Body, Brain, and Mind

Note: This is actually an essay I had to write for philosophy challenging some of our neuroscience assumptions.  I know it's long so don't feel bad if you don't read it.

As a staunch neuroscience advocate, I do not like to think that there is anything we cannot discover experimentally.  The leaps made in even the past few decades have revolutionized our views of mood, personality, and consciousness.  Yet by the same token, we can never have absolute proof that the mind and all that it entails is identical to the physical organ of the brain.  My argument is that the brain functions much as any other body part, only with a much more intimate connection to the mind.  It can be influenced and changed physically and that will lead to alterations in behavior and mood.  But we have no way to control the mind completely through the brain, only to influence it as an outside factor.  Thus the correlation between mind and brain is extremely weighty, but does not serve as an identity between them.

The first case study in differentiating brain and mind comes from research revolving around lesion studies.  Lesions take place when you damage a piece of tissue so that it can no longer operate.  They often happen incidentally due to injury, but the term is usually used to refer to purposely created deficits in neural tissue.  These intentional injuries allow scientists to study what the loss-of-function for a particular region will do to overall cognition.

Just had to add this cause I love brains!

Over the years, thousands of these studies have been conducted, and while some of them have indicated localized regions involved with highly specific function, more often there are examples of the same small-sized lesions making no recordable difference at all.  Even in practical application, we cause brain damage to ourselves every time we drink alcohol or get a strong bump to the head, yet it takes a large degree of damage to actually affect a change at all.

Examining the larger deficits, such as those which plagued Phineas Gage, we still cannot say with complete certainty what the change will be. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex which Gage destroyed with his tamping iron is involved in decision making.  This much we can state as fact.  But the loss of function does not mean that he used to pick B over A but now he will always chose A instead of B.  The effects are highly convoluted with only a general pattern to guide us.

But an opponent to this stance, a physicalist, would claim that of course this makes sense.  The brain does not equal the mind, for we rarely find such a simple association is rarely found in nature.  Instead, it would make much more sense to narrow the statement to say every mental state we can possess is based on a brain state.  And sometimes the brain states are unrelated to conscious thought or processing. Maybe these states are the parts being affected by the small lesions in the studies mentioned above.

Of course, it is important to recall what we are referring to as “the mind.”  Descartes, from whom this original dualism stems, saw the mind as being a collection of ideas, memories, beliefs, and opinions that can be disconnected from the physical world.  So how can we try to change or alter this state?

Descartes: Author of the Meditations

Much of the psychopharmacology of the current era has been based on the belief that we can alter the mind.  Antidepressant drugs rely on changing the composition of cellular channels and levels of neurotransmitters to help patients rid themselves of emotional problems caused by “poor wiring.”  Another example shows that some pain medications block receptors in the body’s central nervous system to keep the signals from reaching the brain and forming full sensations.  And we even have ways of directly stimulating regions of the brains via implanted electrodes to activate the amygdala and invoke a fear response (Though this experiment has only been done on lab animals so the analysis of the effect on cognition is extremely limited.  Not to mention we have not taken into account the implications of animals’ mental states, as well as the fact that only outward behavior can be measured.).

Nevertheless, despite strong arguments for brain alterations leading to changes in behavior or mood, we still have no conclusive evidence that these alterations are affecting the root initiator of the mind.  With all our modern science and technology, we still have nothing resembling brain control.  We can only change influencing factors on the brain, such as physical perceptions like pain or moods such as depression.  These cannot lead to changes in belief or an alteration of how we recall memories.  Our ideas will remain our own, even if our brain chemistry is altered.

Perhaps the most apt metaphor is to compare the brain to another physical aspect of our being such as an arm.  Just as our brain controls the movement of our arm, our mind directs the brain to change in certain physical ways which will then allow it to function as the mind wishes.  The mind just works through the brain which works through the body to accomplish its ultimate goal- whatever that may be.

And just as environmental changes can affect functioning of a limb like an arm, external factors like psychopharmacological drugs can alter the functioning of the brain.  The key lies in that both are experiencing forces outside their existence which tweak how they respond.  And in the case such as damage to the neural cortices, the result is like breaking a bone in the arm.  You may still hold the same intentions but enacting them is challenged by an injury.

Through these examples I have strived to prove the imperfect connection between the brain and the mind.  The correlation between the two grows stronger as modern science progresses but the link will never be perfectly defined.  As correlation does not equal identity, we cannot say that the two are identical entities.  Thus a modified dualist view -which shows the brain is used by the mind like how the body is used by the brain- still holds sway.