That the brain is the origin of the mind is a concept permeating even the most secluded parts of the earth. In this second decade of the 21st century, most educated people agree that the origin of the mind, of who they are, and of their sense of self and personality is the brain, as opposed to any separate structure in the body. This level of scientific judgment is inconsistent with ancient Egyptian and Greek notions about the heart or liver being the house of reflection and soul. Most individuals would likewise concede that human actions have a wide assortment of expression, from optimistic, gloomy, caring to envious. We identify mind with the devil, with the intermittent and restless behavior of the anxious monkey mind, and with the piercing insight of creative geniuses.
As a neuroscientist, I start with the assumption that the brain plays a sizable role in producing the mind. I likewise appreciate that our experiences change the intellect, by when and where we have such encounters, and with whom we share them. The brain as the origin of the mind does not mean there is unanimity in seeing mind as more than the brain. In cognitive science there is the beginning of an appreciation of this asymmetry. We see the mind as extending into and comprising the interactions we have with objects and people around us. This extended mind, or what we call distributed cognition, is an acknowledgement of mind being more than the individual brain. Carl Jung (1875-1961), a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was the founder of the Analytical Psychology movement. He conceived of the intellect, and the unconscious, as products of both personal and collective experiences (what he called the “collective unconscious”). He conceptualized the collective unconscious as the aggregation of human knowledge accessible to us because of our ancestral experience and something passed on in our genes. On another edge of the continuum is the Buddhist notion of “not-self,” which claims that what we conceive of as self, and as our identity, is an invented narrative. As a neuroscientist, it’s imperative for me to integrate these contrasting perspectives.
The phenomenon of non-identity may determine the efficiency by which most of us can detach our action from our personality. It is the reason we can justify acting unfriendly toward friend or rival and split those feelings from what we know ourselves to be. I can continue to see myself as a friendly person even as I act antagonistically towards another. What allows the separation in character does not establish this as a dualistic idea, for while the brain expresses the mind, the mind is not just the brain. One metaphor is to conceive of the image on a television or movie screen as the larger mind, while the pixels are individuals with smaller minds and brains. The individual pixels reflect the local changes in light but interdependently with the wider image being shown on the screen.
This larger mind is a concept we need to discern better to understand the narrower individual fluctuations and to carry out wiser human actions.