What an enormous resource God has given His creatures with the brain as it relates to thinking. We're not just empty minds. We don't live merely as thinkers, but we do play football, we play the piano, we play golf, we walk across the street, we ride bicycles. We are engaged in physical activity all the time because not only do we have a mind, but we also have a body.
The psalmist in Psalm 139 declares to God, I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. And we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The more we learn about our brains and its relationship to our bodies, the more incredible it is.
And that's some of what R.C. Sproul will consider on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. We don't often think about thinking, but we should. The very active thinking about thinking and reflecting on the ability that we have as humans to think should lead us to praise God like that psalmist in Psalm 139. So this week, as you hear messages from Dr. Sproul's series, Think Like a Christian, our hope is that you would not only become a better Christian thinker, but that your affection for God and devotion to Him would also increase.
Let's get started today with Dr. Sproul on the mind and the body. We're always interested in frontier exploration. Some of the most thrilling adventure stories of the past has to do with those people who risked life and limb to explore new worlds, new areas of this planet, and all of the adventure of people like Magellan and Vasco da Gama and others. Well, nowadays they talk in different terms about the new frontier. Some think of outer space as being the dominant frontier of our day.
Others are saying that there's a portion of this world that is a brand new frontier, namely the depths of the oceans, because we're now just beginning to have the technology to explore that area of this world that heretofore in many ways has not been explored. But other scientists argue now that the real greatest and most significant frontier of our day is studies of the human brain. We're told that we never use more than four or five percent of the capacity of our brains. And when we think of the manifold ways in which the brain records every word that we hear, every sight that we view, every experience that we have, and all of the beta that is stored up in the brain.
I read an article not too long ago where the author was writing about some of this contemporary research into the brain, and he said, in light of the amazing microtechnology of the current day, of the storage capacity of these tiny computer chips now that are used to store megabytes of data, this particular scientist said that the mind is like a computer in some ways, but to build a computer with today's technology that could function with the storage capacity of the human brain would require a computer the size of the Empire State Building. Now I don't know whether that was an accurate analogy or not, but the impact was clear in terms of generating an awesome response of that delicate mechanism that we call the brain. Another book that I read recently on neurological research involved some studies of the relationship between physical actions and the functioning of the brain. Studies were made of professional athletes and of world-class concert pianists. And what these studies indicated, for example, they did some kind of a study on Joe Montana, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, and they talked about all of the decisions that had to be made from the time the quarterback received the snap from center, dropped back to pass, read the defense, saw his receivers, raised his arm, took his arm back, brought it forward, and released the ball. All of the things that are transpiring in that split couple of seconds of action, what is it that made Joe Montana so superior in his ability to react to blitzes and complex defense structures and all of that, and to make these crucial decisions and actions in such a short period of time?
Well, the same question was studied with respect to world-class piano players who seem to have flying fingers, where they can play these difficult passages of music with astonishing speed and accuracy. And what they discovered in this brain research is that there are actual physiological changes that take place in the brain, in the synapses, in the connecting tissues of the brain that occur from kinds of repetition. Athletes speak about muscle memory. Well, there's no memory in the muscles.
The memory is in the brain. And I'm interested in golf, and I hear these great golfers talk about when they ask them, well, how did you hit that magnificent shot? And he said, well, my preshot routine is that I look at the flag on the green, I block out all the obstacles from my thinking, the sand traps, the water hazards, and all of those things. And then before I hit the shot, I visualize the kind of shot that I want to hit to the green, and then I just hit it. And they'll talk about being in the zone, how all of a sudden the green looks huge, and the pin looks a mile high, and the cup five feet wide, and they have this visualization that sounds like some kind of Eastern mysticism, some Zen Buddhist approach to playing golf with this visualization. And so they tell you all that.
And get the negative thoughts out of your mind, they tell you, the positive thinking. Well, how many times if you're an amateur golfer, if you stood over your ball, and you looked at the green, and there was a lake between your ball and the green, and the last thing that you thought before you took the club back was what? Don't. Hit. It. In.
The. Water. And so what happened? Then you proceeded to hit it in the water.
Why? Because the shot that you hit into the water is a shot that you know how to make. Your brain has connective tissue on how to hit that shot, and you just call upon that with your thinking. It's a negative visualization. So, I mean, is this some kind of mysticism?
No. They're understanding that there is this physiological dimension that relates to physical activity connecting between the brain and bodily reactions. Again, they did a study of people who were not professional piano players, and they did a triple study. They took three groups of people who did not know how to play the piano, and they gave them a run to play, and they had six weeks to learn how to play this run up the keyboard. And the first group were shown what notes were in the run, and they were told to practice it so much time every day, an hour or two hours a day for six weeks, as fast as they possibly could. And the second group were told to practice this passage very slowly and methodically for two hours a day for six weeks, going up the scale, boom, boom, boom, boom, with the exact fingering very slowly and not doing anything to increase the speed of the fingers, hitting the keys, until one was able to do it at a certain speed 20 times in a row without a mistake.
Then you could increase the tempo a little bit. And so there was this methodical process that was and so there was this methodical process of practicing. The third group had the most boring task of all. They were told to sit at the piano bench for two hours a day for six weeks and just look from note to note, note to note in the process without ever touching the keyboard, just looking at it. And then after six weeks, they compared the results. Those that had practiced this particular passage as fast as they could every day from the beginning were no more proficient after six weeks than they were at the beginning. They made the same number of mistakes and boo-boos as they were flying up and down the keyboard, hitting the wrong notes. The group that did it in the methodical, precise, slow, gradual method after six weeks were flying up the keyboard virtually with the same speed as a professional musician.
And the amazing thing was that the third group, who didn't touch the keyboard at all, were able to play the passage with almost the same proficiency as the second group. Now, what they decided from this study was that the careful repetition of the same activity or thought over and over and over again actually changed the physiology of the brain. I've told young guys that are planning to go on the professional golf tour. I said, if you want to take advantage of this, what you should do every day for one hour is putt from two feet and no more than two feet. And do that every day for an hour until you actually change the physiology of your brain. And then the rest of your life, every putt is a two-foot putt. If you can start every putt straight for the first two feet, you're going to be the best putter in the world. But very few of any of them will ever go through that monotonous routine.
They'd rather practice a putt from eight feet and then from 10 feet and then from 12 feet. And in doing that, they never develop this memory bank that the mind is capable of doing. Now, these things have nothing particularly to do with what we're calling the Christian mind, only for us to step back for a minute as Christians and look in astonishment of how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. And what an enormous resource God has given His creatures with the brain as it relates to thinking. And now we're talking more about the discipline of thinking.
Now we've so far just looked at the physical relationships because we're not just empty minds. We don't live merely as thinkers, but we do play football. We play the piano. We play golf. We walk across the street.
We ride bicycles. We are engaged in physical activity all the time because not only do we have a mind, but we also have a body. Now somebody asked me earlier, can a feeling create a thought, or does the thought create the feeling? And my basic answer to that question is yes. It can go both ways, and we don't have to be neurological researchers to understand that. We experience that all the time.
Think about it. You have a physical sensation in your stomach that you call a hunger pain. And as a result of that feeling, what happens? What thought goes through your mind? Hmm, I'd like to have some lunch now, so that now your thinking has been a response to your physical feeling.
On the other hand, if you're sitting there thinking about what you have to do tomorrow, and you think about all the things that can go wrong, before you know it, as you're thinking of these things, you start feeling butterflies in your stomach or a pain in your head as your body is responding physically to your thinking. This is what we call psychosomatic interaction, where there is an interaction between the mind and the body. Now as I've said earlier, there are those who want to understand the mind as if it were totally disconnected from the body, and others who want to explain thinking and the mind as if it were nothing more than a physical response.
And I said Christianity rejects both of those options. But in that rejection, we don't therefore come to the conclusion that there's no interplay between mind and body. There is a powerful interplay that we know that exists between thought and action, between thought and feeling. And again, it raises one of the oldest and most difficult philosophical posers.
I remember in the 17th century, the advent and birth of the age of rationalism, the French mathematician Rene Descartes was absorbed with this question. It was a question of causality. He was saying, how are thought and action connected or related?
Why is it that Joe Montana can have a thought about a wide receiver going down the sidelines and then immediately respond with a physical action whereby he throws the ball in the precise direction of that wide receiver? How can I think about doing something, thinking about picking up the chair in front of me and then proceed to pick it up? Or conversely, how do physical actions produce or stimulate thinking? And the reason why this is not a simple matter is because we think of the physical or what we call the material as being made up of quantitative things. And remember I've mentioned the theologian who was asked, what is mind? And he said, no matter. And what is matter?
He said, never mind. He was trying to say that there is a fundamental distinction between the physical and the mental. They may be connected. They may be related, but they are not the same thing, that a thought cannot be weighed.
It takes up no space, cannot be measured. It is nonphysical. And so we make this distinction between matter and thought, even though we understand that they can be related to each other, and a thought can produce a material response, and a material response can produce a thought. Well, this is what Descartes was wrestling with as a philosopher, mathematician, and he developed a theory that was simply called interactionism, which sometimes if you put a label on something, we think we've explained it. All he's saying at this point is that there's some kind of interaction between thought and matter, between mind and body. But in trying to answer the question, how does a thought translate into an action?
Now, if I can just get a tiny bit technical for a second. In working this through, Descartes made a distinction between what he called extension and non-extension. He made the distinction to indicate the difference between matter and mind. That which is physical always has some degree of extension. It takes up space and has weight. It's extended. That which is mental has no weight, no size. It's non-extension.
So how can you get from one realm to the other realm? That's one of the greatest mysteries there is about human life. Some of you perhaps have never even thought about it. But without thinking about it, you're engaged in this process every moment of your life. Sometimes that's what philosophers do to upset the apple cart.
They begin asking questions about stuff that we just do and we don't think about at all. Well, the interesting theory that Descartes came up with was that the point of transition between thought and action is in the pineal gland at the base of the brain. And it could have been anywhere in the brain. His argument was based on mathematics, and he said there has to be a point of transition between extension and non-extension. And he liked the word point because a point—how many points can you have in a line mathematically?
Theoretically, an infinite number because a point takes up space but has no dimensions. It's neither fish nor file. It's neither pure extension or pure non-extension. And so he was looking for some complicated category that he could say there is this place where the transition takes place. Well, as I said, you don't read that in textbooks of neurology today.
There is a mathematical point because, to tell you the truth, we still don't know how this interaction takes place. And it's because we don't know how it takes place that some would try to deny that it takes place. But there's nothing about which you are more certain than that there is a difference between your body and your mind, and that you are responsible for your thinking, and that your actions are intimately related to your thinking. It didn't take Descartes or modern neurological research to understand that the ancient wisdom literature made the declaration, as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. And what the Scripture is saying at that point is that we live out in our physical lives the deepest thoughts of our own minds.
That's why we need transformed minds to have transformed lives. My wife told me yesterday that she was listening to Dr. Laura on the radio. And she was all excited because she told me that this woman called in and said that she was dating some fellow, and I don't know whether they were engaged or not, but they were committed to each other. And she said, and the woman said to Dr. Laura, and I did something completely out of character. Dr. Laura said, what was that? She said, I went out on a date with one of my old boyfriends. And Dr. Laura said, well, what do you mean you did something out of character? She says, I never do anything like that. That's just not typical or characteristic of my personality. It was an out-of-character type of activity.
Dr. Laura said, wait a minute. Were you the one who did this? Yes. Then it's part of your character. This is because your character is based upon what you do. Now, it may be that you don't do this regularly and very often, but you can't dismiss it as being uncharacteristic. And my wife said, she said, I wanted to cheer out loud because what she was saying to this woman is you are responsible for what you do, and the mind is now playing tricks on you to try to rationalize your behavior at this point, saying I didn't really do it, or if I did it, it wasn't really me. It wasn't part of my character. No, everything you do and everything you think is what makes up your character.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind from his series, Think Like a Christian. I don't know about you, but I was so struck by this line from today's message. We live out in our physical lives the deepest thoughts of our own minds. That's why we need transformed minds to have transformed lives. I hope as you listen daily that the Lord is using Renewing Your Mind as part of the renewal and transformation of your mind.
The Lord certainly is for me. If you'd like more teaching from Dr. Sproul, then I encourage you to subscribe to Ultimately with R.C. Sproul. It comes out several times a week and it features distilled moments of teaching, wisdom, and application to help you in your Christian life.
Simply search for Ultimately with R.C. Sproul wherever you listen to podcasts and make it another must listen in addition to Renewing Your Mind. The series you're hearing this week is called Think Like a Christian.
The entire series is 12 messages and you can request lifetime digital access to all 12 when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800 435 4343. In addition to the series, we'll also send you Dr. Sproul's popular book, The Consequences of Ideas. Be introduced to the thinkers and thinking that have shaped the western world, whether Socrates and Aristotle or Kant and Marx. This book makes it easier to see that some of these ideas, dangerous ideas, are alive and well today. So request these resources when you call us at 800 435 4343. Visit renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. Thank you.
Here's a preview of what you'll hear tomorrow. Why do you believe what you believe? Because what you believe determines how you live. And so it's a very important question to ask yourself, particularly as a Christian, because Paul tells us to be babes in evil, but in our understanding to be adults, which means we have to use the minds that God has given us to see the basis for truth. So be sure to join us then here on Renewing Your Mind.
