From a licensed psychologist: You are more than your brain

I was seated in a lab at UC Berkeley, staring at a preserved brain floating in a glass jar, pale and luminous under fluorescent lights, like a prop from a science-fiction film.

As the professor spoke, my mind wandered. I imagined a funeral for that brain. A podium. A velvet cloth. I stood to deliver the eulogy: "We are gathered here to honor Cognishia Grey." Note the pristine frontal lobe. No lesions. No trauma. A well-kept brain. A remarkable organ.

Then the smell of formaldehyde snapped me back.

Here's the problem. That brain in the jar once belonged to someone. Someone with memories. Regrets. Longings. A life stitched together by love, fear, hope, and meaning. None of that was floating in the glass. Neuroscience can map neural activity with breathtaking precision, but it still can't explain why a moment matters or why loss hurts the way it does.

The brain is physical. The mind is personal. It's where memory, belief, emotion, and action collide. A scan can show which regions light up when you remember your mother's voice. It can't tell you why her absence still aches 10 years later. You can dissect a brain. You can't hold a thought in your hand. A surgeon can remove a tumor. No scalpel can extract what love feels like.

I'll leave the technical debates to the academics. But after years as a psychologist, sitting with people in their worst moments, I've learned this: when life collapses, no one talks about neurons. They talk about betrayal, regret, fear, and hope. I've watched brilliant men and women — surgeons, scientists, attorneys — lose their theoretical language the moment a teenager overdoses, a spouse walks out, a diagnosis lands, or a future disappears. 

Science is excellent at explaining mechanisms. But it stumbles when asked to explain meaning, morality, or that deep ache for more that refuses to go away. If the brain were all there is, we should be able to explain everything we are through scans and data. We can't. Not fully. And that gap matters.

I often tell my clients that knowing God doesn’t begin with doctrines or tidy explanations. It begins much closer to the heart, with noticing something in ordinary human experience that we usually rush past.

We don’t just operate on instinct or biology. We experience ourselves as being addressed-something calls us beyond the daily grind. People describe it in plain language: “There must be more,” “There has to be something out there,” “There is always that next thing or person that is calling me.” There’s an inward sense of being summoned, questioned, or claimed, and a need to respond.

In therapy, this rarely appears as a clear belief. It’s more like a low-grade ache. Restlessness. A sense of unfinished business. Someone will say, “On paper, my life is fine, but something feels off.” They’ll blame stress or burnout, and sometimes that’s true. But the explanation can feel thin, as if it doesn’t quite touch the thing itself.

That ache is easy to ignore because it’s so common. But it’s also revealing. It suggests we aren’t just bodies managing demands and stimuli. We listen. We answer. And that quiet, persistent sense of being addressed is often where theology actually begins — even before anyone realizes that’s what’s happening.

Scripture never flatters our bodies by pretending they are trivial. On the contrary, it treats them with almost unsettling seriousness. “You formed my inward parts,” the psalmist says, “you knitted me together in my mother's womb” (Psalm 139:13). Not assembled. Knitted. The language is intimate and deliberate. God fashions a living instrument — brain, nerves, breath, flesh — so that a human life can be heard in the world, capable of perceiving, responding, and bearing meaning rather than merely occupying space.

And that, I think, is the crucial distinction. The body is not the composer. It is the instrument. The brain is not the author of meaning; it is the means by which meaning is received, interpreted, and expressed. Confusing the two is like mistaking an electric guitar for Eric Clapton.

Modern thought often assumes that once the mechanism is explained, the meaning has been exhausted. If we understand how something works, we assume we have understood what it is. Scripture resists that assumption. When Paul tells the Corinthians, “The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13), he makes a claim far deeper than sexual ethics. He says the body has a purpose beyond itself. It is tuned toward communion. Toward resonance with God.

This is why purely material explanations for life feel thin when life falls apart around us. Neuroscience can describe activation and inhibition, stress responses, and memory consolidation. But when grief arrives, love overwhelms, or conscience refuses to be silenced, the language of neurology suddenly feels foreign. Something is happening through us that cannot be reduced to us.

The Bible says this plainly: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16).

Notice what that means. A witness implies a relationship. It assumes communication — something is being said, and something is being heard. There’s a signal, and it’s recognized.

Our spirit isn’t something that generates truth on its own. It responds. It receives.

And the brain — remarkable, but still fragile and limited — is the physical organ that helps us experience and understand that inner testimony in real life. Through it, this spiritual assurance becomes something we’re aware of in our thoughts, emotions, and daily experience.

This also helps us see why Christian faith doesn’t treat salvation as an escape from the body.

The goal isn’t a floating, bodiless existence somewhere beyond the world. It’s resurrection. As Paul writes, “The perishable must put on the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:53).

God doesn’t throw away the body, as if it were a broken tool. He restores it. He tunes it again — bringing it to the fullness it was always meant to reach.

Christ makes this concrete.

The Word didn’t remain a distant, abstract idea. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Flesh. A real body. A working brain. Muscles that tired. A stomach that felt hunger. A nervous system that registered pain. If the brain were just a closed system, producing experience all by itself, the Incarnation wouldn’t make much sense. Why step into biology at all?

Christ brings this idea down to earth.

The Word did not stay distant or theoretical. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). That means a real human body. A brain that learned and remembered. Muscles that grew tired. A body that felt hunger and pain.

If the brain were nothing more than a sealed system generating its own inner world, the Incarnation would be hard to explain. Why would God enter biology at all?

But if the brain is an instrument for connection — built for relationship and shared understanding — then the Son of God taking on a human body makes sense. It isn’t strange. It’s fitting. God meets us where we actually live: in bodies, in history, in experiences we can feel and understand.

Augustine famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Restlessness is not a defect. It is evidence of design. A radio tuned to a frequency it did not invent. A mind capable of truth because it was made to correspond to something real.

The Christian claim, then, is not anti-scientific. It is anti-reductive. It honors the brain precisely by refusing to idolize it. It recognizes the body as a gift, not God. Instrument, not origin. And it dares to say that the deepest experiences of human life — meaning, moral obligation, love, and hope — are not produced by neurons any more than a symphony is produced by wood and string.

“You are not your own,” Paul writes, “for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). That exhortation only makes sense if the body is capable of glory — of bearing something greater than itself.

Your life, then, is not noise from a biological machine. It is music — sometimes dissonant, sometimes broken, but real. And Christ does not silence it. He redeems it. He draws it back into harmony with the Song it was always meant to sing.

The brain receives the sound.
The body carries the rhythm.
But the source of the music — your life in Christ — is God.