In today’s book talk I am going to discuss about my book “How does the Mind work?”.
Let me start with an interesting story about some well known incident that happened way back in 1950s. That incident totally revolutionized the way we understand our Mind.
There was this young man Henry Molaison (popularly referred to as just H.M.) who suffered from frequent epileptic seizures. His doctors finally decided to operate on his brain and remove some parts of his brain as a possible remedy. The surgery cured him of his illness but he developed strange memory problems.
Post surgery, though H.M. could remember every thing that happened several years before surgery, he could not recollect incidents that happened just sometime before surgery. Worst still he had severe problem remembering day to day events.
If he met you for the first time, he would talk to you as all normal people do, but moment he turned his back to you, he totally forgot that he ever met you! He could not remember anything for more that few minutes unless he kept effort fully recollecting that incident.
His IQ was above normal, he could easily learn new motor skills, but he had severe short term memory loss which made his life difficult. He never had these problems before surgery.
H.M. offered himself to brain research and the scientists understood a lot about how our brain works at least in the area of memorizing.
So, this is how our attempts to understand the working of the brain went on initially, though it had started way back in 1850s by researchers Broca and Wernicke who used post surgery results to probe into how we produce speech and understand language.
In the past 150 years, we have come a long way. We now have a fairly good idea about how our brain works. Today, we don’t have to cut open the brain to understand it. We have sophisticated gadgets like functional MRI scanners that can provide a detailed video of how our brain works.
The beauty of the most complex entity in the entire creation ,namely the brain is that, all this complexity is built around very simple cells called neurons. There are billions of them in our brain all interconnected in a complex fashion – the so called grey matter (i.e. the neurons) and the white matter (i.e. the connections)
These neurons are like the transistors in a modern day computer. But the interconnection between them can dynamically change throughout our life time and that is what makes each one of us unique.
These days, sophisticated computer programs called simulators are used to mimic the functioning of the brain and understand it better. I jovially call it “Neo speculative way of understanding the brain”
This book, namely “How does the Mind work?” is basically an overview of what we have learnt about the working of the brain over the past 150 years. But I have made the narrative so simple that you can understand it with very little pre-requisite.
I have also compared the functioning of the brain with that of computers at various levels so that we get a better understanding and may be can take cues from the working of a digital computer.
What has working of the brain to do with the Mind?
You probably are wondering why I am talking about the brain when I was supposed to be actually talking about the Mind!
But the fact is that most scientists consider the Mind as “the brain in action”. There is no separate entity called Mind, apart from a living and functioning brain. Let me give a day to day analogy.
When you talk about a program running on a computer or even your mobile phone, for example, there is nothing like a running program. It is just the hardware of the computer working in a specific way. That gives you a feeling that the computer or your phone has intelligence, responds to your interactions in a specific way and so on. Our brain and our Mind have similar relation.
I know, accepting that we are no more than just some mechanical systems like a robot, makes many of us uncomfortable. But many “scientists” even go to the extent of saying that as we understand our brain more, notions like our free will, volition, ego, and even the soul become no more that imagined things! It all boils down to some neurons working in some way!
Can we ever understand the Mind fully?
I personally feel that no matter how much we progress in brain research, we will never be able to understand the Mind fully. And of course there are many scientists who want to limit themselves to address simpler questions rather than bog themselves down in philosophical questions that probably can never be answered.
At least at the moment, we are like kids who are trying to understand a highly complex entity using crude instruments, however sophisticated we would like to call them. In the cover page that you see on the screen, I have tried to express this sentiment.
That is not to say that I don’t appreciate the progress we have made so far in understanding the Mind. But it is too early to rule out many of the philosophical issues that are beyond us at the moment.
Let me now list the contents of this book.
Table of contents
Chapter 1.Through Mind we interact with the world
Chapter 2.How do we get to know about the Mind?
Chapter 3.Neurons: Mini biological wonders
Chapter 4.Networks of interconnected neurons
Chapter 5.How are neural networks formed?
Chapter 6.A brief overview of the brain anatomy
Chapter 7.How does our visual system function?
Chapter 8.How do we remember things?
Chapter 9.Our ability to understand language
Chapter 10.How do we perform physical action?
Chapter 11.Our emotions, beliefs and free will
Chapter 12.Our consciousness
Don’t feel threatened by the titles. I have used lots and lots of simple illustrations and used simple language that should take you easily into the subject.
Where can I find this book?
You can find this book in almost every online store that sells books, such as amazon, apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, scribd and so on. This book is available both in e-book as well as in print book formats.
See https://books2read.com/Mind for a preview/purchase in these formats. This is an universal book link that would list most stores where the book is available and if you click the store icon, you will be taken to that store in your region.
At the moment, I don’t have an audio book version.
I am sure you will greatly get benefited by reading this book.
Bye then, till we meet again, week after next, with another of my books.
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