Brain? Mind? What? An op-ed

The story goes back to 20 million years ago.

When the common ancestors of Humans and the Great Apes came down from the trees, they decided that they wanted to walk on two legs and hold things in their hands with opposing thumbs.

The thing about holding things in your hands is that you don’t have to hold things with your mouth anymore. The thing about holding things with your hands and not your mouth is that your lower jaw doesn't have to be that tight on your skull anymore. This gives us a lot of flexibility in the amount of different sounds that we can come up with. Our jaws became capable of moving around a lot and therefore being able to come up with lots of sounds, which also ended up helping us create language.

Now the thing about language… People usually talk about language (haha), surprisingly, as a way of communicating with others, about giving your thoughts to others, your friends, your next of kin or whatever… but equally important is that language becomes then a way of communication with your own self. Try to - or maybe not try - just imagine waking up in the morning and planning your day without using any words for yourself… like a dog or a cat or a cow… and you will find that it is impossible to analyse something, to plan something out without using this incredible tool called language. Now, that of course, makes it a predominantly and almost uniquely higher brain trait. Why I am saying that is because there are effectively, therefore, two different ways your mind communicates with you. The new part of your mind communicates with you through language which is what we’re talking about … the invention of language. And the old part of your brain that you share with ancestors going back hundreds of millions of years ago. That part of your brain speaks to you or communicates with you in chemicals. That part does not analyse what is the time of the day and how long you will take to get ready and how long it will take you to drive to work... but it gives a feeling as you wake up in the morning that you have to go to work and then it gives you a feeling of how does it feel now that you have to get up and go to work… you might be excited and it will flood your brain with chemicals of that sort. You may be anxious, you may be afraid, unhappy, you may be stressed… any number of things you could feel, and those feelings are only chemicals that your older part of your brain is secreting into your brain because that is the way it communicates with you.

Now whether you call that your gut feeling or you call it your mind, whatever it is, this part of your brain cannot be argued with, this part speaks to you without listening to you. It has only one sided communication. It is completely rhetorical because it does not understand the language that you..meaning your new brain is trying to speak to it saying, ‘there is no point getting anxious, there is no point getting stressed’ and all those arguments that you give are basically not getting through to your chemical part of your brain because that part of your brain doesn't understand language… It only understands chemicals. So you could speak to that part of your brain through chemicals. For example, as Barbara Palvin does, gets up in the morning and watches friends for 5 minutes every day and fills her head with laughter or whatever and I get up in the morning and watch Barbara Palvin watching friends and that gives me happy feelings.

So now what happens is that the brain effectively gets cut into two parts. One is the conscious analytical part of the brain that you can see working or feel working… like an organ, and the other part of the brain that becomes subconscious and you do not feel it working so much… which now people start calling the subconscious brain… and when you add them together, you have this whole idea put together of an organ or a part of you that is analysing and feeling at the same time. It has the desire to work and has aspirations and inspirations, some part of it comes through hard work and some part of it just flashes in front of you like.. Whatever and this whole now… unit of all analysis and all thought, of all training and of all culture… becomes your mind and therefore the brain becomes a part of your mind even though technically it is the other way around, the mind is a part of your brain because the brain as an organ of your body is all there is. And the mind is just a small part of it.

Even though etymologically we use it the other way round, we say “He was the greatest mind of our time” not “He was greatest brain of our time” but when we are tired of analysing something then we say “I’m wracking my brain over it” rather than “I am wracking my mind over it”. So whenever we are conscious about the analysis we are doing, we call it brain but when we are not conscious or we kind of don’t have control over how we are seeing something, we call it mind because that includes that part of your brain that you can’t argue with because it speaks only in chemicals.

As the British magazine punch once said "What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."