Nov/Dec 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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In 1996, to take a break from the grueling work of producing his second novel, A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe hung out with a gaggle of neuroscientists for several weeks. The resulting 7,000-word essay, entitled "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," reminded America once again why Wolfe is our greatest journalist.1 Amidst humor, dish, details, flair, and lots of exclamation points, he told us what he had learned. The Internet might be nice, said he, "[b]ut something tells me that within ten years, by 2006, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories." The technology is called brain imaging. Wolfe predicted that "anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding twenty-first-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it."

What is it, and why should we care? It is a more or less noninvasive scan that allows the brain to be mapped in real time. Electrical impulses, different types of tissue, and reaction to stimuli can all be viewed by a third party. Brain imaging can thus diagnose problems that even invasive surgery might be hard pressed to find. But "its far greater importance," Wolfe suggests, "is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about 'the mind,' 'the self', 'the soul,' and 'free will' that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience."

At the immediately practical level, their theories posit that "[e]very human brain … is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as an exposed negative ...