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mstokes's picture

God in Dickinson's Brain

Submitted by mstokes on Wed, 09/24/2008 - 4:40pm.

I was interested by the last stanza of Dickinson's poem on the brain that Prof. Grobstein references above:

The brain is just the weight of God,
  For, lift them, pound for pound,         10
And they will differ, if they do,

  As syllable from sound.

Does she suggest that God is a creation of the brain--as the sky and you and me are in the first stanza--or that the brain is more like God itself, and more the creator and source of all reality, rather than the one being created by the other?

I'm interested in continuing this connection between God and the brain, and in connecting to the earlier comments on how religion enters our conversation about mental health.  Is religion a "disability" for the study of the brain? Or, perhaps, as we consider an individual or culture's particular vision of itself in relation to God, it will inform a definition of "mental health" as it relates to a particular story.   Dickinson couldn't separate God from the brain in her poem--and it seems to me that many people/patients will also have a hard time separating god/the creator from the brain, that which creates meaning. 

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