SOUL AND BRAIN: How are they related?

The soul and the brain are two very different things. If they weren’t, or if the soul owed its existence to the brain, as materialists claim, then death would mean the end of us. If they are different, as my colleagues and I think, then you would expect their fates to be different. But they are related. How so? Using three analogies, I’ll try to make this clear. This is an important question for philosophers. There is none more important.

First analogy: Think of your television set. What makes the picture display in living color when you turn it on? It’s like magic for most of us. But something very important is going on behind the scenes. Electromagnetic waves are traveling through space. They are picked up by the TV antenna and converted into image and sound. Those invisible waves are like the invisible soul, and the TV is like the brain. Working together, they produce our experience.  If the TV is broken or destroyed, we don’t get a picture. The electromagnetic signals in space are still there doing their thing. In the same way, the soul continues doing its thing when the body with its brain is broken or destroyed. It carries on into the afterlife.  

Second analogy: You are seated in front of your computer writing email to a friend. Who or what does the writing? We all know it is you. But you can’t compose the message without the help of the computer.  And it needs to be working well. Suppose it begins to fail and the message you write is garbled or simply stops. Is there something wrong with you? No. The brain is an incredibly complex computer inside your head. It needs to work well for you to carry on normally. If it gets sick, as in Alzheimer’s, or is injured, what happens? You can’t communicate normally. Is there anything wrong with you? It might appear that there is. But really it is your brain that is damaged, and you are trapped within it. You can’t communicate through it in the usual way. Fortunately, at death you are freed from it, and normal life (on the Other Side) resumes. 

Third Analogy: This is my favorite. Consider a prism. Perhaps you were introduced to it in a high school science class. It is shaped like a Toblerone candy bar. When a ray of white light, like sunlight, shines into one of its faces, the light emerges from the other face of the prism as many colors, or what is known as the visible spectrum. The prism disperses the light into the many colors that make up our world. Clouds sometimes serve as a natural prism dispersing sunlight into a rainbow. In this analogy the soul with its mind is like the sun, and the brain is like the prism. Without the brain there would be no experience of physical life on our planet. The world we all know is a product of a non-physical soul partnered with a physical brain. Now, is the sunlight the same as the prism? Of course not. In the same way, the soul is not the same as the brain. Death does not kill the soul. It simply separates it, frees it, from the body.

If you have followed these analogies, you are thinking philosophically. You get an A.😊

 Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His novels include The Imprisoned Splendor, The Afterlife Therapist and Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is coming in 2026. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.