Where is the Mind Located? Where is the mind located — inside the brain or somewhere outside time and space? This thing called mind... where does it reside? This entity known as the ‘Self’… where is it located? Although such questions have foxed philosophers for thousands of years, most people tend to agree that our brains have something to do with it. They think the mind or psyche or consciousness is something generated by the brain. So, is the mind situated inside the brain? Before we attempt to answer that, it should be noted that historically, this was not always the received belief. Ancient Egyptians, for example, believed our thoughts and emotions came from the heart which is why they removed the brain during mummification, because they thought it served no purpose. Hosting The Mind: Other cultures have attributed various other organs for hosting the mind, including the heart, liver and even kidneys. In fact, it was not until the 17th century when, Rene Descartes — he of the Cartesian Dualism fame who famously said “I think, therefore I am” — arrived on the scene that the mind got relocated to the head. Descartes believed that the tiny pineal gland in the brain was where the mind resided and was the point of connection between the intellect and the body. Today, of course, we know the pineal has an entirely different function. So, to reiterate, is the mind located inside the brain? A lot of mid-20th century neurologists believed it did — especially since the advent of EEC machines and non-invasive imaging systems, which seemed to indicate that it did. After all why else would displays light up, blood flows increase and electrical activity in the brain correlate with a person’s thought processes? Why would they even indicate specific locations in the brain that coincide with cogitation? By the turn of this century, three particular regions had been identified as being critical for self-awareness and mind: the insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. But then, the unexpected happened. Researchers at the University of Iowa in the US came across a person who had lost exactly those three areas of his brain due to an infection. They immediately wondered if this person could have a mind left any longer and started experimenting with him only to discover that he remained completely self-aware. He still recognised himself in the mirror and in photographs, he also passed the ‘tickle test’, which is based on the idea that you can’t tickle yourself and was always more ‘tickled’ by others. He could even joke that showed he had a sense of self. Overnight that painstakingly built brain-mind model had collapsed although the brain as a whole still remained the hottest favourite. David Rudrauf, head of the Iowa research thinks that self-awareness and other high-level cognitive functions probably do not relate to the brain in a simple way. He told New Scientist, “They involve layers of abstraction and mechanisms that cannot be explained by standard functional-neuroanatomy …. We would all like simple answers to complicated questions, and we tend to oversimplify our conceptions about the brain and the mind.” But complex mind models don’t work too well either. For instance, there is the very tempting computational programme model which posits that the mind is to the brain as the software running on a computer is to the hardware, or to put it slightly differently, the mind is a set of computer programmes implemented in the wetware of the brain. Revolutionary as it seems, the model doesn’t work for the simple reason that computers are not conscious, whereas we are. The two can’t be compared or we’d be unconscious too. Perhaps one possible — and ancient — solution could be that the idea of having individual minds or selves is just a persistent and alluring delusion. Perhaps, there is only one collective consciousness in some unfathomable, incomprehensible mind-place, somewhere outside time and space, and our brains are just unique organs that can access this universal Intelligence.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 04:05:59 +0000
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