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

The film (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 passage of time 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… do we know anything about what we call a mind? Where is it located, to begin with? This is a tricky question and one 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 that we attribute, in a rather imprecise way, that capacity to host mental life . But is this right? To understand this, let’s go to the origins of the question of where the mind is.

Descartes’ dualistic theory is possibly the first great effort in human history to locate that mental life in human anatomy: the Frenchman proposed the pineal gland as the structure from which our thoughts emanate. Now, the whole conceptual edifice was collapsing at the moment when we denied the possibility of the soul’s existence. Not for nothing, Descartes was a strong advocate of the division between body and spirit, something that is not scientifically supported.

But even though Descartes’ ideas are theoretically rejected by current science, we usually assume that the right thing to do is to think as this philosopher did, although changing the concept of soul to mind . Human beings have an innate tendency to create categories for any phenomenon and parcel 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 in both psychology and neuroscience assume that the mind is located in a particular place in the body. For example, the frontal lobe is often given a lot of importance, since this part of the brain plays a very important role in decision-making and in initiating movement.

Other researchers have done the opposite, associating the mind with larger locations. Beyond pseudoscientific theories that speak of cosmic minds holding memories of past lives, there are advocates of other ways of thinking about the mind as being 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 that they capture, are part of the mental life, since they condition what we think and what we feel.

On the other hand, authors like Andy Clark, defenders of the theory of the 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 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 completely 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 where the mind is it is necessary, first of all, to make sure that there is sufficient reason to consider that it 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 we have in our 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 a series of responses to stimuli are given. From there arises the concept of the merit fallacy, the tendency to attribute to a place (in the case we are dealing with, normally, the brain), something that is characterized by being a set of changes.

If anything characterizes our experiences and our way of behaving, it is that it always happens in different circumstances. In the same way that spring is not in a particular landscape or country, that which 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 dogma, without stopping to think if it is really right. What is clear is that this is a subject that gives rise to long and hard debate. And what do you think?