Mind and Brain

Mind and Brain – How Do They Relate?

One of the main points is that the brain is simply a bodily organ, like the stomach, the liver, or the lungs. It is tissue, made of cells. These cells do have some special properties, but they are of roughly the same type and employ roughly the same sort of metabolic and other processes as other cells in the body. And yet the brain has a special, mysterious property that distinguishes it from all other organs. It is the seat of the mind, somehow producing our feeling of being ourselves in the world right now. Trying to understand how this happens – how matter becomes mind – is the mind-body problem.

The mind-body problem is a philosophical conundrum that dates back to classical antiquity, and probably beyond. What has changed in recent years is the emergence of a comprehensive scientific effort to solve this ancient problem. This effort, which involves neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers, takes the form of a multidisciplinary enterprise called cognitive science.

The advent of science to the problem has changed it slightly. In that the mind-body problem is now commonly described as the problem of “consciousness.” In other words, the problem, “how does the mind emerge from the brain”, had become, “how does consciousness emerge from the brain.” Although psychonalytically minded readers need to reminding that mental life is not synonymous with consciousness, we will not address this particular twist to the problem. Let us assume that the two ways of putting the problem are synonymous.

Investigating consciousness has become the second career of Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist famous for being the codiscoverer (in the 1950s) of the double-helix structure of DNA. In his book, entitled The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes:

“The astonishing hypothesis is that you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules (Crick, 1994, p.3).

The hypothesis seems self-evidently true, and yet it is something that many people do not find easy to accept. How can all this – all that comprises you – be reduced to the activity of a group of cells? The subtitle of Crick's book is The Scientific Search for the Soul. This (perhaps overstated) phrase captures something of the magnitude of the problem. The individual cells of the brain are not uniquely “mental”, yet when they are connected up together, each one contributes something to something else that somehow becomes the mind.

Cognitive science is an unfortunate term in that it implies an exclusion of noncognitive mental functions such as emotion and motivation. Illustration by Elena.