In Brain Wars, acclaimed neuroscientist Mario Beauregard reveals compelling new evidence set to provoke a major shift in understanding of the mind-body debate: research showing that the mind and consciousness are transmitted and filtered through the brain—but are not generated by it. Following his boundary-breaking neuroscience book The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, co-authored with Denyse O’Leary, Brain Wars makes a powerful and provocative case against the widely held view equating human beings to complex biological computers.
Because the brain is an organ that can be weighed, measured, scanned and dissected, scientists have studied it for over a century. The forgone conclusion is that the brain is a computer made of meat – that neural synapses in the brain account for all of our thought patterns and mental experiences.
Now, in his new book, Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives, acclaimed neuroscientist Mario Beauregard declares that this materialist perspective of the brain is flat out wrong. He urges scientists pay attention to the hard evidence that suggests that “we”—the intangible stuff that we identify as ourselves—are more than our brains.
Beauregard legitimately argues that the true nature of consciousness is found in research in which patients are healed after receiving only a placebo, objects are moved by using only thoughts, and brain activity in the areas connected to compassion, well-being, and attention is activated by meditation.
Based on these findings, Beauregard mandates a move beyond materialist science and points instead to a new model through which to study the mind. Reality encompasses much more than the physical world, he says, and so we must acknowledge all empirical evidence related to mind and consciousness, not only those compatible to materialist theories. As such, he offers reader remarkable and engaging stories of “unexplained” phenomena like mystical experiences and near-death experiences.
The work of Beauregard and other researchers, gathered together for the first time in Brain Wars, has shown that neurofeedback can control seizures, and thoughts and emotions can affect how our bodies can turn certain genes on or off. If the mind affects what happens in our brains, our bodies, and beyond our bodies, the implications for our health and well-being are life-changing.
About the Author Mario Beauregard
Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., is an associate researcher at the University of Montreal in the departments of psychology and radiology, as well as at the Neuroscience Research center. Dr. Beauregard earned two postdoctoral fellowships in experimental neuropsychology, the first at the University of Texas in Houston, and the second at the Montreal Neurological Institute at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre at McGill University. The author of over one hundred publications in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry, Beauregard has been selected by World media Net to be among the “One Hundred Pioneers of the 21st Century” due to his considerable research into the neuroscience of consciousness.
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