The fact that we can now take pictures of our brains thanks to advances in science and medicine is mind-blowing. We can even capture images of a working brain. Amazing! This is done both to try to determine the brain’s structure and function and to pinpoint areas with abnormal blood flow or lesions. The goal is to determine how the brain functions in various settings.
Taking a picture of a living brain is one thing; what about the mind?
Do we have any instruments by which we can learn to see the mind in action? That’s a very different thing. So, the answer is “no.” Actually, the situation is worse than that—we cannot even clearly and accurately define what we mean by mind! We can’t even agree upon what it is that we are referring to when we mentioned mind, let alone see it.
But we can’t deny that we have a conscious mind. Even the intelligence of the mind can be measured, or at least attempts to do so have been developed. Another question is whether or not the tests accurately measure intelligence. That was called into question by both Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence model and Robert Sternberg’s models, particularly Practical Intelligence.
What can we learn from psychologists and other experts on the human brain that might shed light on the mind? What allows us to imagine the mind, or what are the means by which we can manipulate the mind more skillfully? Alas, not very much. According to Freud, awareness is like an iceberg; only the tip is visible above water. Then he likened the construction of emotional pressure to a steam engine. Late 20th-century philosophers of mind began analogizing the mind to a computer in terms of how it takes in and processes information. It’s used for encoding data, storing it, and manipulating it. According to Perls, there are two types of minds and personalities. According to the theory of Transactional Analysis, it consists of three different people: the parent, the child, and the adult. Not one of these analogies or ideas, however, paints a particularly accurate picture of the mind, the intellect, or the conscious self.
And not only do we all feel mind and consciousness, but we also all have a fairly good idea of what goes on in there. Where do we stand? What do you realize when you contemplate your mind? Everything you can think of, believe in, value, remember, imagine, anticipate, know, understand, have intentions for, decide, and so on. If only we had the ability to see them now.
But these mental “things” are not “things” at all; rather, they are mental processes. Our minds are actively engaged in a wide range of cognitive processes. What you and I do with our minds is represent the world we live in, mentally map out how things function and what is most important, and react to it. Korzybski painted a mental “map” of external things and abstraction levels. Even though it’s better, I’m still missing some crucial details about the mind. I’m curious as to how your mind map looks.
The next development came from NLP when the developers took their clue from Korzybski and said that we have a representational map in our mind of the things we have seen, heard, felt, etc. And with that, we can begin to see the mind as a cinematic representation of the empirical world. It is as if we all have a theater in our mind and on that theater, we can re-present to ourselves whatever we have seen, heard and felt in the world. In Developmental Psychology, we call this constancy of representation. This refers to the ability to “hold in mind” what we have seen and heard. Now we can take our visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences with us wherever we go as a movie or cinema that informs us about things.
This inner cinema of the mind, however, is not actual or real—it is a simulation. There is no movie theater in your brain! Rather, it is as if we are looking a sight and hearing sounds. And while it is not an actual thing—it gives us a way of coding the world. And not only that, we can as it were edit our movies. We can make them bigger or smaller, brighter or dimmer, closer or farther, etc. We can ask, “Is your memory of that event in color or black-and-white?” “Is the volume coming from your right side or left side?”
Imagining this cinema of the mind now gives us a way to see the mind in action. Well, at least see what we are doing as we think—we are visualizing, reproducing sounds, sensations, etc. And as we add words and conversations to this mental movie, we now have a meta-representation system at play. All of these is giving us a picture of the mind.
However, this is only the beginning. Above the movie, the editing, the language, there must be belief, value, imagination, intention, memory, etc. We can conceptualize these on more advanced levels of reasoning. This extends our picture of the mind. And this is a description of the meta place.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Neurons] 2023 Neurons #14 IF ONLY YOUI COULD SEE YOUR MIND by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
