Conventional wisdom holds that the human mind is nothing more than the human brain. This belief derives from materialism. By "materialism" I don't mean the mania to shop unceasingly at the mall. Rather, I mean the philosophy that material reality is all that there is. Immaterial or spiritual realities are, in this view, simply epiphenomena of the material world.

We find the materialist view ably expressed in Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis. What Crick finds astonishing is that our thoughts, emotions and feelings consist entirely in the physiological activity in the circuitry of the brain. Daniel Dennett argues that "mind" is simply a term for what the brain does. And how do we know that the brain and the mind are essentially the same? The best evidence is that when the brain is damaged, the injury affects the mind. Patients whose brains atrophy due to stroke, for instance, lose their ability to distinguish colors or to empathize with others.

But in his book The Spiritual Brain, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows why the Crick-Dennett position is based on a fallacy. Yes, the brain is the necessary locus or venue for the mind to operate. It does not follow that the two are the same. Beauregard gives a telling analogy. "Olympic swimming events require an Olympic class swimming pool. But the pool does not create the Olympic events; it makes them feasible at a given location." Far from being identical to the mind, Beauregard argues that the brain "is an organ suitable for connecting the mind to the rest of the universe."

A provocative idea. Beauregard produces several lines of evidence, but there I focus on just one: the placebo effect. The placebo or sugar-pill effect is one of the most widely-attested phenomena in medicine. One medicine journal notes that "the history of medicine is the history of the placebo effect." So powerful is the impact of the sugar pill that today the effectiveness of drugs is measured by the FDA in comparison to the placebo effect.

Yet as Beauregard points out, the placebo effect is an embarassment to the simple-minded conception of the mind as an ephiphenomenon of the brain. The reason is that this effect shows the mind shaping the brain. The mental expectation of being cured leads to an actual alteration in the physical workings of the brain, and the patient experiences a measurable physiological improvement. One doctor who cured a patient through the placebo effect was asked what he gave the patient that produced such an incredible result. His answer? "Hope."

Beauregard also writes about something I didn't know much about: the nocebo effect. "The nocebo effect is the harmful health effect created by a sick person's belief and expectation that a powerful source of harm has been contacted or administered." So if patients are strongly convinced that a particular pill will give them nausea, they frequently become nauseous, even when the pill they have taken is not the one they expected but only a sugar pill.

Materialism is based on the assumption that the only way to alter the mind is to alter the physical operations of the brain. But Beauregard uses the placebo and nocebo effect to show the reverse. The mind can also regulate the operations of the brain. Beauregard writes that he placebo and nocebo effects are not triggered by the sugar pill but rather are "triggered by the patient's mental state. In other words, they depend entirely on the patient's state of belief."

But if minds can control brains, them minds are not the same as brains. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that there is an aspect of thought and feeling that lies outside the realm of the material. This is what Beauregard calls "the spiritual brain." Atheists too have one, even if they refuse to admit it.