The Mind: An Enigma

It seems impossible to conceive of the mind as being located outside the nervous system. It is still not known in which organ it resides. However, we know that it exists. Some have identified it with the soul. Others said that it was located in the pituitary gland, which is under the base of the skull. But this is not known. We simply know the process of thought.

The control center is the brain: it receives the information, classifies it, interprets it and emits the responses to the information received. Stimuli reach it and it manages their processing and the emission and transmission of the responses. It is a very complicated process: it is a complete computer that runs through the entire body collecting information, processing it and responding.

The path of the impulses that go to the brain can be followed and once they reach it, following their trail is the product of a very structured system of studies.

George Berkeley, an 18th century philosopher, believed that the material world had no real existence outside the mind and that objects existed only if they were perceived. However, sometimes the mind is deceived when interpreting certain data provided by sensory nerves.

A blow to the eye can cause pressure on the nerves leading to the brain. As these normally only transmit impulses produced by light and as they travel the same route to the brain, the mind interprets them and converts them into bursts of light (we say that we see stars).

LSD, for example, relaxes the mind, produces new sensations (as if unknown doors were opening), but diminishes perception of the outside. Everything is seen as a hallucination alien to what we normally see as reality because this drug affects or acts on the nervous system.

Memories are the residues of the mind. After several studies, it was concluded that memories were stored in large areas of the brain.

Freud and Jung have also contributed a lot to the concept of the mind. Freud discovered the subconscious (he called it Id or primitive instincts). He said that this subconscious was formed by the first experiences of the individual. His solution technique was Psychoanalysis, that is, revealing the content of the subconscious and thus eliminating the abnormalities of human behavior.

Jung said that every individual was born with what he called the collective or racial subconscious, or set of experiences of his race, molded by millions of years of continuous evolutionary changes and with a content of mental residues accumulated from the most primitive times.