BRAIN

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Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Plate 10, Detail

Although Blake thought long and deeply about the human brain he didn't have the technology to study it that is now available. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who teaches at Stanford University, has been studying the "way parts [of the brain] unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric." Blake did however realize that the mind perceives more than what the five traditional sense organs discern. 

An additional sense that Blake recognized was 'spiritual sensation' or the Imagination. Through this sense Blake has access to a visionary world which revealed a dimension of reality 'closed to the senses five.' 

From Livewired, by David Eagleman, Page 54:

"The key to understanding this requires diving one level deeper: your three pounds of brain tissue are not directly hearing or seeing any of the world around you. Instead, your brain is locked in a crypt of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electro-chemical signals that stream along different data cables. That's all it has to work with."

"In ways we are still working to understand, the brain is stunningly gifted in taking these signals and extracting patterns. To these patterns we assign meaning. With the meaning you have subjective experience. The brain is an organ that converts sparks in the dark into the picture show of your world. All the hues and aromas and emotions and sensations in your life are encoded in trillions of signals zipping in blackness, just as a beautiful screen saver on your computer is fundamentally build of zeros and ones."

Page 61 

"In evolutionary time, random mutations introduce strange new sensors, and the recipient brains simply figure out how to exploit them. Once the principles of brain operation have been established, nature can simply worry about designing new sensors. 

"This perspective allows a lesson to come into focus: the devices we come to the table with - eyes, noses, ears, tongues, fingertips - are not the only collection of instruments we could have had. These are simply what we have inherited from a lengthy and complex road of evolution.

But that particular collection of sensors may not be what we have to stick with." ___________________________________________________________

Four Zoas, Night II ,Page 34, (E 322)

"For Los & Enitharmon walkd forth on the dewy Earth     
Contracting or expanding their all flexible senses               
At will to murmur in the flowers small as the honey bee
At will to stretch across the heavens & step from star to star
Or standing on the Earth erect, or on the stormy waves
Driving the storms before them or delighting in sunny beams
While round their heads the Elemental Gods kept harmony"    

Book of Urizen, Plate 3, (E 71)

"1. Earth was not: nor globes of attraction
The will of the Immortal expanded
Or contracted his all flexible senses.
Death was not, but eternal life sprung"

Book of Urizen, Plate 4 (E 92)

"7: Many ages of groans: till there grew
Branchy forms. organizing the Human
Into finite inflexible organs."

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 5, (E 35)   

"How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
   Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?"

THERE is NO NATURAL RELIGION [a],(E 2)

 "IV  None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if
he had none but organic perceptions"

THERE is NO NATURAL RELIGION [b], (E 2) 

 "I  Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. he
percieves more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover."

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 4, (E 34) 

 "1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is
a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets
of Soul in this age" 

Jerusalem, Plate 71, (E 225) 

"as in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow." 

Songs of Experience, The Tyger, (E 24)
 
"What the hammer? what the chain, 
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,     
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!" 

Songs of Experience, The Human Abstract, (27) 

"The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain" 

Visions of Daughters of Albion, Plate 2, (E 47)

"The lark does rustle in the ripe corn, and the Eagle returns     
From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure east;
Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to awake
The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon I am pure.
Because the night is gone that clos'd me in its deadly black.
They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;     
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.
And they inclos'd my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.
Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye              
In the eastern cloud: instead of night a sickly charnel house;
That Theotormon hears me not! to him the night and morn
Are both alike: a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears"

Milton, Plate 2 (E 96) 

"Come into my hand    
By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm
From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. planted his Paradise,
And in it caus'd the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms
In likeness of himself." 

French Revolution, Page 10, (E 294)

"But go, merciless man! enter into the infinite labyrinth of another's brain
Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run. Go, thou cold recluse,into the fires
Of another's high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsum'd, and write laws.
If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider all men as thy equals,
Thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them."

Four Zoas, Night I, Page 11, (E 306)

"Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves.       
Tho' this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.
Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps"

Letters, To Flaxman, (E 710) 

 "And Now Begins a New life. because another
covering of Earth is shaken off.  I am more famed in Heaven for
my works than I could well concieve   In my Brain are studies &
Chambers filld with books & pictures of old which I wrote &
painted in ages of Eternity. before my mortal life & whose works
are the delight & Study of Archangels.  Why then should I be
anxious about the riches or fame of mortality."

Letters, To Trusler, (E 702) 

"Why is the Bible more

Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason Such is True Painting and such alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says "Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted." See Advancemt of Learning Part 2 P 47 of first Edition But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity Some Children are Fools & so are some Old Men. But There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation"

Milton, Plate 32 [35], (E 132) 

"The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself
Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination
The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State
Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created                  
Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated Forms cannot
The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife
But their Forms Eternal Exist, For-ever. Amen Halle[l]ujah" 

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Eagleman writes that his long-range goal is "to understand how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world".