gitanjali and neuroscience

A connection between noble prize winning Gitanjali, the celebrated English collection of Tagore's poems, and neu-roscience may at first seem far fetched. For " Gitanjali " literally means " song offerings , " and the poems are suggestive of harmony, beauty and relationality at the least. Tagore, employing 12,091 words and a lexicon with slightly fewer than 2,468 word types, 1 renders in Eng-lish what he had composed originally in Bengali for singing. The collection, consisting of 103 poems composed before 1910, translated in 1912 and published in 1913, won for him the Nobel Prize the very year of its publication. Neuroscience was still in its infancy then. In 1906, Santiago Ramón Y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for discovering that neurons are discrete, unitary cellular entities of the central nervous system and form a network. 2 Further, they have gaps between them and interact by allowing information to flow across the gaps or synapses through den-drites to axons. By mid 20 th century, the study of the nervous system was well on the way to becoming a scientific discipline, in large measure due to revolutionary developments in MRI technology, molecular biology, computer science, electrophysiol-ogy, and cognitive psychology. By the final decade of the last century, it had become interdisciplinary, having as allies behav-ioural and cultural studies, linguistics, and engineering, all in pursuing an explanation of how the network of neurons produces cognition and behaviour. Today, it has widened its collaborative scope to include medicine, physics, evolutionary theory, decision theory, communications and information sciences, and philosophy, thus becoming an interdisciplinary science. The widening has occasioned distinctions. One is between the Neuron Doctrine theory (associated with Cajal) and neuron doctrine as a philosophical stance. It is the latter that is more relevant to the underlying argument of this paper. In short, explaining how the brain makes the mind has become one of the tasks of neural studies. How does the activity of discrete neurons achieve for us awareness, for example, experiencing gladness in the heart? Discoveries and answers coming from neuroscience quarters did not miss the attention of philosophers and theologians. Paul and Patricia Churchland 3 had cut a hotly contested path by arguing that empirical data for how the mind works was relevant to philosophers of mind. Theology also responded, but differently from the stance taken by elimina-tive materialists in philosophy, trying to uphold the idea of downward causality, 4 …