How biased are we in thinking the mind is in the brain?

Great Debates
1

I suspect it has to do with where our eyes are located and how thought seems to be localized in the head. But every now and then I can sense things lower down in my body, not necessarily in the area of the heart, but certainly not in my head.

Brain exploration, mapping, surgery and all those scientific studies make a strong case for the brain being the center of our nervous system, where memories are stored, where motor activities originate and all that sort of thing. But do we have anything concrete that associates mind with brain?

2

Well, if I amputate other parts of your body, it won’t affect your mind. But if I start to amputate parts of your brain, your mind is going to be affected profoundly.

Also, if your mind isn’t the “center of our nervous system, where memories are stored, where motor activities originate and all that sort of thing”, then what the hell is it?

3

The famous story of Phineas Gage comes to mind.

And where is the mind, if that’s not where it is?

4

That’s what nerves are for. Nerves are an extension of the brain.

5

Maybe my question/proposition isn’t clear. I’m not saying the brain doesn’t do all the controlling, storing, organizing physical things that science has found that it does. Amputating various parts of the body before the mind is affected still brings up the issue of just how far one can go without losing consciousness when organs are removed or incapacitated. I suspect the heart’s contributions will be as life-sensitive as the brain’s, for instance.

What I was really driving at is the idea that somehow the physical nature of the brain gets interpreted as the basis for thought, creativity, sensibilty, talent, and all those non-physical attributes we human beings are alleged to possess.

It seems reasonable, up to a point, to ascribe those things to various brain functions. But do we have real evidence that this is truly where mind is located?

And just how are mind and spirit and self and other such terms confined to brain?

6

What evidence do we have that “mind”, “spirit,” and “self” are anything beyond concepts created by the brain to explain certain patterns of observation?

7

You seem to be missing it, Zeldar – cutting off body parts doesn’t agffect the mind. Even setting aside the heart altogether for a time, or replacing the heart with another heart doesn’t affect the mind.

But physically altering the brain does affect nt only memory, but personality, creativity, and other things that we tend to see as essential parts of a person’s personality. It’s not bias – it’s observation and experience, coupled with a bit of Occam’s Razor. Why believe that something eklse is required when assuming that the mind is harbored in the physical brain accounts for observed effects.

All “explanations” for the mind are essentially metaphors. People used to compare it to Flame or Wind. he latest metaphor is the software associated with a computer, which actually seems to fit reasonably well. If that’s true, then the mind is not the brain, but it is certainly located in the brain as much as my software is located on my hard drive. Perhaps someday we can store this and reconsitute it in a new vessel, but until that time it seems likely that our minds are inextricable from our hardware brains.

8

Almost all of it. I was once in agreat PhD program in behavioral neuroscience. Your question seems remarkably naive or mystical or…something. It would be a trivial task for any neurosurgeon to open up your skull while you are conscience and use knives, electrical stimulation, or drugs to wipe out functions, remove functions, EVOKE functions such as memories, and selectively just disable you and screw with your “mind” unlike you where nothing but dead little hunks of grey matter in the garbage can. That is not difficult to do or under dispute. It is ethical considerations that keep someone from hooking up your hands to a remote control unit as a joke or wiping out all capability for long-term memories formation. They could cause you extreme euphoria with electrodes planted in your brain. They could make you insanley horey (what do you think people are doing with drugs. How do they work? Some affect the “mind” quite a lot and some never recover).

The only real hope your…ideas have left is that the algorithmns that govern basic behavior including memory are poorly understood. Brain science is still primitive in that way but that doesn’t mean that functions are at least isolated to the cranial cavity. That was done ages ago and is like disputing that the heart is the seat of blood pumping.

We can easily take apart this strange car and point to the parts that do what while puzzling over some interconnected functions. We can’t engineer a similar car from scratch but this is much, much more basic.

9

Well, it does affect proprireception, the innate knowledge of where one’s body parts are supposed to be. Or consider something like phantom limb syndrome, caused by the brain not having access to something it used to be attached to. And the mind is affected by the removal of parts even if one can’t physically feel their removal. If you mutilated the legs of a paraplegic and didn’t allow him to see/feel/know about the damage, it’s true that his mind wouldn’t be affected, but if he was aware of it the mutilation would certainly have an effect on his mind even if it was not that of physical pain.

I’m confused about what definition is being used for “mind.” I was using it to mean all conscious and unconscious function and thought but if you’re thinking of the soul (which cannot be proven to exist under laboratory conditions) then this question becomes very vague and nonscientific.

10

But that’s not affecting the mind – it’s affecting its inputs. Phantom Limb pain is caused by random neural firings, giving false signals. By itself, that doesn’t affect the mind at all.

11

It’s in that zone of “unconscious” that psychologists, psychoanalysts and the specialists who work with the “psyche” are engaged with that I’m looking at as “mind” for this discussion. The synonyms and other terms like soul, spirit, self, and so on do have their connotations that run off into mystical territory, and I wasn’t advocating going that far away from the physical attributes of the brain for answers.

The answers so far are doing a decent job of getting at what I was after.

It’s just that mind and brain are so often used more or less interchangably that I’ve had the impression that little separation is allowed in discussing what the brain does from what the mind (whatever it is) does.

12

You are right that psychoanalysts refer to the “psyche” and other such things. However, true psychoanalysts are almost completely discredited in modern psychology and psychiatry. It was a religion largely formed by a cocaine addict with too much ambition and an overreaching imagination. That has little to no bearing on the current state of the field other than as an unfortunate sidetracking that kept the field from developing for real earlier.

Freud left little scientific legacy to the field. He was merely an overly famous crackpot that confuses laypeople today. You might as well talk about what your senile neighbor’s views on the mind are.

13

Zeldar, you do know we’ve done complete heart transplants on people, and when they wake up their minds are the same. We’ve even REMOVED hearts completely and replaced them with mechanical pumps. People with artificial hearts could still talk, remember, move, think. Their minds still functioned.

Where else could the mind be located, if not the brain? The legs? No, we can amputate those. The arms? No, we can amputate those. The intestines? No, we can amputate those. The kidneys? No, we can transplant those, and people with complete kidney failure can still think, talk and remember. The lungs? We can remove one lung completely, and it doesn’t affect thinking. We can transplant lungs between people, and their minds are unaffected. You’ll die without a liver, but you can get a complete liver transplant.

However, the minute I take a scalpel to your brain and start carving off chunks of it, or start passing electric currents through parts of your brain, your thoughts, memories, behaviors, ability to speak, and many other abilities are suddenly profoundly affected.

It isn’t like somebody one day woke up and said “I know, the brain is what makes us think!”, and we’ve all been repeating that dogma since then. The opposite is true…ancient people believed that the heart and liver were important, but we’ve proved conclusively that theory was false.

Read Oliver Sack’s amazing book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, about the sometimes bizarre behavioral changes his patients experienced from brain damage.

14

Ahem,

Speaking as a man: I totaly get what your saying!!

15

I’m not sure what you mean by mind exactly, but mental activity reported by a person, or observed, seems to be correlated with specific brain activity. I don’t know what evidence could be clearer than that.

16

Even if we posit that a “psyche” exists. That the mind can somehow extend beyond our cranium that could get us into things like telepathy, astral projection or wherever the mind goes on a really good acid trip the mind still ultimately resides in our skulls.

Think of it like an electric generator. There is a magnetic field that extends beyond the generator itself. In this respect there is more to the generator than is immediatley apparent. It seems you are asking where the magnetic field resides. While it extends beyond the generator it is still ultimately a part of the generator. If you dismantle the generator the magnetic field doesn’t just pack up and find somewhere else to hang out. It disappears.

No generator, no field.

No brain, no mind.

17

My best friend has frontotemporal dementia. I’ve watched over the last several years as her brain died, bit by bit. She was a successful manager and a great mom, and sharp as a razor. Now she can’t talk, can’t read, can’t understand much of anything, can’t find her way to her room, wears diapers, and doesn’t know who her daughter or sisters are.

The mind is a function of the brain. Period.

18

The comedian EMo’s take on it:

[squeaky voice]

Of course I believe that it’s my brain that’s the most important organ in the body.

But then I think…

What organ is telling me that?
[/squeaky voice]

19

My penis told me to tell you that the brain has little to do with things around here.

20

I would argue that when you cut a man’s dick off, it significantly alters his mind. So is it part of the mind? Judging from experience, I’d say its the ultimate remote control.