Where is the Mind Located?

In our daily conversations it happens quite often that, when we want to talk about the “essence” of people, we talk about their minds.

The film (Martín Hache), for example, popularized one of the proclamations that best expresses this idea applied to attraction: what is interesting is not the bodies themselves, but the intellectual side of human beings, something like their psyche. In other cases, we think that although the passing of the years changes our appearance, there is something that remains more or less the same, and that is the mind, which identifies us as thinking individuals.

However… Do we know anything about what we call the mind? Where is it located, to begin with? This is a trick question and gives rise to some quite provocative reflections.

The location of the mind in the body

Decades pass in the history of psychology and neuroscience, but we still do not attribute a specific place to the mind; At most, the brain is the set of organs to which we attribute, quite imprecisely, that capacity to harbor mental life. But is this correct? To understand this, let’s go to the origins of the question of where the mind is.

Descartes’ dualistic theory is possibly the first great effort in human history to locate that mental life in human anatomy: the Frenchman proposed the pineal gland as the structure from which our thoughts emanate. Now, the entire conceptual edifice collapsed the moment we denied the possibility of the soul existing. Not for nothing, Descartes was a firm defender of the division between body and spirit, something that is not supported scientifically.

But even though in theory Descartes’ ideas are rejected by current science, we tend to assume that the correct thing to do is to think as this philosopher did, although changing the concept of soul for that of mind. Human beings have an innate tendency to create categories for any phenomenon and part of reality, and that is why we believe that there is something called “mind”, from which all thoughts, emotions, decisions, etc. emanate. And, when it comes to assigning a place to that source from which the entire psyche arises, we choose the brain, just like Descartes.

The mind beyond the brain

As we have seen, we have an almost instinctive tendency to believe that minds are in our heads, piloting our bodies as if they were tiny little men. In turn, many scientists, both in psychology and neuroscience, assume that the mind is located in a specific place in the body. For example, much importance is usually given to the frontal lobe, since this part of the brain has a very important role in making decisions and initiating movements.

Other researchers have done the opposite, associating the mind with larger locations. Beyond pseudoscientific theories that speak of cosmic minds that maintain memories about past lives, there are defenders in other ways of the idea that the mind is beyond the nervous system. For example, from the theory of embodied cognition, it is considered that the positions and movements of the body, as well as the stimuli they capture, are part of mental life, since they condition what we think and what we feel.

On the other hand, authors such as Andy Clark, defenders of the theory of the extended mind, believe that this goes beyond the individual body of people, and is also found in the environment with which we interact, since both these external elements and the parts of our organism are essential for the mind to behave as it does. does in the here and now. Computers, for example, are places where we store information, and our way of functioning already fully includes them as part of an expanded memory.

The fundamental question: does the mind exist?

So far we have seen attempts to locate the mind, but to ask where the mind is it is necessary, first of all, to make sure that there are sufficient reasons to consider that it exists.

Behavioral psychologists have been characterized precisely by rejecting the existence of something called the mind…or at least, one that can be located somewhere. In the same way that the movement of a train or the money we have in our account cannot be understood as something limited to one place, the same happens with the mind.

From this perspective, believing that the mind is something similar to an object or a subject is the result of having fallen into a conceptual trap. The mind is not a thing, it is a process; a set of dispositions that make sense when a series of responses to stimuli occur. From this arises the concept of mereological fallacy, the tendency to attribute to a place (in the case at hand, normally, the brain), something that is characterized by being a set of changes.

And if something characterizes our experiences and our way of behaving, it is that it always occurs in different circumstances. In the same way that spring is not in a landscape or in a specific country, what we call mind should be understood not as a noun.

The idea that the mind does not exist may sound provocative, but it is no less true that we assume that it does exist as a dogma, without stopping to think if it is really correct. What is clear is that this is a topic that deserves long debate. And you do you think?