Where is the mind located?

Is the human mind contained in the brain? Where in the brain? Actually, these are trick questions.

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

The movie (Martin 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 modifies our appearance, there is something that remains more or less the same, and that is the mind, which identifies us as thinking individuals.

Now then... do we know anything about what we call the mind? Where is it located to begin with? This is a trick question that gives rise to some rather provocative reflections.

The location of the mind in the body

Decades go by in the history of psychology and neuroscience, but we still do not attribute a specific place to the mind; at most, it is the brain the set of organs to which we attribute, rather imprecisely, that capacity to harbor mental life.But is this accurate? To understand it, let us go to the origins of the question of where the mind is.

Descartes' dualistic theory is possibly the first major effort in human history to locate that mental life in the human anatomy: the Frenchman proposed the pineal gland as the structure from which our thoughts emanate. However, the whole conceptual edifice collapsed the moment we denied the possibility of the existence of the soul. It is not for nothing that Descartes was a strong advocate of the division between body and spirit, something that does not hold up scientifically.

But despite the fact that 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, though changing the concept of soul for that of mind. Human beings have an innate tendency to create categories for any phenomenon and plot 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 attributing a place to that source from which the whole psyche emerges, 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 particular place in the body. For example, much importance is usually given to the frontal lobe, since this part of the brain plays a very important role in decision making and in the initiation of 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 the 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, 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 mindbelieve 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 in the here and now. Computers, for example, are places where we store information, and our way of functioning already includes them fully as part of an expanded memory.

The fundamental question: does the mind exist?

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

The behaviorist 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 in our account cannot be understood as something limited to a place, the same is true of the mind.

From this perspective, to believe 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 this case, usually the brain), something that is characterized as a set of changes.

If anything characterizes our experiences and the way we behave, it is that they always occur in different circumstances. In the same way that spring is not in a particular landscape or country, what we call the 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 dogma, without stopping to think if it is really accurate. What is clear is that this is a topic that gives rise to lengthy debate. And you, what do you think?