We started our discussions with the fundamental premise that brain and mind are almost synonymous. One by one, we saw how many aspects of our mind can be mapped on to the activities of the brain.
We said that our feelings, thoughts, consciousness and even the so called ‘free will’ are all just happenings in our brain. We were almost close to concluding that even the illusive entity namely the soul does not exist. We can explain everything about our existence without taking recourse to concepts like soul etc.
But do we really have all the answers?
Overall, most of us are more or less similar. But don’t we have great geniuses among us, once in a while? In terms of structure, an Einstein’s brain and ours may not be very different. But how is it that we are not able to come up with great ideas like Einstein?
Why all of us cannot compose music like Mozart did?
Why only some people could achieve what they did, even when all of us have the same raw material namely the brain?
Well. Effort, focus, opportunities, and so on definitely count. But is that all? Given the same conditions, can all of us become great geniuses?
Our worldly experience tells us that great people are one in millions. Others spend most of their lives either in making ‘two ends meet’ or at best keeping themselves busy with enjoying worldly pleasures. Why we don’t get motivated to do something out of ordinary?
We often attribute genes to whatever we are. At least our potentials are decided by them. It is a different matter that we may go altogether astray and do something that does not match our backgrounds.
Many a times our upbringing has a great role to play. Our minds get shaped by the way we are brought up. Environment has its own influence on what we will be. Mozart had his father who was also a composer. Einstein’s father was an engineer.
But have you not heard of great musicians born in a family that had almost no conducive environment? The parents and other elders may not even have any interest in music at all!
The great Indian mathematical genius namely Srinivas Ramanujan’s father was just a clerk in a cloth shop. Srinivas Ramanujan was brought up in a very traditional family with more emphasis on religious activities. He could have become a priest like his elders. But how did he develop interest in mathematics?
How do you explain two identical twins born out of the same egg fertilized by the same sperm; sharing the same genes, brought up under almost identical environments, develop into two different kinds of individuals. It is not very rare to find such cases. What made them different though they had almost identical brains?
We may never have drowned ourselves in water, but still we have hydrophobia and we would never attempt to swim. We may never have fallen from some height, but still we may have acrophobia! Why?
Dr. Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry, who was the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia seemed to have an answer to all these questions.
According to him, conventional theory about the development of personality of an individual in terms of genetic influences and modifying influences of prenatal and postnatal environment is incomplete.
Then how does Stevenson explain these things?
Dr. Stevenson is a strong proponent of rebirth or re-incarnation theory. Rebirth is that phenomenon by which a person who died reappears as another person in a new body. Dr. Stevenson suggests that experiences accumulated over our previous births may influence our personality, our abilities, likes and dislikes, our phobia and so on, in this birth as well.
Does that not sound a bit absurd! On one hand science says that our experiences are stored in our brain; our abilities stem from our brain; And at the same time here is a reputed scientist who says that our experiences, fears, capabilities, tastes and so on can be passed on to another body that we are supposed to take up in our next birth.
Whether rebirth is a possibility or not is a different question. But how can the contents of a brain, a brain that perishes along with the dying body, be transferred to another body? Definitely, we are not talking about science, are we?
But Stevenson has thousands of cases to prove his hypothesis! His co-researchers are almost sure that rebirth is a reality and passing information across bodies is also a reality. That means brain is not everything as far as our Mind goes. Is that what it means?
Let us dig more into this in subsequent episodes.
But for now, ‘tighten your seat belts; I am going to take you back by few thousands of years!’, in the typical Star Trek style 😉
A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King 2019
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