Reading the Human Brain through the Qur'anic Order of Senses - A Modern Take

This updated article compares Qur'anic sequences that list hearing, sight, and heart with contemporary neuroscience. It summarizes where vision, audition, language, emotion, and decision-making are located in the brain, notes suggestive overlaps with classical phrasing (including the forelock/forehead and prefrontal executive function), and stresses that such parallels are interpretive and not scientific proof.

Introduction

Classical Qur'anic verses frequently list hearing, sight, and the heart in set orders. Traditional commentators debated whether that order implied ethical priority, poetic style, or something else. With modern neuroscience we can revisit those sequences and compare them to current maps of brain function.

What neuroscience actually shows

• Vision: Primary visual cortex (V1) sits in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. It processes images arriving from the eyes.

• Hearing: Primary auditory cortex lies in Heschl's gyrus on the superior temporal lobe (lateral side of the brain). In a rough anterior-posterior sense, auditory cortex lies anterior to the occipital visual areas, though the two are largely lateral vs. posterior in three-dimensional space.

• Language and eloquence: Modern language function is distributed. Broca's area (inferior frontal gyrus) contributes to speech production; Wernicke's area (posterior superior temporal gyrus) supports comprehension. Speech arises from a network that links frontal, temporal, and parietal regions, not a single "middle" structure.

• Emotions and instincts (the "heart" or fouad): Emotional processing depends on limbic structures - amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate cortex, insula and their networks - which lie deep and medial within the brain.

• Decision-making and will (the "forelock" / forehead): Executive functions such as planning, response selection, and weighing alternatives localize to the prefrontal cortex, especially dorsolateral and ventromedial sectors of the frontal lobes.

How that compares with the Qur'anic language

Several Qur'anic passages list hearing, sight, and heart together, and other passages use sequences like deaf-dumb-blind. Readers over centuries have offered ethical, poetic, and physiological readings of these orders. From a neuroscientific standpoint:

• The relative placement of auditory and visual cortices (temporal vs. occipital) can be read as broadly consistent with an order where hearing precedes sight in some verses, though the brain is three-dimensional and functional networks cross those boundaries.

• The deep, medial location of emotion-related structures fits the sense of the Qur'anic "heart" as a center of feeling and instinct.

• The frontal lobe's role in choice and moral decision-making aligns with verses that associate the forehead or forelock with agency and control.

Caution and perspective

These correspondences are suggestive, not proof. Neuroscience maps functions to networks, not single-word equivalences. Exegetical claims about miraculous foreknowledge require careful hermeneutic and scientific restraint. Readers can appreciate a consonance between scriptural language and modern brain science while recognizing the interpretive steps involved.