beings. The simplest organisms have sensory abilities oriented toward sustaining life (seeking nutrients) and avoiding harm (from poison to predators). Over several chapters he shows how, as multicellular organisms developed, giving way to more complex species, that sensory apparatus developed. Neural inputs fed into ganglia, and eventually a cerebral cortex. Increasingly complicated responses developed to the variety of inputs involving layered and connected neural networks. In human beings, this resulted in a large pre-frontal cortex with semantic capabilities carrying the possibilities of thought and meaning within the recursive and layered neural processes.

The other part of Mitchell’s argument is based on quantum effects and neural “noise” factors that introduce indeterminacy into the system. He argues that this creates room for choice in what might otherwise be a determined system. Combined with human evolution, this allows space for higher level thinking, consciousness of self, and real agency.

He also argues against an approach to freedom as a lack of prior influences on choice. He argues that we have greater freedom when we have access to these factors and can draw upon them. This means we enjoy degrees of free agency rather than some impossible “absolute freedom.”

Until reading Mitchell’s book, I thought there were only two major options. One is dualism which posits a non-material mind, consciousness, or soul interacting with the brain. The other is reductive materialism where we are our brains and agency is illusion. What Mitchell posits is a third option, cognitive realism, in which neural patterns comprising “thoughts” may have causal power based on what they “mean.”

As interesting as this is, I still can see this collapsing into reductive materialism. All of what he posits is rooted in material processes. All material is subject to quantum indeterminacy. Random probability is different from free agency.

Mitchell is still making a materialistic argument. While I recognize that philosophic dualism has its own challenges, not least that it is incapable of scientific proof, I found that Mitchell was dismissive of this long tradition of thought that has its own explanatory power in terms of what it means to be human. Mitchell relegates this to “the ghost in the machine” language, and in doing so thinks he has satisfactorily dismissed it. Yet I wonder if he has substituted material for non-material “ghosts.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Have we Lost Our Minds?

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Cover image of "Have We Lost Our Minds?" by Stan W. Wallace

Have We Lost Our Minds?, Stan W. Wallace. Foreword by J. P. Moreland. Wipf & Stock (ISBN: 9781666789133)

Summary: Have we lost our minds to neuroscience? A challenge to neurotheology’s eclipse of the soul and reduction of mental events to brain events.

Classically in Christian thought, human beings have been thought of as embodied souls. We believe that an immaterial nature is joined to our physical bodies. The advances of neuroscience have ushered in the new field of neurotheology. This field seeks to foster the spiritual flourishing of human beings by drawing upon the findings of neuroscience. In doing so, neurotheologians accept the premise that our mental processes are simply expressions of brain processes. There is no soul or “mind.” At best our sense of this is an emergent property of what is going on in the brain.

This book arises as an attempt to engage the expression of these ideas by two popular Christian authors, Curt Thompson and Jim Wilder. Both base their work of counseling and spiritual formation on an understanding of how the brain functions, and the spiritually re-wiring those functions when they are awry. Wilder even appropriates the spiritual formation work of Dallas Willard, saying his work extends that work. Stan W. Wallace contends that their work is contrary to Willard, who understood spiritual formation as something that occurred with the soul. He makes a case for our two natures as embodied souls or what he calls holistic dualism over against the physicalism of neurotheology.

Wallace lays out a careful biblical and philosophical argument to make his case. Before he begins the argument, he reviews the findings of neuroscience. His point is not to challenge these findings but rather to challenge the conclusions neurotheologians derive from them. Firstly, he considers the biblical argument on what we are as human beings–everlasting souls united with bodies. Then Wallace shows how the neurotheologians view differs in assuming an identity between mental and brain processes.

Refuting this identity, Wallace observes our first-person subjectivity, our free will, and our use of reason. Additionally, the assumption that mental and brain processes are identical leads to physicalism and the eclipse of the soul. But this ignores both our unified experiences at a given moment and the unity of our sense of self through time.

From here, Wallace discusses further from philosophy the nature of the soul, noting the correspondence with biblical ideas of us as individuated human nature, a “spiritual substance.” But how does the soul relate to the body? Against Cartesian dualism, where there is a sharp divide between soul and body, Wallace proposes “holistic dualism,” which he defines as “a form of substance dualism in which the body is caused by the soul, and therefore the two are deeply united.”

In the next two chapters, Wallace considers and refutes three arguments neurotheologians advance, and three arguments against holistic dualism and defenses against these arguments. I was most interested in the defense of holistic dualism against the challenge that neurotheology provides a simpler answer to understanding our nature. Parsimony or “Ockham’s Razor” is a fundamental principle in science. Wallace defends holistic dualism as the simplest answer for all the relevant data, including reason, free will, unified experience and unity through time. The most surprising objection was one that if we posit human souls then we have to admit animal souls. Wallace affirms the objection, noting the application of soul language to animals in the Bible and the belief that animals had souls of some sort until the seventeenth century!

Finally, in the last two chapters, Wallace applies all this to loving God and loving others. He draws on the work of Dallas Willard to show how important the soul is to our spiritual formation. Then he illustrates how important affirming the soul can be across the professions.

I found Wallace’s approach both compelling and winsome. It was compelling because of his step by step logical argumentation. It was winsome because he sought a middle way in addressing neuroscience. Unlike some, he neither outright accepts or rejects. Because he offers a model that highly values embodied life, he can affirm neuroscience while challenging the conclusions of neurotheology.

While Christians have been fighting hundred-year-old battles about science, neuroscience has crept up unawares, posing important questions about our nature. Wallace shows that some Christian neurotheologians have adopted assumptions contrary to what we learn about human nature both from the Bible and philosophy. He shows why this may be harmful rather than helpful in our formation. In so doing, he offers a helpful corrective for all who care about the spiritual formation of God’s people.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. New York: Touchstone, 2006 (originally published in 1985).

Summary: Brief case histories of twenty-four patients with unusual neurological conditions.

Oliver Sacks is one of those authors I discovered in recent years, beginning to read him only shortly before his death in 2015. Only now have I gotten around to what is probably his most famous work. It is organized in four sections: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Each section is introduced by a clinical discussion followed by four to nine illustrative case histories.

The title essay is found in the first section on losses, or cognitive deficits due to disease or damage to a particular brain structure. In the case of Dr. P, a musician and teacher, while the cause remained undetermined, he could not identify the objects he was seeing. He could describe them in detail, but he did not know what he was seeing. Hence at one point, when getting dressed to go out, he grabbed the top of his wife’s head, thinking it a hat. His visual agnosia left his musical abilities untouched, and with accommodations was able to continue in this work. One of the other cases described in this section was of a woman who lost all sense of her body, a loss of what is called proprioception. She could not tell where her arms or legs were apart from seeing them and had to learn to function by sight rather than by this sense of ourselves we take for granted. Sacks also describes cases of phantom limbs, pain, of someone who could see only the right half of their world, and a man who could not remember his life after 1945.

The section on excesses covered cognitive functions that might be describe as being in hyper mode. He covers things like Tourette’s syndrome, and a fascinating instance of “Cupid’s Disease,” a case of late onset in a patient nearly 90 of symptoms from syphilis contracted when she worked in a brothel as a young woman. It made her “frisky,” symptoms which for her were actually somewhat welcome! Although treated for syphilis, the symptoms remained.

“Transports” covers instances of sensations, memories, or visions that come due to epilepsy, or sometimes drugs, as was the case of a student who suddenly had a heightened sense of smell for a three week period before reverting to normal. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Hildegard of Bingen, whose migraines were accompanied by visions rendered in drawings.

The final section, discussing subjects with profound mental deficits were some of the most touching as Sacks recognizes what they possessed rather than what they lacked, such as Rebecca, who blossomed in a theatre program despite an IQ of 60, or twins who spoke to each other in prime numbers and could almost instantaneously calculate the day on which any calendar date would fall for 80,000 years. The last case of an autistic patient, Jose, shows how much things have advanced since Sacks wrote. He was considered mentally deficient but Sacks discovered an artistic ability that brought him to life. When he was moved to a quieter setting and allowed to develop his artistic expression, he flourished. Perhaps Sacks anticipated (and maybe helped) the advances in the treatment of those on the autism spectrum.

Sacks account is fascinating for its account of unusual neurological conditions, revealing the influences of neurophysiology on our personalities. What is also impressive is the delightful respect Sacks has for his patients. He listens to them and recommends treatments and accommodations that respect their individuality. At the same time, this book strikes me as a “snapshot in time” that reflects the state of knowledge in the 1980’s, which has advanced tremendously since then. What hasn’t changed is the care for the person Sacks shows. They are not just cases to him but people, and hopefully we will never advance beyond respecting the dignity of each person in the way Sacks does.

Review: Conscience

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Conscience

Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, Patricia S. Churchland. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (Forthcoming June 4) 2019.

Summary: Exploring the neuroscience of our sense of right and wrong, integrating our knowledge of neurophysical causation, social factors, and philosophy, arguing that moral norms are based in our brain functions, interacting with our social world.

Conscience. Unless one is significantly cognitively impaired, there is this inner sense we have about what is morally right or wrong, or sometimes this place where we determine right or wrong. Where does this come from? Theists will claim a transcendent basis for this, something written on the heart. Yet, what is written on one heart often varies from another’s. Often we experience uncertainty about these things in our own hearts. Furthermore, those “cognitive impairments” and advancing neuroscience are demonstrating that many aspects of human moral behavior from social bonding and care for others to where one may fall on the political spectrum with regard to moral issues is rooted in the neurophysiology of the brain. Are we conscious actors, or is our moral sense and moral behavior in some way determined by our brain chemistry?

Patricia S. Churchland is one of the pioneers in the field of neurophilosophy–exploring this intersection of neuroscience research and philosophical discussion of questions like ethics and free will. This work is an engaging introduction to her work that moves between discussions of neurotransmitters and a philosophical survey of theories of moral behavior and the question of free will.

She looks at the role of oxytocin in human attachment (“The Snuggle to Survive”), how we are wired for sociality, and how behavior is shaped by the reward system in our brains, and the physiology of empathy. We learn what the brain response to a person eating worms may indicate about political attitudes. Churchland explores the bewildering field of psychopathology–those whose anti-social behavior reflects a lack of moral compass, guilt or remorse–and thus far, our futile efforts to arrive at remedies.

The last two chapters of the book focus on the philosophical questions, and here is where it got really interesting for me. Churchland considers “rule based” moral behavior from the ten commandments to Kant’s categorical imperative to utilitarian-based systems. The flaw, she argues, is that human behavior endlessly deviates from these rules, and there is even significant disagreement on the rules. She argues for a socio-biological basis for moral behavior in which the evolution of our neurophysiology is such that we are well-equipped to engage in social life and behavior that sustains the bonds between us. This leads her to a definition of morality as “the set of shared attitudes and practices that regulate individual behavior to facilitate cohesion and well-being among individuals in the group.”  She seems sympathetic to forms of virtue ethics in which habits of behaving may be modified by particular case constraints.

The final chapter explores free will, and here, Churchland seems to be trying to navigate between those who would fully advocate for free will, and even argue moral certainties, and those who would argue that what we have learned about causation in neuroscience undermines free will, and exonerates criminals from guilt. She argues for the distinction between causes beyond our control and causes under our control, using the example of Bernie Madoff, who was under no compulsion, but knew exactly what he was doing.

Churchland’s discussion in these two chapters also indicated to me some of the concerns that underlie this book. She is deeply concerned about those who tout moral certitudes and also authoritarian approaches that may lead to morally justified abuses of others. She believes that an understanding of how we are “wired” for morally decent behavior shaped by social norms to be superior to such approaches.

As a Christian theist with a deep respect for scientists, and one who shares a sense of being humbled before the realities of our existence, I wonder whether there is a third way between a pure naturalism of “morally decent humans” and a rule-based authoritarianism, whether rooted in ideology or theology. Might we not allow for the possibility that we are indeed “wired” for moral behavior in social contexts that reflect transcendent concerns expressed in the great commands, which are really broad moral statements of principle, to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself? It seems we often get caught in binary discussions of either science or the transcendent. Might there be an approach of both-and that both celebrates the wonderful mechanisms that bond parents and children, or larger social groups, the mechanisms by which we learn what it is to be moral, in all its societal variants; and recognizes the possibility that at least some communal norms might be grounded in transcendent realities that are not occasions for arrogance or authoritarianism, but humility and grace and empathy, and are consonant with the ways we are wired?

I could be wrong, but it was not evident that Churchland has engaged with neurotheologians like Andrew Newberg, (see my review of his book Neurotheology) who covers similar ground. There are many others interested in a conversation rather than a war between science and religious belief, and see the possibility of a kind of consilience that mutes the voice of neither. When I consider Churchland’s account, I find myself marveling anew at the marvels hidden within my own body and am grateful for her exposition of these. I hope going forward, there might be a growing appreciation on the part of neurophilosophers like Churchland, not merely of problematic aspects of rule-based ethics in philosophy or religious teaching (which I will admit exist, just as there are problematic questions in neuroscience), but also the ways religious frameworks of moral teachings have profoundly shaped many communities for good (for example Andre’ Trocme’ and his community of Le Chambon, which hid Jewish refugees during the Holocaust), and helped individuals lead morally worthy lives as people of conscience.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.