The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

With all the advances of science, we may be no nearer to understanding ourselves than before, says Anthony Daniels — but we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility outright

Some years ago I had a patient who believed that his neighbours, unskilled workers like himself, had developed an electronic thought-scanner whose antennae they could, and did, direct at him in order to know his thoughts as and when he had them. He heard them laughing and jeering at the banalities with which, inevitably, his mind was filled most of the time. Needless to say, he found this intrusive and oppressive, and it made him murderously angry.

As life follows art, science follows delusion. It seems to be the ambition of neuroscientists to reach a level of understanding in which such a thought-scanner might be possible, and many claim that we are on the verge of understanding ourselves so completely that we shall no longer be mysteries to ourselves.

In this book, whose title is derived from a wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson, Bryan Appleyard contests such claims. He interviews prominent neuroscientists, and even subjects himself to experiments in a MRI machine, to explore them further. He comes to the conclusion that was his starting point, namely that we are no nearer self-comprehension than ever we were, and that we shall never be any nearer to it. The nature, quality and wealth of our inner life will never be fully explicable by or translatable into physical terms, and — furthermore — it would be horrific if it could.

I share his opinion. For all our astonishing advances, it does not seem to me that, taken as a whole, we have plucked out the heart of our mystery. The most advanced neuroscientist does not necessarily live better than his fellow beings, and there is still no uniquely compelling scientific guidance as to the nature of the good life.