What is the mind? Where is he physically located? This word is most often used in the meaning of "intelligence" and "logic", contrasting the soul or emotions. The famous psychiatrist and psychotherapist Daniel Siegel in his book "Reason" uses the concept in a broader sense and interprets it at the intersection of several fundamental science: from neurobiology and quantum physics.
Although reason, of course, is fundamentally connected with brain activity , the human mental life and its occurrence may not be limited to the processes inside the cranium. Could the reason be something used to lshim than the result of neural impulses in the brain? And if so it is - what are its components?
To understand this, it is useful to move away from the dominant view that “the mind is brain activity” and see a wider picture. Understanding the brain plays an important role in comprehending the mind - but why should the results of the latter, its causes or composite aspects, be necessarily limited to what is happening in our head? This point of view (“brain activity = reason”) is called “limited by the brain”, “restrained by the skull” or “cranial”.
First of all, mental activity (for example, emotions, thoughts and memories) is directly formed, and probably generated by the state of the whole organism, so the mind can be considered as something embodied - located in the body, and not just in the skull.
Another fundamental issue is relationships with other people, or the social environment that directly affects everyone’s mental life. Human interconnections also create a mental life: not only affect it, but turn out to be one of its sources; not only form, but also give rise to it. Thus, there is an option to consider the mind as something relational, and as something bodily embodied.
If you look beyond the skull, the body and the world of relationships may turn out to be not just contextual factors affecting the mind, but the fundamental foundation of it.
In other words, whatever the mind may be, it is not limited to what happens between the ears, but arises at least in the body and in relationships.Perhaps, in this case, it is appropriate to consider from a scientific point of view the likelihood that the mind is more than just brain activity?
So, to say that “the mind is what the brain does and nothing else” is apparently not entirely true: one cannot turn away from the complexity and richness of this phenomenon. Subjectivity is not synonymous with brain activity. And consciousness is also not a synonym. As well as a psychic life deeply connected with relationships. The reality of consciousness, its internal texture and the interpersonal social nature of the mind at least invite to see in it not only the buzzing of neurons inside the head.
Physicists argue that energy is most conveniently described as an action potential. It is measured as the movement between opportunity and reality along a probability spectrum. It is sometimes called the wave function, and sometimes the probability distribution curve. We experience this flow of energy not as something magical, mysterious and unscientific, but as a fundamental aspect of our world. The energy fields surrounding us are invisible - this was described two centuries ago by the famous scientist Michael Faraday in his work on the discovery of electromagnetism - but they are real.
We rarely feel the source of energy - the sea of the possible, but we are aware of the transition of the possible into the real. This is a flow of energy, a change in the probability function. The light was off, and now on. The room was quiet, and now someone was talking. You see that someone is coming to you - he is a close friend, he hugs you warmly. This is a conversion of opportunity into reality. We feel such a flow every second of our lives.
Some part of the energy flow goes beyond the limits of energy patterns: it carries a symbolic value, indicating something else.
If you write or utter nonsense, no meaning arises. But if you write or say, for example, “Golden Gate” - energy in the blink of an eye becomes information, something more than pure energy, embodied from a sea of possibilities in this reality. If we say "Eiffel Tower", from the vast, almost endless sea of possibilities, a concrete energy pattern will be born, information representing a linguistic designation of an architectural structure in Paris.
Nevertheless, not all energy patterns are endowed with information; therefore, the common element uniting the brain and relations may be energy as such, or, more fully, “energy and information”. Information in any case manifests itself in the world through energy transformations, turning the action potential into reality. This is the essence of energy.
The terms “energy” and “information” are useful to consider as a basis, especially if you combine them. Patterns, or waves, appear when energy changes in time, when it flows, unfolding momentarily in the present. The idea of flow is also well suited to describe a person’s mental life, which is constantly being born and changing. Flow means change. The phrase “in time” as “flow in time” simply means tracking this flow, various dimensions of transformations in the experienced reality.
That is why the energy-information flow can be considered the central element of the system that generates the mind. When you walk along the coast and look at the waves, it seems that the coast is created by the sea and sand. The coastline is born of two elements, one is not enough. The shore is both land and water. Maybe the mind also somehow fits inside the body and between people?