• Question: I know this may simple but: what's the difference, if any, between brain and mind?

    Asked by snacks to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 22 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      This is anything but simple to philosophers of mind, who spend their careers researching whether the mind is separate from the physical organ of the brain. For a neuroscientist like me, changes in mental state reflect physical changes in the brain. However, following up some of the philosophical debates is where it gets tricky. For example, if your brain is constantly changing according to your actions and the environment, is there such a thing as a ‘soul’ or a constant, unchanging ‘self’? I like to stick to the basic science so I don’t have to worry about these things!

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      Well the brain is the physical grey squishy thing that sits inside your head. The mind isn’t a physical thing and doesn’t have a scientific definition as such, but means the way we think and the way we are. If our brain was a computer then our mind would be all of the programs running on it.

      You do like asking questions don’t you snacks! Keep it up though, they make my work day more interesting

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      This is a question that I often put to my first year undergraduates as one of their first essay questions 🙂

      In a nutshell, the brain is a physical organ of the body that in humans, sits in our skulls and controls essentially all of the information processing that we do including sensation, voluntary (and many involuntary) movements, as well as all cognitive processes such as planning, decision making, memory, language, attention, etc. In contrast, mind is a term referring to an abstraction that usually is linked to consciousness — one’s mind is their own sense of self awareness and therefore is not a physical thing. We normally speak of our mind when referring to things like planning, decision making, language, etc because we experience these things as under our conscious control.

      In a very real sense, there is no such thing as mind except as created by a brain.

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      Hi snacks! you have lots of good questions. The answer to this one is not that simple. The brain is the physical tissue in our skull, made up by billions of neurons. The mind is an “emergent” property of the brain. So, when many neurons act together for us to think or to be conscious of an experience, then the mind exists. I once heard a neuroscientist explain this with an analogy, saying that the brain would be equivalent to a puddle of water, and the mind would be the waves that are formed when you disturb the water (for example by throwing in a stone). We know very little about how consciousness is generated in the brain, and this is one of the biggest questions in current neuroscience research.

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