Mind or matter: What really makes up 'you'?
Grounding ourselves in brainy, mortal bodies
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The other day, I came across this expression when reading about the strange and counterintuitive nature of our feelings:
Your brain doesn’t want you to be happy.
It’s not the first time I’ve read something like this — which makes it even more interesting. How can my brain want something different from the rest of me? Why is this idea so deeply engrained in me and everyone else? Even more pressing, is my brain truly separate from the rest of me? Where does that separation begin and end?
To start, let’s acknowledge the obvious: the mind intuitively feels very separate from the body. We speak so casually about our minds and our bodies as distinct entities that it’s almost impossible to imagine the alternative. The mind is an ethereal space of thought and feeling and imagination — in direct contrast to the messier, needier body with its physical needs, gross tendencies, and more definitive form.
When we say things like the expression above, we invoke a deep-rooted intuition that the body and mind are inherently at odds with one another. The body’s slowly evolved habits and ways of being are out of touch with the mind’s more enlightened, up-to-date view of the world. Under this framework, our physical brain is holding us back from the kind of happiness our mind would otherwise allow us.
And to be precise, the mind, in these cases, is you. The real you, that thing just behind your eyes where most people pinpoint their “self” exists. You must be distinct from that three-pound hunk of meat sliding around in your skull, right? Right?
The origins of our mind-body split
The history of the mind-body problem is a long, winding one that begins in philosophy and brings us all the way to the present moment’s cutting-edge neuroscience research. And while the history extends far back, the philosopher Rene Descartes is widely considered to be the one to bring the problem to light and to take one of the first big stances.
And that stance was a bold one:
According to Descartes, the mind and body are, in fact, separate.
He believed in an inherent duality that divides the physical body from the mind (or the soul — he considered them the same). These two aspects of ourselves can exist independently of each other; they aren’t made of the same substance. They’re both needed to make up a human being, but they’re very different from each other. And yet somehow, the ethereal properties of the mind are able to control and influence the body. If I think about moving my right arm, I can move my right arm.
Though many (but not all) of Descartes’ other ideas have been stowed away in library shelves, the world has taken this notion of duality and run with it.
It’s everywhere. If you look closely, you can likely find it in the ways you think and talk about yourself. Why does my body hate me? My brain is just not on the same page as me today!
And it’s the entire basis for many of the world’s major religions. If the body is not distinct from the soul, then there’s no room for an eternal soul and afterlife. These foundational aspects of most religions depend on a certain form of Cartesian separation. We have a body that lets us roam around Earth and then dies and decays — but more importantly, we have an intangible spirit that sticks around after death.
So obviously, the idea that we might not actually have such an enduring spiritual substance is unnerving at best, blasphemous at worst.
Fortunately, here we’ll stick to the more secular concept of the ‘mind.’ The larger question of the soul is a bit beyond our scope.
The road to materialism
But Descartes lived a long time ago — nearly 400 years ago, to be exact. The world has come a long way since his early assertions about our dual nature.
While the question used to belong to philosophers, the newer field of psychology quickly picked it up. But psychology had to go through its own string of transformations to prepare it for such a heavy investigation.
Starting with William James and his first psychology lab, the focus was on one’s most interior thoughts and experiences. To James, the mind was its own rambling, chaotic thing — worthy of scientific study in its own right — but not particularly associated with the body.
Over time, the field’s focus drifted from this abstract and personal exploration to a more rigid categorization of behavior. In the early twentieth century, there was a surge in the study of the mechanics of behavior — the nuts and bolts of learning, conditioning, punishments, rewards. The mind was irrelevant, all that mattered were our animal-like tendencies and instincts. An early sort of materialism was asserting itself, but it was too exclusive. The mind, with all its rich complexity and nuance, was forgotten.
In response, the cognitive revolution emerged, which renewed our focus on the mind and all of its many properties: memory, perception, emotion, judgment, decision-making. The black box of the mind was reopened, ready to be dissected into modules. In many ways, the mind came to be seen as a computer, capable of impressive computations that permit all of our basic daily functions. Here, though, the brain almost became a machine, a tool that enabled our mental life. Not immaterial, but not particularly biological, either.
It wasn’t until the late twentieth century that modern neuroscience came fully to the scene and offered a fresh glimpse into the relationship between mind and body. Rejecting its odd and pseudoscientific ancestor (phrenology — or the matching of skull shape to personality and aptitude), neuroscience was devoted to the pairing of brain regions with specific functions like emotion, attention, and daydreaming.
Through this steady work of functional mapping, the brain’s synchrony with the mind has come into focus, melting the dualist theories of thinkers like Descartes.
Now, we have an even fuller — but not complete — picture of how the brain operates. And a big piece of that picture comes down to the deep, inextricable connection between our minds and bodies:
We know that we get cranky if we haven’t had enough to eat because our blood sugar levels directly influence our mood and hormonal state.
We know that alcohol and other drugs can seep through the blood-brain barrier and wreak havoc on our judgment, attention, memory, perception, and emotion regulation.
We know that degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s can strip away mental functioning and leave us with a very different mind than the one we started with.
In light of the mind’s conditional existence, it seems impossible to claim that the mind, in the way we conventionally think of it, somehow exists separately from the body. Rather, the mind is part and parcel with the rest of the body — like the rest of the body, it relies on a physical organ to function and is at the mercy of that organ’s health for its own operation.
Our brains are us.
Accepting our new status
All of this talk about the separation of mind and body leads us to the overarching problem of consciousness — where we must somehow reconcile the vividness of moment-to-moment experience with the reality of the brain’s plain old chemical and electrical processing.
How can the feeling of being in love be reduced to a series of synaptic interactions? The same for the color red and the sound of your favorite song. How can you and everyone you know and love emerge from a unique web of 100 trillion neuronal connections? Does acknowledging this reality deplete us somehow? Have we lost something?
Many feel that we have. They feel robbed of a distinctly human quasi-supernatural existence. Those existentially valuable experiences of love and art and music and touch seem to lose some of their luster when examined under the microscope. We feel that we’ve become lab rats or science experiments — a successful chain of predictable chemical reactions. We’re suddenly deprived of our dynamic, free-thinking agency.
But do we really need to feel this way? Couldn’t the fact that mind and body are one intertwined entity be an exciting revision to the way we’ve historically thought of ourselves?
This new view brings us back down to earth, unites us a species, replaces the messiness of immortality with the messiness of mortality. We’re forced to look at ourselves for what we really are: time-limited creatures with many needs and conditions for our existence — and at the same time with near-infinite capacities for imagination, language, memory, creativity, love.
We don’t need stories of free-wheeling, ethereal minds — we have so much already.
Meanwhile, the story is far from over. Many consider the problem of consciousness to be the next frontier in science. Where the mystery of life was revealed to be based on DNA, and the emergence of the human species to be based on a process of natural selection, the enigma of consciousness has yet to have its true moment in the limelight.
But while the exact thing that animates our minds and makes up us is still a puzzle, we can never forget the marvel that is living, breathing, daily consciousness.
Unraveling the mystery doesn’t make it any less enchanting.
A quick reminder: If you enjoy this article, it means so much and helps other people discover my work when you press the little heart at the top or bottom of this email/post. Thanks in advance.
From the perspective of neuroscience it’s possible to intuit that there is no separation between mind and body, but our lived human experience often suggests a duality between our inner life of thoughts/consciousness and our physical bodies. I like the idea that mindfulness meditation is considered by some as the scientific study of the mind through direct experience, the Buddhist concept of no self challenges this duality seeing both perceived mind and body as transitory processes with no permanent separate self underlying. Thanks for your insights on this fascinating topic!
This question of mind vs body reminds me too of the eternal facts vs feelings debate. Both ends of these "spectrums" coexist within our existence but we try **really** hard to dissect them into separate things. Sometimes that's a worthy endeavor, but more I've felt that is a way to compartmentalize our existence to avoid feeling too much at once.
PS: I love being able to listen to your posts!