The brain is not the mind, the mind inhabits the brain.
Like a ghost in a machine, some say. Mind is the comforting mirage of the physical brain. An experience, not an entity. An essence, not just a substance. And, of course, the mind isn't located only in the brain. The mind reflects what the body senses and feels, it's influenced by a caravan of hormones and enzymes. Each mind inhabits a private universe of its own devising that changes daily, depending on the vagaries of medication, intense emotions, pollution, genes or countless other personal-size cataclysms.
Sometimes it's hard to imagine the art and beauty of the brain, because it seems too abstract and hidden an empire, a dense jungle of neurons. The idea that a surgeon might reach into it to revise its career seems as dangerous as taking the lid off a time bomb and discovering thousands of wires. Which one controls the timing mechanism? Getting it wrong may be deadly. Still, there are bomb squads and there are brain surgeons. The art of the brain is to liken and learn, never resist a mystery, and question everything, even itself.
---Excerpted from An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman (Simon and Schuster, Inc.)
We've learned a lot about the human brain: its average size and weight, its various regions, and even how some of its inner circuitry works.
New technology and approaches to brain research have yielded useful findings for a wide variety of fields--psychotherapy, education, law, economics, and nutrition, to name a few--and have also created new fields of study, including neuroethics, neuromarketing, and neurotheology. And although numerous unanswered questions follow every new discovery, neuroscientists are steadily revealing how we can use different capacities in our brain to enhance our well-being.
Scientists used to believe that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed and couldn't change, but with the help of brain imaging they are learning that the brain can constantly develop and evolve. By examining how the brain works when meditating, neuroimaging has opened a new door into exploring higher states of consciousness.
Today, we not only have a greater understanding of the mysterious inner workings of the brain, but we have opened doors into improved psychotherapies, enhanced learning capabilities, and healthier relationships with ourselves and one another.
Source: SHIFT: AT THE FRONTIERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS, September 2007