“What is the Mind, Professor?” by Dick Symonds
On 6 June some of us (psychiatrists) were privileged to hear a most interesting lecture at the Royal College of Psychiatrists by Professor Thirunavukarasu, on the subject of ‘what is Mind?’. As director of a busy psychiatric institute in India, Professor Thirunavukarasu told us that he was once floored by a clever student , who asked him to explain exactly what was the Mind.
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Thankfully most of our patients do not pose the same question as the smart Indian student. Nevertheless they do often fix upon ‘The Mind’ and how ‘It’ affects them , referring often to symptoms ‘in the mind’ and assuring us that ‘its not like a broken leg, doctor’. In short they are stuck
in the Cartesian dualist position of nearly 400 years ago. Psychiatrists, in their professional mode, mostly aspire to a scientific model which is monist and materialist, yet in their role as ordinary citizens, slip into the same dualist position as everyone else.
To return to patients, preoccupation with ‘The Mind’ is particularly noticeable in those with obsessional conditions, who refer painfully to ‘its my Mind, doctor’ and ‘I want to but my Mind won’t let me’, as if ‘The Mind’ were a parasitic organism which had taken control of their brain. I used to reflect this by a little cartoon, ‘Me and my Mind’. (see Fig.)
Why is this? Why should we be so stuck in an outmoded concept, when few today would resort to ideas like ‘phlogiston’, ‘the ether’ or transmutation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives the
derivation of ‘mind’ as the Germanic ‘mynd’ or ‘gemynd’. In Old English (OE), ‘mynd’ means thought or memory, rather abstract concepts, yet OE is the basis for the greater part of our ordinary vocabulary, especially concrete objects in the natural world like cows and corn, which suggests that we also regard ‘mind’ as a concrete object. These original speakers, who became Anglo-Saxons and thus the English were originally pagans. They converted to Christianity a century after they arrived in these islands. The Judaeo-Christian tradition seems to have captured an essentially concrete noun and merged its meaning with the very nebulous abstract noun , the ‘soul’. When in the 16th century, Descartes introduced his dualist theory of mind and matter , it seems to have fossilised this nonmaterial essence into a concrete noun, ‘The Mind’. Its use may have been quite different from the original Germanic speakers: the alternative form of mind in OE is ‘gemynd’. The ‘ge- prefix suggesting a gerund or participle, signifying a verb or at least a noun with many actions. There was
a verb ‘myndgian’, meaning to think, remember and intend.
Psychiatrists who work as medical members on the mental health Tribunals, come into close contact with lawyers, and are sometimes surprised at their frank dualism. This may be because their work
causes them to concentrate on their clients literal meanings and our legal system forces strict categorical definitions, leading to questions in court like: ‘So is it a disorder of the body or the mind, doctor?’, which is almost unanswerable.
Perhaps it is time to retrieve our linguistic roots, to think of ‘Mind’ as essentially a verb, or at least an abstract noun of action. There is an uncommon word ‘mentation’, which the OED defines as
‘mental activity’, and we might use this in preference , to express what the brain does when operating in its most complex mode. It is certainly doing something: thinking, perceiving, memorising , remembering, calculating, planning etc . It is not a ghost , hanging around with othing to do. In fact we acknowledge this, with other uses of ‘mind’ in modern English. We ‘mind the gap’ and ‘mind what we say’ – pay attention to something. We are ‘minded’ (‘gemynde’?) to plan to do something. When asked to ‘mind something for someone ‘, we take special care of the object. ‘Mindless violence’ is the result of primitive emotion spilling over into automatic motor activity, unrestrained by inhibition, reflection or predicting the consequences, all higher functions of the brain we subsume as ‘mind’. As the human is a social animal, it is behaviour that is copied and synchronised with others in a crowd, a pre-human reflex, buried but not lost, occasionally triggered, and truly ‘mind-less’ (OE myndléas -‘ ‘senseless’). All these are the actions, not of a ghostly ‘Mind’,
but of an active brain at work. But we’re not there yet. Most unfortunately, the drafters of the revised Mental Health Act of 2007, defined ‘mental disorder’ as ‘any disorder or disability of the mind’.
To return to Professor Thirunavukarasu, and ‘manas’. This word also traces back to an earlier language, in this case Sanskrit, ‘manam’, which a learned friend informs me, means – ‘mind’. There is obviously a similarity between ‘mynd’ and ‘manam’, the sort that impressed 19th century German linguists that there was an even earlier common language, Indo-European. It illustrates the age of the concept, and that Iron-Age pagans they might be, but these Indo-Europeans were no fools. Professor Thirunavukarasu transformed ‘manam’ into the more verbal concept of ‘manas’, to mean a system for coordinating Though, Mood and Intellect, what the human brain is doing when it is functioning at its most human. The short answer for Professor Thirunavukarasu’s tricky student might have been, “ ‘Mind’ is a fully functioning human brain’s activity” .
Dr.R.L.Symonds
June 2011
Thankfully most of our patients do not pose the same question as the smart Indian student. Nevertheless they do often fix upon ‘The Mind’ and how ‘It’ affects them , referring often to symptoms ‘in the mind’ and assuring us that ‘its not like a broken leg, doctor’. In short they are stuck
in the Cartesian dualist position of nearly 400 years ago. Psychiatrists, in their professional mode, mostly aspire to a scientific model which is monist and materialist, yet in their role as ordinary citizens, slip into the same dualist position as everyone else.
To return to patients, preoccupation with ‘The Mind’ is particularly noticeable in those with obsessional conditions, who refer painfully to ‘its my Mind, doctor’ and ‘I want to but my Mind won’t let me’, as if ‘The Mind’ were a parasitic organism which had taken control of their brain. I used to reflect this by a little cartoon, ‘Me and my Mind’. (see Fig.)
Why is this? Why should we be so stuck in an outmoded concept, when few today would resort to ideas like ‘phlogiston’, ‘the ether’ or transmutation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives the
derivation of ‘mind’ as the Germanic ‘mynd’ or ‘gemynd’. In Old English (OE), ‘mynd’ means thought or memory, rather abstract concepts, yet OE is the basis for the greater part of our ordinary vocabulary, especially concrete objects in the natural world like cows and corn, which suggests that we also regard ‘mind’ as a concrete object. These original speakers, who became Anglo-Saxons and thus the English were originally pagans. They converted to Christianity a century after they arrived in these islands. The Judaeo-Christian tradition seems to have captured an essentially concrete noun and merged its meaning with the very nebulous abstract noun , the ‘soul’. When in the 16th century, Descartes introduced his dualist theory of mind and matter , it seems to have fossilised this nonmaterial essence into a concrete noun, ‘The Mind’. Its use may have been quite different from the original Germanic speakers: the alternative form of mind in OE is ‘gemynd’. The ‘ge- prefix suggesting a gerund or participle, signifying a verb or at least a noun with many actions. There was
a verb ‘myndgian’, meaning to think, remember and intend.
Psychiatrists who work as medical members on the mental health Tribunals, come into close contact with lawyers, and are sometimes surprised at their frank dualism. This may be because their work
causes them to concentrate on their clients literal meanings and our legal system forces strict categorical definitions, leading to questions in court like: ‘So is it a disorder of the body or the mind, doctor?’, which is almost unanswerable.
Perhaps it is time to retrieve our linguistic roots, to think of ‘Mind’ as essentially a verb, or at least an abstract noun of action. There is an uncommon word ‘mentation’, which the OED defines as
‘mental activity’, and we might use this in preference , to express what the brain does when operating in its most complex mode. It is certainly doing something: thinking, perceiving, memorising , remembering, calculating, planning etc . It is not a ghost , hanging around with othing to do. In fact we acknowledge this, with other uses of ‘mind’ in modern English. We ‘mind the gap’ and ‘mind what we say’ – pay attention to something. We are ‘minded’ (‘gemynde’?) to plan to do something. When asked to ‘mind something for someone ‘, we take special care of the object. ‘Mindless violence’ is the result of primitive emotion spilling over into automatic motor activity, unrestrained by inhibition, reflection or predicting the consequences, all higher functions of the brain we subsume as ‘mind’. As the human is a social animal, it is behaviour that is copied and synchronised with others in a crowd, a pre-human reflex, buried but not lost, occasionally triggered, and truly ‘mind-less’ (OE myndléas -‘ ‘senseless’). All these are the actions, not of a ghostly ‘Mind’,
but of an active brain at work. But we’re not there yet. Most unfortunately, the drafters of the revised Mental Health Act of 2007, defined ‘mental disorder’ as ‘any disorder or disability of the mind’.
To return to Professor Thirunavukarasu, and ‘manas’. This word also traces back to an earlier language, in this case Sanskrit, ‘manam’, which a learned friend informs me, means – ‘mind’. There is obviously a similarity between ‘mynd’ and ‘manam’, the sort that impressed 19th century German linguists that there was an even earlier common language, Indo-European. It illustrates the age of the concept, and that Iron-Age pagans they might be, but these Indo-Europeans were no fools. Professor Thirunavukarasu transformed ‘manam’ into the more verbal concept of ‘manas’, to mean a system for coordinating Though, Mood and Intellect, what the human brain is doing when it is functioning at its most human. The short answer for Professor Thirunavukarasu’s tricky student might have been, “ ‘Mind’ is a fully functioning human brain’s activity” .
Dr.R.L.Symonds
June 2011