I was correcting a student's paper recently, and I found the phrase, "the brains ability." Without thinking I wrote in the margin "brains don't have abilities but people do." That in turn started a whole series of reflections. The current explosion in brain research has had many powerful and beneficial effects. But it has also been used to justify early intellectual stimulation in infants and young children. The argument is that the brain is growing so fast during the first years of life that we need to capitalize on that growth and load infants and young children down with cognitive stimulation in increase their intelligence. I am a gardener and this argument never made sense to me. One of the first lessons I learned was that you don't prune during the growing season. Loading young children with stimulation is a form of pruning. Another fallacy of that argument is that it is not the number of neurons but their interrelation which is correlated emerging ability. In any case, there is a lot of synaptic pruning going on so that older children have fewer neurons than younger ones.

But the issue raised by my student is more profound than that and goes to the heart of contemporary discussions about the brain. Let me put it simply, do I tell my brain I want pizza, or does my brain tell me that I want it. That is to say we are looking at two quite different levels of phenomena, electrochemical processes on the one hand, and conscious experience on the other. Brain research has given us a much better sense of the connection, but certainly it is far from explaining my ideas, my feelings, my desires, my personality my free will.

It raises questions like: Where does the I reside? I tend to locate ideas in my head and sensory experiences in my body, but my thoughts and experiences are not electro-chemical. I certainly have no use for the mystical explanation of a spirit world that can be reached by séances and wedge boards. I simply remained mystified and awed by my conscious experience. I realize that it is an epiphenomena but that really doesn't take me very far.

The aim of this rumination is simply to make us a bit more careful and a bit more awed about the brain and our conscious experience and behavior. They are very different levels of phenomena, and while they are necessarily correlated, they are far from being identical. The brain doesn't have abilities, values, beliefs and prejudices, people do.