God Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist's Reflections on the Spirit World  . By Michael S.A.Graziano . Teaticket , MA : Leapfrog Books , 2010 . 154 pages. $13.95 (paper).

I find books such as this, written as they are at the extreme end of the popular market, difficult to review. In any popularization, certain compromises have to be made. Complex concepts have to be simplified. The necessary nuances and qualifications that accompany any scientific finding (“in this instance …”“for the most part …”“excepting …”) are encouraged to be left out. Bold claims are required to attract the casual reader. These requirements, or perhaps temptations, become stronger the wider the audience is appealed to. Such is the case with this small book.

Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist at Princeton University who has also dabbled in novels and children books. Much of his scientific work has focused on the sensory and motor cortex of primates, and this expertise shows in portions of the book, the aim of which is quite a bit larger. As the title indicates, Graziano has religion in his sights, although not exclusively so, and the larger aim of the book is to give an account of how cognitive psychology and social neuroscience can explain much about how we view the world.

The explanation that Graziano lays out is rather bleak, although Graziano does not seem to think so. What he would like us to know is that we do not experience the world, but a model of the world created by the perceptual apparatus of the brain. Nevertheless, we experience this as perception, and Graziano goes on to explain some of the findings of visual perception in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which has revealed over the past decades some of the very specific ways that our perceptions do not match the real world. In addition to visual perception, Graziano argues, is social perception, and just as visual perception can be mistaken in systematic ways, so can social perception, leading us to attribute minds to objects (such as a childhood toy or teddy bear) that do not have any.

It is this phenomenon of misplaced social perception that Graziano sees as the explanation for belief in God, which he conjectures to have emerged from attributing intentionality to natural events or objects, such as a lightning strike or a river. The God of the monotheistic traditions is the “perception of intentionality on a global scale” (p. 48). The reason that religious convictions are held so strongly is that our neural systems trick us into perceiving God, rather than just inferring God's existence by use of logic, the same way I perceive my friend John, rather than inferring he exists from the movements of his body.

Strangely enough, this whole argument is made as if the author is unaware both of the history of this thesis in religious studies (starting with E.B. Tyler) and the more recent and sophisticated arguments in cognitive science of religion made by scholars such as Pascal Boyer that develops this very line of thought in considerably more detail. It is all the more glaring given the greater attention to detail in other portions of the book. Nor does Graziano consider criticisms or alternative schemes of interpretation.

Having disposed of God in the first fifty pages, the author turns to the soul, or rather its modern proxy, consciousness. It turns out that, on Graziano's account, consciousness is as illusory as God, and he hypothesizes that our perception of consciousness is created by the some neural machinery supporting social perception that also creates our perception of God. The author then quickly moves on to the second half of the book, which places greater focus on the brain itself. These chapters are a bit more satisfactory, dwelling in greater detail on visual and social perception and the brain regions involved, and they clearly reflect the author's expertise. Research on neurons dedicated to faces and hands leads down a path of argumentation suggesting an area of the brain key to the experience of consciousness, the Superior Temporal Polysensory area (STP). This more interesting material is followed by a less than satisfactory chapter on emotion, which strangely implies that the hippocampus is the only significant brain region involved in emotional processing, followed by a chapter on memes and the importance of emotion for social learning.

In conclusion, the casual reader may find in this book some important and interesting tidbits about brain science, and about visual and social perception as well. The author does spend some time on key areas of contemporary exploration, including theory of mind, that are useful and perhaps important for the public to know about. Some of the inferences are also interesting, and while I disagree with illusion theories of consciousness (trying to write this sentence without the word “I” in part exemplifies why), I do find the perceptual theory he proposes to be of interest and one with a long pedigree, with roots in David Hume, among others. Indeed, the brief arguments made concerning religion are the least satisfactory and least developed elements of the book, and it would likely be a much better and interesting read if they had simply been left out. This is somewhat curious, since the book speaks of the greater respect the author has for religion due to his study of it, although this study is nowhere apparent in the writing of the book itself. Indeed, the emphasis placed on the gap between appearance (in the form of brain‐produced perception) and reality is in many places so great, that one wonders about our ability to know anything at all, including the results of brain science that tell us what we cannot know. Acknowledging this problem at the outset may well have led to a more interesting, but very different volume.