mind is not in the brain

The brain has a locatable memory center, but mind isn't confined to the brain. Consider a deeply meaningful experience in your life - a first kiss, or hte last time you saw a beloved grandparent. That memory is the remianing trace of an event in time and space. The experience can still be activiated in your brain, which means that millions of molecules that could be flying randomly through your neurons know that they have to stay together in order for your memory to continue, year after year, without fading. how could they know this, since molecules aren't intelligent? The physical basis for memory remains totally unknown to neurologists, so we can only speculate.

Somehow your first kiss has an afterlife. The afterlife isn't physical, because there's absolutely no difference between the hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon in a neuron and those same elements in a tree, a dead leaf, or decomposed soil. Neurons aren't immortal. They die, just as the rest of the body does, and atoms fly in and out of them every second. How, then , does a memory get transferred to a new atom, or to a new neuron when the time comes for the old one to perish? No physical process for this has been identified, so perhaps memory actually persists on a nonphysical level. Neurologists would defend to the hilt the opposite idea, that mind arises only in the brain, using CAT scans and MRI imaging to prove the point. But those images are only maps. They show th terrain of the brain as an idea or emotion crosses it; they don't prove that the brain is the mind, any more than a footprint in the sand is the same as a foot. Imagine that you could map every vibration in the tiny nerve endings that line the inner ear. When graphed on a chart, there would be an extremely complicated pattern for every word and sentence the ear receives, but that pattern is only a map of a word, not hte territory itself. A powerful sentence like "I love you" is more than the map of its vibrations, since even the most perfect map cannot contain love's power, meaning, significance and overall intent.

Comments

[Loki]

Neurons are not normally supposed to die. When they do, they cause memory loss and it's called neurodegeneration. Alzheimer's, is a neurodegenerative disease. Scientists also recently discovered that they can program memories into neurons with several experiments with involving neuron cultures. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/aps-alm052907.php

[Dwain Cannon]

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