It kind of reminds me of the movie , where the boy king, thrown to the mercy of the elements, returns triumphant. And this is not fiction. Time and again, we have proven it to ourselves. The beauty of the human mind makes us far more special, far more intricate, complex, unique, and perfect than anything else in this creation.
So, can we look at ourselves as wonders of nature and train our minds to believe that we will not give in or give up, no matter how tough the times are? Of course, we can — in fact, we should. This is the only way we will ever discover how strong we can truly be, how amazing we truly are, how precious, how valuable this life is. And we can all come back to ourselves — warriors, survivors, winners.
Abhijit Chakraborty is a senior content editor at upGrad, a digital education organisation in India. He is also a mental health advocate. Disclaimer: Psychreg is mainly for information purposes only. Materials on this website are not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, medical treatment, or therapy. Never disregard professional psychological or medical advice nor delay in seeking professional advice or treatment because of something you have read on this website.
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Don't have an account? All Rights Reserved. OSO version 0. University Press Scholarship Online. Sign in. Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Studies on patients who have suffered brain injury such as Phineas Gage have also provided interesting clues on the mind in relationship to the brain. We now know that damaged frontal lobes can no longer exert inhibitory influences on the limbic system with consequent aggressive acts.
The relation between the amount of grey matter in the frontal lobes and intelligence; the inferior parietal lobules and spatial reasoning and intuitions on numbers as in Albert Einstein and the third interstitial nucleus in the anterior thalamus and homosexuality Pinker, are a few more examples of specific areas of the brain linked to characteristics attributed to the mind.
Paul Broca showed that damage to the area subsequently named after him in the dominant cerebrum results in an inability to talk. Subsequent studies showed several other areas within the cerebrum that govern other aspects of speech. Bilateral frontal lobotomy and subsequent more sophisticated variants such as stereotaxic amygdalotomies or cingulotomies reduce an aggressive, maniacal individual to docility Heller et al.
Wilder Penfield — , Canadian neurosurgeon, was known for his groundbreaking work on epilepsy. He operated on patients with intractable epilepsy using local anaesthesia, ensuring that they remained awake throughout the operation. He stimulated areas of the brain surface in these patients in order to demarcate the part producing epilepsy.
In many patients, electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain triggered vivid memories of past events. One patient, while on an operating table in Montreal, Canada, remembered laughing with cousins on a farm in South Africa. It brings psychical phenomena into the field of physiology. It should have profound significance also in the field of psychology provided we can interpret the facts properly.
We have to explain how it comes about that when an electrode producing, for example, 60 electrical impulses per second is applied steadily to the cortex it can cause a ganglionic complex to recreate a steadily unfolding phenomenon, a psychical phenomenon. But the mechanism seems to have recorded much more than the simple event. When activated, it may reproduce the emotions which attended the original experience.
On 1 September , Dr. William Beecher Scoville performed bilateral mesial temporal lobe resections on a patient known as H. The inadvertent severe damage to the important limbic structures resulted in permanent loss of memory in this patient Scoville, But, he could remember almost nothing after that. Damage to discrete areas within the brain can thus produce a variety of disorders of the mind.
In his Nobel Lecture, Sperry described the implications on concepts of the mind of the observations made after splitting the corpus callosum Sperry, Myers, showed that the cat with divided corpus callosum now had two minds either of which was capable of learning on its own, and of responding intelligently to changes in the world around it on its own.
Subsequent experiments with rats, monkeys and later with human epileptic patients gave similar results. Psychological tests showed that both John Does had remarkably similar personalities. Except for language ability, they were about as much alike as identical twins. Their attitudes and opinions seemed to be the same; their perceptions of the world were the same; and they woke up and went to sleep at almost the same times. There were differences however.
John Doe Left could express himself in language and was somewhat more logical and better at [planning…]. John Doe Right tended to be somewhat more aggressive, impulsive, emotional - and frequently expressed frustration with what was going on. Such experiments led Sperry, Ornstein and others to conclude that each of the separated hemispheres has its own private sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories, in short, that they constitute two separate minds, two separate spheres of consciousness Gross, In addition to structure, we must consider the chemical processes within the brain.
The effects of caffeine, alcohol, marihuana and opium on the brain and mind are common knowledge. Chemicals within the nervous system, such as adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, the endorphins and encephalins, enable and modify the many functions of brain and mind and body we take for granted. Carter described modern techniques for mapping the brain and mind.
Sounding a cautious note, Carter pointed out that whilst the optimist might wish for a complete understanding of human nature and experience from such studies, others may insist that a map of the brain can tell us no more about the mind than a terrestrial globe speak of Heaven and Hell.
The brain is the organ of the mind just as the lungs are the organs for respiration. Consciousness, perception, behaviour, intelligence, language, motivation, drive, the urge to excel and reasoning of the most complex kind are the product of the extensive and complex linkages between the different parts of the brain. Likewise, abnormalities attributed to the mind, such as the spectrum of disorders dealt with by psychiatrists and psychologists, are consequences of widespread abnormalities, often in the chemical processes within different parts of the brain.
Jackson suggested that the evolutionary development of the prefrontal cortex is necessary to the emergence of self. In this sense it could be called the organ of mind. However, this is not to say that self resides in the prefrontal cortex. Rather, the new structure allows a more complex coordination of what is anatomically a sensori-motor machine. He used the terms lowest, middle, and highest centres…as proper names…to indicate evolutionary levels. Ascending levels show increasing integration and coordination of sensorimotor representations.
The highest-level coordination, which allows the greatest voluntary control, depends on prefrontal activity. Self is a manifestation of this highest level of consciousness, which involves doubling. This doubling is established by the reflective capacity that enables one to become aware of individual experience in a way that gives a sense of an inner life.
Sherrington addressed function and emphasised the limitations of our means for analysis:. The physico-chemical produced a unified machine… the psychical, creates from psychical data a percipient, thinking and endeavouring mental individual… they are largely complemental and life brings them co-operatively together at innumerable points… The formal dichotomy of the individual … which our description practiced for the sake of analysis, results in artifacts such as are not in nature… the two schematic members of the puppet pair… require to be integrated… This integration can be thought of as the last and final integration.
Impenetrable, Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched, Immortal, all-arriving, stable, sure, Invisible, ineffable, by word And thought uncompassed, ever all itself, Thus is the Soul declared! Arnold, Socrates — Now do you think one can acquire any particular knowledge of the nature of the soul without knowing the nature of the whole man? Phaedrus — If Hippocrates the Asclepiad is to be trusted, one cannot know the nature of the body, either, except in that way. I was being mischievous.
Where is it? The search for the location of the human soul probably dates back to the awareness of such an entity. Termed atman by ancient Indian philosophers, psyche by the Greek and anima by the Romans, it has been considered resident within, but distinct from the human body.
Many consider it immortal, postulating death to be the consequence of the departure of the soul from the body. Several questions arise when considering the soul. Here are some examples. When does the soul enter the human body, as the sperm enters the egg or as they fuse into one cell or at a later stage? Does the soul influence the body, mind and intellect? Is the soul identical with what we term conscience?
What happens to the soul during dreams, anaesthesia, trance-like states? What happens to it after the soul leaves the body? Where and how are acquired characters stored in the nebulous soul? Where, in the body, does the soul reside? The answer must be in a resounding affirmative. The efforts over millennia to determine the nature and discover the location of the soul have resulted in a better understanding of the wonderful structure and function of man and his place in the cosmos.
And if one knows how great is the likeness between bodily and mental diseases, and that both are treated by the same remedies, one cannot help refusing to separate the soul from the body. Chekhov echoes the question asked by so many over the centuries. Hippocrates concluded that madness originated in the brain. Plato in Timaeus felt that folly was a disease of the soul. Philistion subclassified folly into madness and ignorance Harris, Pythagoras c. The seat of the soul extended from the heart to the brain, passion being located in the heart and reason and intelligence in the brain Prioreschi, Leonardo da Vinci —; see Figure 2 , with his uncanny genius, placed the soul above the optic chiasm in the region of the anterior-inferior third ventricle Santoro et al.
Leonardo depicted the location of the soul at the point where a series of intersecting lines meet Santoro, Though human ingenuity by various inventions with different instruments yields the same end, it will never devise an invention either more beautiful… than does Nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing superfluous and she… puts there the soul, the composer of the body, that is the soul of the mother which first composes in the womb the shape of man and in due time awakens the soul which is to be its inhabitant Del Maestro, There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.
And the faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. But it is quite otherwise with corporeal or extended objects, for there is not one of them imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide into parts. Descartes localised the soul in the pineal gland as it lay deep within the brain, in the midline and was unpaired [see Figure 4 ]. The pineal gland according to Descartes. Lancisi — agreed that the soul must lie deep within the brain, in the midline and in an unpaired structure, but favoured the corpus callosum, especially the Nervali longitudinales ab anterioribus ad posteriora excurrentes , which are still called the medial longitudinal striae of corpus callosum, or nerves of Lancisi.
He felt that the vital spirits could flow in the fibres of the medial striae. These formed a pathway for the stream of the soul or perhaps consciousness between the anterior part of the corpus callosum and the anterior columns of the fornix and the posterior part of the corpus callosum and the thalami, a sort of connection between the seat of the soul and the peripheral organs, between the soul and the body Di Ieva, Thomas Willis wrote Cerebri Anatome while being a Professor of Natural Philosophy in Oxford, where he used the anatomy of the brain as a tool to investigate the nature of the soul.
Albrecht von Haller — placed the soul in the medulla oblongata Trimble, ; p Bloom commented on the refutation of the dualist view differentiating the body and the soul:.
But the question is not really about life in any biological sense. It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing. It is a question about the soul… It is not a question that scientists could ever answer. The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical processes in the brain…. Santoro et al. They concluded that there exist two dominant and, in many respects, incompatible concepts of the soul: one that understands the soul to be spiritual and immortal, and another that understands the soul to be material and mortal.
In both cases, the soul has been described as being located in a specific organ or anatomic structure or as pervading the entire body, and, in some instances, beyond mankind and even beyond the cosmos. Rationalists are doubtful.
What do you mean by soul? The brain? Is there not something immortal of or in the human brain — the human mind? Because we do not know what that power is, shall we call it immortal? As well call electricity immortal because we do not know what it is… After death the force or power undoubtedly endures, but it endures in this world, not in the next. And so with the thing we call life, or the soul — mere speculative terms for a material thing which under given conditions drives this way or that.
It too endures in this world, not the other. Because we are as yet unable to understand it, we call it immortal.
In , Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, decided to weigh the soul by weighing a human being in the act of death. It seemed to me best to select a patient dying with a disease that produces great exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted. He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat.
During all three hours and forty minutes I kept the beam end slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come. At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound.
The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce. It is the belief that when the heart stops beating the soul leaves the body. Something may be learned of the soul by observing the changes in its habitat, the marrow-like brain, at the moment when life ceases. I myself do not believe the soul to be a thing without the brain though I am neither an atheist nor an agnostic.
Otto Rank has summed the situation regards the soul well. He felt that belief in the soul grew out of the need to reassure ourselves of immortality, despite our knowledge of the immutable biological fact of death:.
Ramachandran, brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, is less tactful. For scientists who are people of faith, like Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, asking about the science of the soul is pointless, in a way, because it is not a subject science can address.
If we accept the existence of the soul and its localisation in the brain, we must focus on the brainstem. Christopher Pallis , discussing the definition of whole-brain death, provided a modern concept of the soul. We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul.
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