This two part series by David Malone is the sequel to Channel Four’s much praised Testing God series which was said by the Times reviewer to be “as close to poetry as Television gets”. 

Just as Testing God pitted belief in God against what modern science has to say, so Soul Searching tests belief in the Soul. It asks, is the idea of the Soul anything more than a figment of the religious imagination?  Is there some real scientific basis for the feeling that many even non religious people have, that in addition to their body and their brain there is something else, some inner essence which is the real core of who and what we are? It is that feeling which Soul Searching examines. 

The self and our feeling we have one may be making a scientific comeback. But we are still left wondering if the ‘Self’ is all we are? Or is there some truth underlying the feeling that many have, that there is something else, something deeper than the self. Something we might call the Soul. The second episode, The Undiscovered Country,  looks at what that deeper part to us might be.

What is it about the way human beings are made that gives us that feeling that in addition to our bodies and brains there is a person riding around inside them?

Film One - Know Thyself.

Central to most religious belief is the conviction that the real essence of what it is to be human is some inner essence that was given to us by God and will one day return to him.  Modern science rejects this notion of an immaterial an immortal Soul.  But while most people might agree with science and reject the idea of the immortal Soul, they still feel that there is something more to them than simply the physical machinery of their bodies and their brains.  They may not believe it is a ‘Soul’ in the religious sense but still feel there is some inner essence to being who and what they are.

Today we are more likely to express the sense of an inner core to who we are as what makes each of us a unique individual, our Self rather than a Soul.  The ‘Self’ is the secular pretender to the job the Soul used to do. But when did this idea of a self come to challenge the Soul?  According to Professor Harold Bloom, one of America’s most controversial thinkers, the modern self was invented by Shakespeare. Before Shakespeare the sense of self was something we inhabited quite un self-consciously. It was Shakespeare who first created characters who gave his characters the self consciousness to ask ‘Who am I?’ According to Bloom, Shakespeare created the idea that people had the ability to question and create themselves just as an author creates a character. According to Bloom, Hamlet was the first modern self and it is that self which we still have today.

Strange as this idea of a created self is, modern science agrees.  Brain Scientist Michael Gazanigga is the godfather of all modern scientific attempts to understand the 'Self'. Gazanigga’s work is based on testing the brains of people who have had the two hemispheres of the brains surgically separated.  So called split brain patients.  This procedure was invented in the 1970’s as a last resort treatment for epilepsy.

Gazanigga found that in split brain patients one side of the brain, the left side, which is where speech is located, is also where the ‘Self’ is located.  Gazanigga found that the left side of the brain constantly makes up plausible stories to make sense of what it sees and feels. According to Gazanigga our sense of having a self is just an example of a plausible story that the left hemisphere of our brains has made up.  Gazanigga argues that the sense of self is no more than a theory our mind has generated to explain its own behaviour.  According to Gazanigga the self has the same relation to the working of our brains as the whistle has to a steam train: it is produced by it but is superfluous to its real working. 

Professor Louis Sass of Rutgers University disagrees.  He studies Schizophrenia patients.  According to Sass, you understand the crucial role of the self when you see what happens to someone who has lost it.

According to Sass and Schizophrenia sufferer and artist Peter Arakawa, what leads to the breakdown of the self in Schizophrenia, is when the rational, questioning part of our mind begins to pick away at the sense of self.   Sass sees in this a metaphor for our entire culture.  Our culture wedded, as it is, to rational enquiry and proof, has picked away at our sense of self. 

But science itself may be growing up, according to Psychologist, John Pickering, of Warwick University.  Science has been unable to find the self, because it has presumed the self would be a thing, a part of the brain where the ‘self’ inside us saw what we saw and controlled our actions.  It has been the failure to find any such place in the brain that underlies science's scepticism about the existence of the self.  Pickering advances the idea that we have not found this ‘thing’ because the self is not a thing, it is a process.  Imagine, he says, a whirlpool. It is not a thing you can cut out and put in a bottle. But it is a real phenomenon. If the self is like that then it can be real but still not a thing.

And there are scientists already exploring how such a self as process could exist inside the brain.  John Joe McFadden (University of Surrey) believes the self as process may be in the electromagnetic field of the brain.

REVIEWS

Independent 7.11.03

An erudite and challenging philosophical inquiry in Primetime?  It can be done as the channel showed in 2001 with Testing God, its acclaimed investigation into whether faith in God could be reconciled with the findings of science….

The Times. 6.11.03

It is amazing to find so many intellectual heavyweights illuminating a subject of such paramount importance.

Time Out London 3-10 Sept 03.

For such a highbrow subject, this is beautifully shot and makes intelligent use of its many contributors.  Probably the sort of thing John Reith was on about.

Radio Times 6-12 Sept 03

This programme asks deper, more fundamental questions than we’re used to seeing on prime-time TV, and it comes up with some answers too. It’s directed by David Malone (who made the award-winning Testing God ) ….

Independent on Sunday : Sunday Review. 7.9.03

One of the most intellectually stimulating series of 2001, C4’s Testing God, asked whether science, rather than undermining the belief in a Supreme Being, hadn’t actually revealed new ways of believing in Him.  Those who watched it, rated it as one of their picks of the year; sadly, though, I don’t know of many who did tune in. It wasn’t, after all, easy television; it encouraged the viewer to think very deeply.

This two-part follow –up by the same producer, is an investigation into our belief in the soul,…Again it is a programme that you cannot simply sit back and let flood over you. As such Soul Searching asks lots of questions, not only those related to its own internal inquiry, but of television itself.  Given the evidence they see each day, do people who want to be challenged in this way bother looking to television to do it for them?  And are there enough people in the current terrestrial television audience who can be enticed into disciplines heavy with abstract thought and difficult concepts?

They’re probably the two easiest questions that this series will help provide answers to.

 The Independent Review 8.9.03

TV Science that’s good for the soul.             By Thomas Sutcliffe.

You can number on one hand the television programmes which bandy about words like “eliminativist” and  “veridical” and “phenomenological”. But you only need a single digit to count the programmes that actually look good while doing it – and it’s currently pointing at Soul Searching  - in which David Malone, something of a market leader in cerebral television, follows up his much admired series Testing God… What is remarkable about Malone’s programmes is not just that they get made in the first place – but that they get made with such visual flair. Once again he is demonstrating his ability to think in pictures.

Testing God was such a big success for Channel 4, not because that many people watched it, but because those who did – including most critics – were delighted by the purity of its intent.  You might say that it was good for the channel’s soul. Now, like some rich mediaeval merchant who builds the occasional parish hospital for the sake of his conscience, the channel has commissioned Malone to take on the pointedly abstruse subject of the human sense of self.

…there were wonderfully insinuating images. A sweatshop making baby dolls offered the sight of a stack of identical eyeless heads, all of them apparently waiting to be infused with the essential spirit that will make them more than matter.  The little girl focuses the sunlight through a magnifying glass, raising a swirl of smoke off the pages off the bible, as if you are actually watching belief vaporised by the piercing light of reason.  This is thoughtful and suggestive emblem making, not just something to rest your eyes on while your ears do all the work.

This is deep dish stuff as they say in America, and there were sequences that left you with the sensation that your own comprehension had gurgled away down some conceptual plughole. But when most television can barely raise a ripple on the surface, that’s a curiously invigorating feeling.