Where is the mind located?

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 film (Martín Hache), for example, popularized one of the proclamations that best expresses this idea applied to the attraction: what is interesting is not the bodies themselves, but the intellectual facet 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 this is the mind, which identifies us as thinking individuals.

However... Do we know anything about that which we call mind? Where is it located to begin with? This is a tricky question that gives rise to some quite provocative reflections.

• You may be interested: "Mentalism in Psychology, belief in the soul, and why it is a problem"

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 house mental life. But is this accurate? To understand this, let's go to the origins of the question of where is the mind.

The Descartes' dualist theory is possibly the first great effort in human history to locate that mental life in the human anatomy: the French proposed the pineal gland as the structure from which our thoughts. Now, the whole conceptual edifice was collapsing at the moment in which we deny the possibility that the soul exists. Not for nothing, Descartes was a strong defender of the division between body and spirit, something that is not supported scientifically.

But despite the fact that in theory the ideas of Descartes are rejected by current science, we usually assume that the correct thing 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 the reality, and that is why we believe that there is something called "mind", from which all thoughts, emotions, emanate. decisions, etc. And when it comes to attributing a place to that source from which the entire psyche arises, we choose the brain, just like Descartes.

• You may be interested: "Dualism in Psychology"

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 like 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, the frontal lobe is often given great importance, since this part of the brain has a very important role in decision-making and 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 lives past, there are advocates in other ways of the idea that the mind is beyond the system highly strung. For example, from the theory of embodied cognition it is considered that the positions, movements of the body, thus Like the stimuli they capture, they are part of mental life, since they condition what we think and what we sorry.

On the other hand, authors such as Andy Clark, proponents of the theory of extended mind, believe that it goes beyond the individual body of people, and is also found in the environment with which we interact, since both These external elements such as the parts of our body are essential for the mind to behave as it does in the here and the 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 ourselves where the mind is First of all, it is necessary to ensure that there are sufficient reasons to consider that this exists.

Behavioral psychologists have been characterized precisely by rejecting the existence of something called mind... or at least one that can be located somewhere. In the same way that the movement of a train or the money that we have in the 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 given a series of responses to stimuli. Hence the concept of mereological fallacy, the tendency to attribute to a place (in the case that concerns us, normally, to 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 is debatable at length. And you do you think?