Neuroscience and Thomas Aquinas

Recent science has shown the fruitfulness of taking the brain to be the seat of all those mental
faculties medieval thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas, had attributed to the soul. Therefore, we
consider here a variety of results from neuroscience which make it appear that the various
human capacities once attributed to the soul are better understood as capacities of the human
brain.

One sort of research concerns the localizing of various cognitive and affective functions in
specific regions or distributed systems of the brain. This research began by studying victims of
brain damage, correlating lost faculties with localized damage discovered during autopsies. With
the development of CAT scans (computerized axial tomography), it has become possible to study
correlations between structural abnormalities and the behavior of people while they are alive.
Further, MRI scans (magnetic resonance imaging) now provide quite detailed pictures of the
brain, more easily revealing locations of brain damage. And PET scans (positron emission
tomography) allow research correlating localized brain activity with the performance of
specialized cognitive tasks.

These varied techniques have allowed for the localization of a vast array of cognitive functions.
To show the extent to which current science now studies the capacities once attributed to the
soul, let us consider in more detail the account developed by Thomas Aquinas of the
hierarchically ordered faculties, or powers, of the soul.

Vegetative Faculties

The `lowest' powers of the human soul, shared with plants and animals, are the vegetative
faculties of nutrition, growth, and reproduction. All of these processes are now fairly well
understood in biological terms, especially since the discovery of DNA. The brain is significantly
involved here, in that neurochemicals play a large role in appetite and sex drive;
while pituitary hormones control growth.

Sensitive Faculties

Next higher are the sensitive faculties, shared with animals but not plants. They include the
exterior senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, as well as the four "interior senses,"
called sensus communis, phantasia (imagination), vis aestimativa, and vis
memorativa (memory). The sensus communis is the faculty that distinguishes and collates data
from the exterior senses. An example of this faculty would be associating the bark and the
brownness of the fur with the same dog. The vis aestimativa allows for apprehensions that go
beyond sensory perception. Here, an example would be apprehending the fact that something is
useful or useless; friendly or unfriendly. This sensitive level of the soul also provides for the
power of locomotion and for lower aspects of appetite -- the ability to be attracted to sensible
objects. This appetitive faculty is further subdivided between a simple tendency toward or away
what is sensed as good or evil, and a more complex inclination to meet bodily needs or threats
with appropriate responses: attack, avoidance, or acquiescence. Together, these appetitive
faculties (all still at the sensitive level) provide for eleven kinds of emotion: love, desire, delight,
hate, aversion, sorrow, fear, daring, hope, despair, and anger.
Locomotion is now known to be controlled by the motor cortex -- running across the top of the
brain -- and by the efferent nervous system.

Great progress has been made in tracing the processes involved in sensation. For example,
signals are transmitted from two different kinds of light-sensitive cells in the retina, through a
series of processors, and on to the visual cortex. Smell involves the sending of signals from six
different kinds of receptor cells to the olfactory lobes.

The task Aquinas assigned to the "interior sense" sensus communis -- the ability to synthesize
input from the various external senses -- is now studied by neuroscientists as "the binding
problem."

The "interior sense" of memory, identified by Aquinas, has also been researched a great deal.
Long-term memory is now understood to arise from patterns of connections within the neural
network. Short-term memory is believed to be enabled by a system of "recurrent pathways,"
such that information is processed, recycled, and then fed into the process again. The
hippocampus is involved in converting short-term into long-term memory, but how this
happens is not yet known.

One of the most interesting findings involves the localization of specific sorts of memory. Paul
Churchland presents a map of the brain showing regions involved in language memory, with
different locations being responsible for verb access, proper name access, common noun access,
and color terms. The parietal lobes are an example, as they are involved in our memory of
faces.

PET scans make it possible to record localized elevations of neuronal activity. Paul
Churchland reports an experiment in which his wife, Patricia, was asked to perform a task
involving her visual imagination. The activity in her visual cortex was elevated exactly during
the time she was doing the exercise, but not to the same extent as when she received external
visual stimulation. Paul Churchland hypothesizes that visual imagination involves the
systematic stimulation of the visual cortex "by way of recurrent axonal pathways descending
from elsewhere in the brain."

The vis aestimativa of Aquinas included the ability to distinguish between the friendly and the
unfriendly, the useful and the useless. One clear instance of this is our ability to read others'
emotions. While there does not seem to be a single location responsible for this capacity, there
are patients whose brain damage has resulted in its loss. For instance, Churchland describes the
patient "Boswell," who suffers from extensive lesions to the frontal pole of both temporal
lobes, and to the underpart of the frontal cortex. One, among many, of his mental deficits is
the inability to perceive emotion. Churchland reports:

I watched as Boswell was shown a series of dramatic posters advertising sundry

Hollywood movies. He was asked to say what was going on in each. One of them showed
a man and a woman, in close portrait, confronting one another angrily. The man's
mouth was open in a plainly hostile shout. Boswell, without evident discomfort or
dismay, explained that the man appeared to be singing to the woman.
The sensitive appetite postulated by Aquinas was responsible for emotions such as desire,
delight, sorrow, and despair. Studies of the etiology of mental illnesses involving inappropriate
affect have shown a significant role for neurotransmitters such as serotonin.

Rational Faculties

The rational faculties described by Aquinas are distinctively human: passive and active intellect
and will. The will is a higher appetitive faculty whose object is the good. Since God is ultimate
goodness, this faculty is ultimately directed toward God. The two faculties of the intellect enable
abstraction, grasping or comprehending the abstracted universals, judging, and remembering.
Morality is a function of attraction to the good, combined with rational judgment in reference to
what the good truly consists.

These higher mental faculties Aquinas attributed to the rational soul are further from being
understood. However, all of them involve language. Even if we do not understand how these
mental faculties depend on brain functioning, we know that they do because of the close
association of linguistic abilities with specific brain areas, especially Wernicke's area and Broca's
area.

Summary

To review, a variety of results make it appear that the various human capacities Aquinas had
attributed to the soul are better understood as capacities of the human brain. In fact, these
capacities are attributable to specific regions of the brain.

These conclusions are not uncontroversial. First, there is the argument within neuroscience over
specialization versus globalism. That is, many would argue that each of the mental capacities
listed above is much more a result of global functioning of the brain, not localized functioning.
We need not get into this argument; all that needs to be pointed out is that the regions cited
above are involved in the specified functions, since all we know is that, if a region is damaged by
illness or injury, a corresponding function is lost. Second, there are still some philosophers and
scientists who maintain a dualist account of the mind and brain. They point out that however
precise science may become in associating mental functions with the brain, science will never
prove it is the brain performing the functions. It may simply be the case that functions
performed by an independently existing mind, or soul, are just highly correlated with brain
functions.