Many scientists have remarked that the brain is “the most complicated object in the known universe” (Michio Kaku) and that “the last thing that man will understand in nature is the performance of his brain” (John C. Eccles). Carl Jung pointed out that to truly apprehend something, we must apply all our psychological functions—sensing, feeling, and thinking. Traditional science relies heavily on sensing, which is undoubtedly useful, but it doesn’t reveal the brain’s true nature. What if the soul is like a hidden dimension in string theory—imperceptible to our senses yet crucial to the fabric of our existence? Can we use our thinking faculties to logically reason about what the brain must be—one of many souls producing and experiencing thoughts—and finally crack the nature of this mysterious organ?

I was always taught that jumping to the conclusion that something is impossible is a quitter’s attitude, and who wants to be a quitter? While the brain remains one of life’s greatest mysteries, I sincerely doubt that it’s impossible to understand. If we can reason that the universe is composed of countless souls collectively shaping reality through their thoughts and experiences, then we can also hypothesize that our physical bodies are reflections of these immaterial, dimensionless souls. Imagine the brain as a cosmic antenna—not creating thoughts itself but rather detecting and interpreting the signals of our immaterial soul. Could the electrical activity in our brains be the observable manifestation of our souls’ thought processes? Can we begin to reason about the nature of the brain and use that understanding to better inform our scientific experiments on mind and consciousness?

In the classic mythology of Perseus and Medusa, Perseus, the son of Zeus, is tasked with slaying the Gorgon Medusa. Countless men have been turned to stone attempting to face her directly, but Perseus has the genius insight to approach Medusa using her reflection in his polished shield. How many of us have been “turned to stone” by trying to apprehend the mind directly? Great mythology often represents universal archetypes, and what is more universal than our quest for self-knowledge and understanding the mind? Could this story be a clue that we need to approach the mind—the soul—indirectly?

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is another story has been interpreted in many ways: as an analogy for escaping social conditioning, seeing beyond the ego, or the challenges of sharing spiritual truths with those who haven’t experienced them. But what if Plato was pointing to the duality between the perfect forms produced by the soul and the world of matter that we experience? Like a shadow puppeteer we cannot see, the soul may be manipulating the “shadows” of brain wave activity that we can observe physically.

Throughout history, we have been mystified by what was previously undetectable, until a new instrument was developed that revealed what we couldn’t see before. By honing our rational abilities and thinking beyond the confines of physical observation, our minds could become a new kind of telescope—one that reveals aspects of consciousness previously as invisible to us as distant galaxies were before Galileo’s time. While empirical research remains invaluable and useful, complementing it with rigorous philosophical inquiry and deduction may provide the holistic approach we need to truly comprehend the nature of consciousness and the soul.