Neuroscience Meets the Soul: Why Humans Are More Than Biology

Professor Shimon Marom, a leading expert in physiology and biophysics who teaches at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, has an important message for researchers of human behavior. In his book “Psychoanalysis and Neurophysiology,” he calls on scientists to rethink their assumptions about the relationship between the brain and the mind.

He writes: “I wish to dispel the complacency that has infected brain scientists in recent years. Modern neuroscience, as reflected in scientific literature and conference headlines, has a new dream: to understand how spirit emerges from matter.”

Freud and James: A Century-Old Debate

Marom recalls a famous meeting in 1909 between William James, the American philosopher, and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud had been invited to lecture in the United States and presented his ideas to James, arguing that all mental phenomena arise from biological processes such as childhood conflicts, instincts, and drives.

Freud portrayed man as a sophisticated animal whose emotions — good or bad, stem from early biological complications.

James listened, then replied: “Freud is nothing more than a dreamer. Scientists who succumb to the temptation of accepting what is possible as if it were necessarily true are following a path of faith, not of science.”

More than a hundred years have passed, and the same intellectual trend persists — the effort to explain the human mind as a byproduct of physical processes. Yet, Professor Marom argues, these explanations collapse under scrutiny.

Why Biology Cannot Explain the Soul

According to Marom, there is no scientific method — genetic, biological, or neurological, that is capable of explaining or predicting human behavior. The attempts to connect mental states with biological phenomena are superficial, misleading, and scientifically weak.

They add confusion rather than insight, and do little to help people suffering from emotional or psychological distress.

“It’s time,” Marom insists, “to change direction — to study the mind as mind, as a non-material reality. We must examine mental phenomena as they are, without forcing them into biological frameworks.”

The Confusion in Modern Research

Marom highlights the chaos he observes in modern scientific journals: “Open any scientific publication,” he writes, “and you’ll be bewildered by the many conflicting ways researchers describe human behavior. Imaging experts speak of emotions as increased brainstem activity. Geneticists report correlations between social ability and variations in a gene that regulates body fluids. 

Neurophysiologists describe the planning of a simple hand movement — say, reaching for a glass of water, in terms of complex electrical coordination among thousands of neurons. Meanwhile, molecular biologists announce the discovery of a ‘memory molecule.’ 

Neuropharmacologists explain schizophrenia and depression in terms borrowed from cooking — ‘too much dopamine,’ ‘too little serotonin’, and cell biologists link mental illness to intracellular defects.

The absence of any standard of relevance, combined with the hunger for publication, results in papers full of category mistakes.”

The Human Being Is Not a Machine

What good does it do, Marom asks, to tell someone in emotional pain that their suffering is caused by a supposed biological mechanism?

“The soul is a real, independent, spiritual entity,” he argues. “Its processes are its own, and must be understood as such.” Reducing a human being to a machine, Marom concludes, is not only philosophically mistaken, but also prevents genuine healing.