Human Mind: A Mysterious Thing | Abdullah Al Moinee

Abdullah Al Moinee

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[ Origin (Excerpted from): philosophy0fpsychology.blogspot.com/2019/06/human-mind-inborn-mystery-by-abdullah.html ]

Human mind is such a kingdom where all of the knowledge and imagination - everything that human thinks, feels and senses - comes through along with the participation of the human brain. The NSF (National Science Foundation) estimates that a human brain produces as many as 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts per day, depending on how deep a thinker a person is. Every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain inherently escorted by human mind. The mind is usually defined as the synchronized system of all psychological processes or psychic activities of an individual. Many philosophers think that the brain is a detector of the mind and that the mind is an inner, subjective state of consciousness.

The term “mind” is derived from the Old English ‘gemynd’, or “memory,” and the Proto-Indo-European verbal root ‘men-‘, meaning “to think, remember.” The use of “mind” to refer to all mental faculties, thought, feelings, memory, and volition developed gradually over the 14th and 15th centuries. Attempts to understand the mystery of mind are to go back at least to the ancient Greeks. Plato believed that the mind acquired knowledge through virtue, independently of sense experience. Descartes and Leibniz also believed the mind gained knowledge through thinking and reasoning—or, in other words, rationalism. In contrast to rationalists, empiricists, such as Aristotle, John Locke, and David Hume, believe that the mind gains knowledge from experience. Combining both rationalism and empiricism, Kant argued that human knowledge depends on both sense experience and innate capacities of the mind.

There have been three major schools of thought that describe the relationship of the brain and the mind. Dualism holds that the mind exists independently from the brain. Materialism argues that the mind is identical to the physical processes of the brain. Idealism posits that only mental phenomena exist. The conscious mind includes sensations, perceptions, memories, feelings, and fantasies inside of our current awareness. The preconscious mind includes those thoughts that we are thinking at the moment but can easily draw into our conscious mind. The subconscious mind is the psychic activity that operates below the level of awareness.

Again imagination is the activity of generating or evoking novel situations, images, ideas or other qualia in the mind. It is a characteristically subjective activity, rather than a direct or passive experience. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Consciousness is an aspect of the mind generally thought to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain.

When the mind recalls a memory, it’s not the original memory. In fact, the act of remembering is an act of creative re-imagination. The put-together memory doesn’t just have a few holes; it also has some entirely new bits pasted in. The mind’s power of expectation can blind people to facts and lure them into unwitting conjecture in virtually every way they perceive the world. For example, testers in a study responded differently to an odor that they sniffed out of a test tube depending on whether they were told that it was fancy cheese or human waste. Short-term memory is linked to current electrical activity taking place in a person’s neurons, or the pattern of signal transmission that goes through the brain. Long-term memory, however, depends on permanent physical changes in the brain. The mind stores memories in different ways, although the boundaries are not always clear cut: short-term memory (working memory), long-term memory (declarative memory), and procedural memory (“how-to” memory associated with physical skills such as shoe tying). Procedural memory is remarkably durable and is even able to survive the ravages of diseases like Alzheimer’s. Scientists are unsure how things are forgotten; in other words, they are unsure what makes a person unable to remember even long-term memories. New research shows that people don’t necessarily forget, they simply lose the ability to retrieve older, rarely visited memories. Scientists believe that the mind forgets in order to avoid information overload, to think more quickly, assimilate new information easier, and to avoid emotional hangovers.

However one must know how to control the mind. Such control is the unethical use of manipulative techniques to persuade others to meet to the wishes of the manipulator. It was first recorded during the Korean War. Solomon Shereshevsky was a Russian journalist who couldn’t forget. He suffered from synesthesia, a phenomenon in which one sense stimulates another sense. Solomon’s extreme synesthesia led him to taste, smell, and see vivid images in conjunction with numbers and sounds. Because a single word could trigger a flood of memories and associations, he had a difficult time reading a book or having a simple conversation. One of the crueler mind experiments was conducted by psychologist Harry Harlow who studied severe maternal deprivation. He separated a baby monkey from its mother and raised it in a cage with two substitute mothers. One mother was made from wire and had a bottle. The other mother was made from cloth, but didn’t have a bottle. As soon the infant finished nursing, it would cling to the cloth monkey. When the experimenters introduced frightening stimulus into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth monkey for protection. The monkeys grew up with severe emotional and behavioral problems. Again the Stanford Prison Experiment is an infamous experiment that took average people and randomly assigned them to be either guards or prisoners. After a few days, the prisoners and guards became grossly absorbed in their roles. The experiment revealed how readily the human mind accepts authority and institutional ideologies.

In short, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind. Every aspect of nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and so the mind does with its infinite junctures. The deepest insights of doctors, biologists, engineers, nerve scientists, psychologists, even philosophers are functioning to conquer the human mind in all phases. The conquest of the human mind is going to be not only a one small step for man but also one giant leap for mankind in the forthcoming days which will aspire us to be inspired to have the ample cognition over mind to have victory over mysteries.

Moinee, A. Al. “Human Mind: A Mysterious Thing” The Daily Sun. 7(185). 28 Apr. 2017. Morning Tea. 7(16).