Mind

MINDPRESENTER – Dr.Sriram.R, 2nd year MD PG

CHAIRPERSON – Dr.Rajkumar, Associate Prof

• The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water

~Sigmund Freud

• Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredrome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.... We take for granted the ridiculous-sounding yet undeniable fact that each person carries around atop the body a complete universe in which trillions of sensations, thoughts, and desires stream.... It's where catchy tunes snag, and cravings keep tugging.

~Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

ORGANISATION

• HISTORICAL IDEOLOGIES RELATING TO MIND AND SOUL

• WHY IS IT HARD TO DEFINE THE MIND?

• DEFINITIONS OF THE MIND

• MENTAL FUNCTIONS

• WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

• PSYCHE

• PSYCHIC APPARATUS

• TOPOGRAPHICAL MODEL OF THE MIND

• STRUCTURAL MODEL OF THE MIND

• THEORY OF MIND

• MIND-BRAIN RELATIONSHIP

• REFERENCES

HISTORICAL IDEOLOGIES RELATING TO MIND AND SOUL

• Nearly 6000 years ago, man began explaining his experiences of the self, especially intrigued by the experiences during sleep and dreams. He believed them to be wandering, shadow-like entities, which in Shamanism came to be known as 'spirits'.

• 8 th -5 th century BC - Homer identified this spirit as the "soul," which he believed was located in the head. Identified 2 types of soul –• Body soul – Composed of 3 entities, the Thymos (emotions such as joy, grief,

fear, pity, etc), the Nous (rational and intellectual component, responsible for thinking) and Menos (inner rage, located in the chest)

• Impersonal Immortal soul – “Psyche” located in a mystical place called Hades

• 4th – 3rd century BC - Plato’s concept of “Psyche” - This psyche was constituted of three parts, namely the thymos, the logos, and the pathos. Separated into components which were immortal as well as mortal• Thymos (corporeal/mortal) – Similar to Homer, located in the chest

• Logos (immortal) – Mind, located in the head

• Pathos (corporeal) – located in the liver, “Id” attributed to bodily appetites of food and drink

• Aristotle, Plato’s disciple – 3 different types of soul: a rational soul (concerned with thinking and analyzing), a sensitive soul (concerned with passions and desires), and a nutritive soul (concerned with appetites and drives). But these “souls” were located within the body.

• In Aristotelian terms, interaction of the mind with the body is as absurd as asking how the wood of a table (body) would interact with the shape of the table (mind) or as asking how the pupil of the eye (body) would interact with the vision (mind).

• In the 16 th century, Rene Descartes introduced a paradigm shift in the philosophy of the mind, by theorizing that emotional soul (or thymos) and the nutritive soul (or the id) were functions of the body, and not of the soul.

• In essence, Descartes removed thymos and the id from the soul and displaced it to the body.

• The Eastern world ideas of the soul are quite different.

• The soul is called the "aatman" in Sanskrit (like "atmen" in German, signifying a common Indo-Germanic origin). There is a school of thought that distinguished a mortal personal life-soul called the jeevatma, which interacts with an immortal divine impersonal soul called the paramatma.

• This ideology called the Dvaita (meaning "two") philosophy is akin to the Platonic-Cartesian dualism of the Western world.

• In the 8th century BC, the Advaita interpretation of consciousness and soul came about.

• The principal, though not the first, exponent of the Advaita Vedanta-interpretation was Shankara Bhagavadpada in the 8th century, who systematised the works of preceding philosophers.

• Advaita (not-two in Sanskrit) refers to the identity of the true Self, Atman, which is pure consciousness, and the highest Reality, Brahman, which is also pure consciousness.

• According to Advaita Vedanta, these different categories of consciousness are classified as absolute consciousness (brahma-caitanya), cosmic consciousness (īśvara-caitanya), individual consciousness (jīva-caitanya), and indwelling consciousness (sāksi-caitanya).

• The superimposition of the ego-idea upon pure consciousness is the individual’s first plunge into the whirlpool of maya (veil/cloud).

• A passage in the Mundaka Upanishad describes the relationship of our true Self with the empirical self (jīva-caitanya):

“Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches of the self-same tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree; the latter, tasting

of neither, calmly observes.”

WHY IS IT HARD TO DEFINE THE MIND?

• First, there are no animal models for studying the human mind or mental illnesses.

• Secondly, stringent research about the human mind has several human rights related and ethical limitations.

• Thirdly, the study of the human mind is invariably done by another human mind, and hence an unbiased objective interpretation of findings becomes difficult.

• Fourth, any concept of the mind has far-reaching implications not just in medicine, but also outside it.

Prof. Thirunavukarasu, 2011

DEFINITIONS OF MIND

• The element of a person that enables them to be aware ofthe world and their experiences, to think, and to feel;the faculty of consciousness and thought

~ OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

• The human faculty to which are ascribed thought, feeling, etc; often regarded as an immaterial part of a person

~COLLINS ENGLISH DICTIONARY

• The part of you that thinks, knows, remembers, and feels things

~MACMILLAN DICTIONARY

Prof. Thirunavukarasu’s concept of mind (MANAS)

• Manas - the part of the human self that is the subject of interest to the scientific study triggered by human deviant phenomena and behavior.

• Provides a simple, working concept to medical students, psychiatry residents, nurses, paramedics, psychiatrists, students and professionals of all allied clinical disciplines.

• Consciousness is not the manas, and manas is not the consciousness, but consciousness is what that allows manas to make a body into the self.

MANAS (Prof. Thirunavukarasu, 2011)• Manas is a functional concept which consists of mood, thought and

intellect which is indivisible from each other, nicely sychronised and amalgamated, always functioning in unison and cannot be separated from each other

• Mood - all that constitutes ‘feeling’

• Thought - all that constitutes ‘thinking’

• Intellect - all that constitutes ‘analyzing’ or

‘problem solving

• Mind can also be thought of as being an abstract concept composed of Cognition, Conation and Affect existing on a bed of consciousness

COGNITION CONATION AFFECT

CONSCIOUSNESS

MENTAL FUNCTIONS

THOUGHT• Thinking allows humans to make sense of, interpret, represent

or model the world they experience, and to make predictions about that world.

• Thought can refer to the ideas or arrangements of ideas that result from thinking.

• Psychologists have concentrated on thinking as an intellectual exertion aimed at finding an answer to a question or the solution of a practical problem.

COGNITION

• In science, cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory and working memory, judgement and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. (Eckardt, 1996)

• Human cognition is conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). (Blomberg, 2011)

COGNITION

• Within psychology and philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind and intelligence.

• It encompasses the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts), and states of intelligent entities.

CONATION

• Conation is a term that stems from the Latin conatus, meaning any natural tendency, impulse, striving, or directed effort.

• Conative is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive.

• It is in "The 1,000 Most Obscure Words in the English Language“

• There are different definitions for conation.

CONATION

• “The aspect of mental process directed by change and including impulse, desire, volition and striving“

~Standard Comprehensive International Dictionary (1977)

• “One of the three modes, together with cognition and affection, of mental function; a conscious effort to carry out seemingly volitional acts“

~Living Webster Encyclopedia Dictionary of the English Language (1980)

AFFECT

• Affect is the experience of feeling or emotion. (Hogg, 2010)

• Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect“ (APA, 2006)

• Affective states are considered psycho-physiological constructs and vary along three principal dimensions: valence, arousal, and motivational intensity (Harmon-Jones et al, 2013)

AFFECT

• Emotional valence is defined as referring to the emotion’s consequences, eliciting circumstances, or subjective feel or attitude. (Harmon-Jones et al)

• Arousal is by the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and can be measured subjectively.

• Motivational intensity refers to impulsion to act. (Penguin, 2009)

MEMORY

• In psychology, memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.

• Encoding allows information from the outside world to reach the five senses in the forms of chemical and physical stimuli.

• In this first stage the information must be changed so that it may be put into the encoding process.

MEMORY

• Storage is the second memory stage or process. This entails that information is maintained over periods of time.

• Finally the third process is the retrieval of information that has been stored. Such information must be located and returned to the consciousness.

• In recent decades, it has become one of the pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

IMAGINATION

• Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability to form new images and sensations in the mind that are not perceived through senses such as sight, hearing, or other senses.

• Imagination helps make knowledge applicable in solving problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process.

• It is a characteristically subjective activity, rather than a direct or passive experience.

PERCEPTION• Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization,

identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. (Schacter, 2011)

• Perception would somehow be split in two. (Bernstein, 2010)

• Firstly processing sensory input which transforms these low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition).

• Secondly processing which is connected with person's concept and expectations (knowledge), and selective mechanisms (attention) that influence perception.

PERCEPTION• Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but

subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.

NECKER CUBE RUBIN VASE

JUDGEMENT

• Judgement (or judgment) is the evaluation of evidence to make a decision.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

• Consciousness is the quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. (Gulick, 2004)

• It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. (Farthing, 1992)

• "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.“ (Schneider and Velmans, 2008)

• 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. (Block, 1995)

• Phenomenal consciousness has many different experienced qualities, often referred to as ”Qualia”.

• Phenomenal consciousness is usually consciousness of something or about something, a property known as intentionality in philosophy of mind.

NEURAL CORRELATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS• The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) constitute the minimal set of

neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept or stimulus.

• The set should be minimal because, if the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components is necessary to produce it.

Synchronized action potentials in neocortical pyramidal neurons

Midline structures in the brainstem and thalamus necessary to regulate the level of brain arousal

PSYCHE

• In psychology, the psyche /ˈsaɪki/ is the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious.

• Psychology is the scientific or objective study of the psyche.

• The word has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and represents one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view.

• In psychoanalysis and other forms of depth psychology, the psyche refers to the forces in an individual that influence thought, behavior and personality.

• Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, believed that the psyche OR “Seele” was composed of three components:

• The id, which represents the instinctual drives of an individual and remains largely unconscious.

• The super-ego, which represents a person's conscience and their internalization of societal norms and morality.

• The ego, which is conscious and serves to integrate the drives of the id with the prohibitions of the super-ego. Freud believed this conflict to be at the heart of neurosis.

• Carl Jung wrote much of his work in German.

• Difficulties for translation arise because the German word Seele means both psyche and soul. Jung was careful to define what he meant by psyche and by soul -

“I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a "personality".

(Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797)

PSYCHIC APPARATUS

• The term psychic apparatus (also psychical apparatus, mental apparatus) denotes a central, theoretic construct of Freudian metapsychology, wherein:

• We assume that mental life is the function of an apparatus to which we ascribe the characteristics of being extended in space and of being made up of several portions [Id, ego, super-ego].

—Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940)

• It is a hypothesis, like so many others in the sciences: the very earliest ones have always been rather rough. ‘Open to revision’, we can say in such cases . . . the value of a ‘fiction’ of this kind . . . depends on how much one can achieve with its help.

—Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926)

TOPOGRAPHICAL MODEL OF THE MIND

• Freud's earlier, topographical model of the mind had divided the mind into the three elements of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.

• The conscious contains events that we are aware of, preconscious is events that are in the process of becoming conscious, and unconscious include events that we are not aware of.

• Freud called the “disagreeable discovery” that on the one hand (super)ego and conscious and on the other hand repressed and unconscious are far from coinciding, and hence came up with the structural model.

STRUCTURAL MODEL OF THE MIND

ID• The id (Latin for "it") is the unorganized part of the personality

structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives.

• Id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives.

• The id acts according to the "pleasure principle"—the psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse—defined as, seeking to avoid pain or unpleasure (not 'displeasure') aroused by increases in instinctual tension

ID• "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we

know of it we have learned from our study of the dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. ... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.“

- Sigmund Freud (1933), New Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis

EGO• The ego (Latin "I") acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks

to please the id's drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bring grief.

• The ego is the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions.

• Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious.

EGO• It serves three severe masters - the external world, the super-ego and

the id.

• To overcome this the ego employs ”defense mechanisms”. The defense mechanisms are not done so directly or consciously. They lessen the tension by covering up our impulses that are threatening.

• Ego defense mechanisms are often used by the ego when id behavior conflicts with reality and either society's morals, norms, and taboos or the individual's expectations as a result of the internalization of these morals, norms, and their taboos.

SUPEREGO• The superego (German: Über-Ich) reflects the internalization of

cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence.

• The super-ego aims for perfection (Meyers, 2007)

• The super-ego works in contradiction to the id. The super-ego strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. The super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways. (Ruth, 2006)

THEORY OF MIND

• Theory of mind (often abbreviated ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own. (Premack and Woodruff, 1978)

• Deficits occur in people with Autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as neurotoxicity due to alcohol abuse

• The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as ”mind-blindness” (Moore, 2002)

• This means that individuals with a ToM impairment would have a hard time seeing things from any other perspective than their own.

• Individuals who experience a theory of mind deficit have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and have a difficult time with social reciprocity. (Baker, 2003)

MIND-BRAIN RELATIONSHIP

• Understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind –mind-body problem is one of the central issues in the history of philosophy – is a challenging problem both philosophically and scientifically. (Churchland, 1989)

• There are three major philosophical schools of thought concerning the answer: Dualism, materialism, and idealism.

• Dualism holds that the mind exists independently of the brain (Hart,1997) Materialism holds that mental phenomena are identical to neuronal phenomena and Idealism holds that only mental phenomena exist (Lacey, 1996)

• The most straightforward scientific evidence of a strong relationship between the physical brain matter and the mind is the impact physical alterations to the brain have on the mind, such as with traumatic brain injury and psychoactive drug use.

• Philosopher Patricia Churchland notes that this drug-mind interaction indicates an intimate connection between the brain and the mind.

REFERENCES

• Von Eckardt, Barbara (1996). What is cognitive science?. Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262720236.

• Blomberg, O. (2011). "Concepts of cognition for cognitive engineering". International Journal of Aviation Psychology 21 (1): 85–104. doi:10.1080/10508414.2011.537561.

• Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, CD-ROM Version 3.00). Oxford University Press. 2002.

• Hogg, M.A., Abrams, D., & Martin, G.N. (2010). Social cognition and attitudes. In Martin, G.N., Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., (Ed.), Psychology (pp 646-677). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

• Harmon-Jones, E.; Gable, P. A.; Price, T. F. (5 August 2013). "Does Negative Affect Always Narrow and Positive Affect Always Broaden the Mind? Considering the Influence of Motivational Intensity on Cognitive Scope". Current Directions in Psychological Science 22 (4): 301–307. doi:10.1177/0963721413481353.

• Harmon-Jones, E.; Harmon-Jones, C.; Amodio, D.M.; Gable, P.A. "Attitude toward emotions". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (6): 1332–1350. doi:10.1037/a0024951.

• "Emotion". The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology. Credo Reference: Penguin. 2009.

• http://www.hindupedia.com/en/Consciousness_in_Advaita_Vedanta

• Thirunavukarasu M. A utilitarian concept of manas and mental health. Indian J Psychiatry 2011;53:99-110

• Robert van Gulick (2004). "Consciousness". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

• Farthing G (1992). The Psychology of Consciousness. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-728668-3.

• Susan Schneider and Max Velmans (2008). "Introduction". In Max Velmans, Susan Schneider. The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-75145-9.

• Ned Block: On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness" in: The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1995.

• Cf. Reed, Edward S., on the narrowing of the study of the psyche into the study of the mind.

• Schacter, Daniel (2011). Psychology. Worth Publishers.

• Bernstein, Douglas A. (5 March 2010). Essentials of Psychology. Cengage Learning. pp. 123–124. ISBN 978-0-495-90693-3. Retrieved 25 March 2011.

• Premack, D. G.; Woodruff, G. (1978). "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4): 515–526. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00076512.

• Moore, S. (2002). Asperger Syndrome and the Elementary School Experience. Shawnee Mission, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Company.

• Baker, J. (2003). Social Skills Training: for children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome and Social-Communication Problems. Mission, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Company.

• Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: toward a unified science of the mind-brain, MIT Press, 1989

• Hart, W. D. (1997): ‘Dualism’, pp. 265-7 in S. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell

• A.R. Lacey, A Dictionary of Philosophy, 1996

• "id." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2009 Deluxe Edition.

• Carlson, N. R. (19992000). Personality. Psychology: the science of behavior (Canandian ed., p. 453). Scarborough, Ont.: Allyn and Bacon Canada.

• Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933] (Penguin Freud Library 2) pp. 105–6

• Noam, Gil G; Hauser, Stuart T.; Santostefano, Sebastiano; Garrison, William; Jacobson, Alan M.; Powers, Sally I.; Mead, Merrill (February 1984). "Ego Development and Psychopathology: A Study of Hospitalized Adolescents". Child Development (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Society for Research in Child Development) 55 (1): 189–194.

• Snowden, Ruth (2006). Teach Yourself Freud. McGraw-Hill. pp. 105–107. ISBN 978-0-07-147274-6.

• Meyers, David G. (2007). "Module 44 The Psychoanalytic Perspective". Psychology Eighth Edition in Modules. Worth Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7167-7927-8.

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