Editorial October 10, 1977 Issue

Spiritual Light on Consciousness and the Brain

Geoffrey J. Barratt

The nature of human intelligence and the operations of the brain are still, after intensive research, mysterious, even to those considered experts in this field. One writes: "Throughout my own scientific career I, like other scientists, have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands, and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain?"^{Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. xiii;}

Teaching that God is divine Mind, and that Mind is the only source of ideas, Christian Science is proposing a unique way out of the problem. The rightness of its approach can be demonstrated in breaking limitations relating not only to brain thinking directly, but to the whole range of troubles that entangle human beings.

Real consciousness and intelligence do not result from the functioning of the physical brain. This organ never includes true consciousness. And its operations are not the path to the comprehension of Spirit, matter's opposite. "The brain can give no idea of God's man," Mary Baker Eddy points out in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. "It can take no cognizance of Mind. Matter is not the organ of infinite Mind."^{Science and Health, p. 191;}