Articles & Research

How Do the Brain and the Mind Relate?

There are two great questions facing humanity today — how the universe is constructed, and how consciousness arises. Mathematics and physics wrestle with the first, demonstrating the practical relevance of their theories. But does the science of the brain have a theory of its own?

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary environment that includes neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and other adjacent fields studying the brain and the mind. Cognitive technologies promise a fantastic future in which the human being will change as a biological species. Perhaps discoveries in this area will herald the beginning of a new era, like the Renaissance — only still greater in scale.

But for now let us come down to earth, where the seventh international conference on cognitive science took place in June. We are interested in the talk by the neurophysiologist Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin, who reasoned about the creation of a fundamental theory of the brain and the mind. The task of this theory is to find out how the brain and the mind relate to each other. Their relation is a whole set of “simultaneities.” Psychological, physiological, biochemical, molecular-biological, informational, energetic, and biophysical processes all occur at the same time. In the new theory, all of these properties must be brought into agreement.

However, in order to understand the significance of developing a fundamental interdisciplinary approach, one must first form a general picture of how views on the problem of the relation between the mental and the physical evolved stage by stage.

1. “Naive common sense”.

At first, people managed to see the soul in all sorts of things. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, the organ of wisdom was considered to be the ear. And the heart to this day is perceived metaphorically as the receptacle of emotional experience. One of the great philosophers held that “animal spirits” exist in the brain, running from one muscle to another and constituting the bodily principle of movement. That man was René Descartes. And later neuroscience would discover a process that is, in a certain sense, equivalent to the “running spirits” — synaptic transmission.

It is hard to imagine a time when people had as many social functions as they do today. But together with them, new psychological phenomena kept appearing that needed to be classified. Aristotle thought for a long time, but in the end he divided mental processes into sensation, perception, attention, and a number of others. Later there were those who reduced the whole diversity of feelings to desire, pleasure, and displeasure. Attempts to gather all psychological phenomena in one place led to the creation of introspective psychology.

2. The speculative stage.

In this way, the problem of the relation between brain and mind acquired psychological solutions: scientists conducted research by means of the internal observation of mental processes. We too can observe how behavior is born within us, how decisions are made in nonstandard situations — for example, when we decide to drive around a traffic jam. Later, this behavior is analyzed and evaluated.

It is obvious that self-observation is available to everyone.

Herbert Spencer, for example, had only general notions of the physical functioning of the nervous system, but he was a master of introspection and conducted thought experiments. Such work still did not lead the researcher away from an understanding of one very important thing: there is only one reality, and it manifests itself both from the subjective and from the objective side. At this stage, scientists singled out the intellect, the emotions, memory, will, perception, and sensation. One of the greatest achievements was the recognition of the evolutionary character of the mind's development. Incidentally, Spencer, who made a significant contribution to science, preferred self-education to studying at Cambridge — and there is reason to believe that this is not merely a curious coincidence.

3. The clinical stage.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, our problem was studied mainly by physiologists and clinicians. The fact is that introspective psychology often saw no great point in studying the interconnection of the soul and the brain. It was believed that the mind could be studied separately from physiology.

Sometimes it happened that a person suffered a brain injury that changed his behavior. Clinicians studied how these two phenomena were connected. It was precisely from these positions that introspective psychology was criticized. Physiologists were able to discover and name various structures of the brain — for example, the centers of speech, hearing, vision, and movement, and many others. You have surely heard of cases in which people with a damaged brain live full lives. But still, far more often, impairments in one area or another lead to the loss of some mental function.

“A mental phenomenon never exists by itself; it is always only an internally necessary moment of a more complex psychophysiological process” — L.S. Vygotsky

At the same time, Ivan Pavlov was the first to begin experimenting on healthy animals. The main process recorded in his laboratory was salivation, and the participants in those famous experiments were dogs. This process is a response to a conditioned and an unconditioned stimulus — in other words, a reflex.

If I spill hot coffee on you, you will feel pain and make a sharp movement backward — this is an unconditioned reflex.

But if I pour hot coffee on you every day, you will learn a new behavior — this is a conditioned reflex. That is, you now not only react to the stimulus but also know how to prevent it — for example, by avoiding a meeting with me at the time of day when I used to spill coffee on you.

The reflex came from the philosophy of that same Descartes and was recognized as the foundation of nervous activity. Thanks to the labors of physiologists and neurologists, many clinically important reflexes were described. They were used to diagnose lesions of parts of the nervous system and to help patients. The scientific delusion of this stage consisted in the fact that psychological concepts were replaced by physiological ones. Today the scientific community treats not only the stimulus but even the concept of “instinct” with caution.

4. The correlational approach and a bold alternative.

Soon scientists set themselves a new task: to investigate the mechanism of mental processes by uncovering the connection between recorded brain activity and behavior. Brain activity is studied by means of a special device — the EEG. Researchers observed which areas of the brain become activated during, say, speech activity. They matched the data and drew certain conclusions. Technology made a breakthrough in the twenty-first century, but the principle of matching has not changed.

Some researchers concluded that reflexes are unfit for the study of complex behavior.

Imagine a dog scratching its ear. How can such behavior be described from external observation? In the terms of the doctrine of reflexes, this behavior could be called a “scratching reflex”: the irritation in the area of the ear is removed by a “scratching” movement. In reality, the dog engages its whole organism in this movement in order to achieve a useful result.

On this basis, Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin developed the theory of functional systems (TFS). Its essence is that at the basis of behavior lie qualitatively specific systemic processes, which can be considered both mental and physiological at the same time. We noted above how many “simultaneities” make up the work of the brain. In this theory much is brought into agreement, and it became an alternative to the method of matching. The development of the relationship between the doctrine of reflexes and the systems approach is a gripping story.

In the TFS, behavior is considered through the behavioral act, which is defined as the relation of the whole organism and the surrounding environment.

When you are driving a car, your behavior is not a set of simple reflexes. It is a process that involves elements of the whole organism, forming an integral functional system. Behavior is a continuum of acts in which a functional system is activated. In the end you reach the nearest recreation park, thereby realizing the function of this mental system and achieving a useful result.

“In the neocortex everything happens at once, so that in these processes there is neither beginning nor end” — Ray Kurzweil / “The Evolution of the Mind”

At that time, just as now, there was no possibility of studying the brain activity of an animal in its natural environment, but Konrad Lorenz coped with this problem magnificently in his experiments with geese.

The correlative (matching) approach remains the most popular in today's neuroscience as well. A work by leading researchers of the neural correlates of consciousness, headed by Christof Koch, was recently published, in which the scientists conclude that by studying individual structures of the brain it is impossible to solve the “hard problem of consciousness.” Simply because consciousness is not in any single structure of the brain.

5. The systems approach and a fundamental theory.

Back in the last century, the systems approach asserted that every function of the brain is carried out not by local structures but by systems of such structures. Many scientists around the world agreed with this — for example, Vernon Mountcastle, who described the modular organization of the cerebral cortex, or Alexander Luria, the founder of Russian neuropsychology.

Today the science of the brain possesses a fantastic set of research tools that allows it to renounce dead-end metaphors.

For example, that the brain and the mind are a computer, a holographic apparatus, or a divine gift. Modern science makes use of the knowledge and approaches of all the stages we have considered. Very soon, for example, we will fulfill the cherished dream of the researchers of the correlational stage and be able to record brain activity by means of wearable EEG.

Logically, a necessity arises for a fundamental theory of the brain and the mind, just as once arose the necessity of an interdisciplinary unification of the sciences. The emergence of the hypernetwork model of the brain is founded on the experience of the previous achievements of the systems approach. Any brain is a network. Any mind is a network. Their relation is a hypernetwork, and it can be formally described. Newtonew has already told us about the connectome and the cognome in one very interesting article. A fundamental theory must answer the question “what is any brain?”

The brain and the mind in expectation of a genius

We have considered five logically incompatible approaches to how the relation of the brain and the mind can be conceived and studied. Each of them was, at a certain stage, a great achievement. Research on the neural correlates of consciousness still generates thousands of scientific papers every year. But we require solutions of a different quality, which still await their discoverers.

“In Kant's thought, nature has acted toward us as a stepmother: having given us moral consciousness, she at the same time deprived us of the possibility of having it known and proven” — Merab Mamardashvili

When we manage to understand the relation of the brain and the mind, we will stand before a choice. To direct our knowledge toward the sociocultural tasks of humanity — or to create an artificial analogue of the human being and see whether it will reconcile itself to our shortcomings.

We will be able to amplify our intellectual abilities, teach our children better, and understand the nature of creativity. Research on the brain and the mind is a road with many dangers. But we have been peering into this Pandora's box for too long already simply to set it aside.