Brain vs. Mind
- Mica Schuchardt
- Jan 1, 2019
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 13, 2024
Alright world changers,
Today’s post aims to establish a foundational understanding of the brain vs. the mind…because in subsequent weeks, I’ll be diving much deeper into these topics. Differentiating between the brain and the mind and decoding how the mind works is SO INCREDIBLY VITAL – because once you know how something works, you don’t need someone telling you how to use it. You’ll be empowered to break out of the debilitating thought patterns that keep you from thriving and harness the damn near illimitable power of your mind to serve you...rather than deter you. LFG.
THE BRAIN
For the vast majority of scientific history, the brain was believed to be fixed, locked in, and hardwired once reaching adulthood.
The implications of this were rather unfortunate because if you had a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, depression, anxiety, or really bad PMS, your doctor would assume that your condition was entirely irreversible. And, if your family didn’t like you very much, you could easily find yourself ushered into a residential psych ward because they were all the rage in the mid-1900s.
Fun fact: In 1941, for every 1,000 humans living in the United States, 6.5 of them resided in a mental asylum.¹ Um, yikes.
But then, the field of science had a happy accident.
In the 1970s, a researcher named Michael Merzenich set out to definitively show that the brain is fixed in adulthood, but instead, he ended up proving the exact opposite. He discovered neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to reorganize itself and form new neuronal connections throughout life.²
In addition, recent research has confirmed the presence of a renewal process called neurogenesis in adults. Every morning 700 little baby neurons are born in your hippocampus - the emotional and memory center of your brain.³ Awww :)
So, the squishy tofu floating inside your cranial vault is decidedly not fixed. It has the capacity to evolve, reorganize, adapt, and heal throughout one’s lifetime. Countless studies are underway seeking to elucidate the extent of the human brain’s healing potential...and fingers crossed, it’s to infinity and beyond.
THE MIND
Now let’s dip our toes into some controversy. The general consensus in the scientific community is that the brain is all that matters and the mind is irrelevant.
See, scientists can’t actually prove that the mind exists; therefore, materialists take the stance that the mind is a made-up “woo woo” concept that has no place in a scientific model. However, in response to that, I’d just like to gently point out that materialism (the idea that if you can’t see it, it isn’t real) is actually a theory as well and cannot be proven.
In any case, there is a growing number of renegade scientists out there who are breaking out of this reductionistic view of the world and have no problem accepting that the brain is the physical, tofu-textured organ, and the mind is the transcendent world of mood, thought, attitude, imagination, and belief. So in this model, the brain and the mind are distinct yet associated entities that perpetually inform and interpenetrate one another.
What’s particularly interesting about this scientific quandary, is that our population at large has already taken sides. Any time we express our mood, we are using the language of the mind, thereby acknowledging its existence.
On the other hand, if it’s true that materialism is the correct way to describe our world, then we should be saying things like this: “The sucrose stimulus I just ingested seems to have triggered the release of excitatory neurotransmitters that have activated the hot spot in my nucleus accumbens shell and ventral pallidum.” I haven’t met a materialistic scientist, but I genuinely hope that’s how they express themselves…
Anecdotal Support for the Scientific Renegades
When I was 17, I came across a Bible verse that inspired me to conduct a personal experiment:
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” Romans 12:2
I took this to mean that if I broke out of our societal patterning, seized control of my mind, and renewed it by choosing to think life-giving thoughts that are in alignment with the natural order of things, I could transform myself – which was exactly what happened. I became very disciplined in my thought life - observing my mental chatter and inner monologues - systematically turning my attention away from thoughts that seemed contrary to the beauty of life and focusing on what seemed useful, wonderful, and congruent with the type of world I wish to live in.
Over the course of a summer, I reinvented myself. I went from being stressed out, miserable, physically sick, depressed, and chronically cynical to the joyful, peaceful, healthy, optimistic, and loving creature that I am today – and THE ONLY thing that changed was my belief that I could take control of my mind.
Did my brain change my thoughts or did my thoughts change my brain?
Yes.
Both.
So the way I see it...
We have 2 options:
1) Be the victim of our squishy tofu organ
-OR-
2) Harness the power of the mind to beneficially influence our squishy tofu organ
Let's Look into my Crystal Ball
Choosing option 1 (or unconsciously falling into option 1) means you don’t take control of your mind, you fall victim to every thought that pops into your head, and your brain will express its default settings and run the subconscious programming that it acquired during childhood via nature and nurture. In addition, the brain will serve its basic primal function of doing one thing and one thing only – keeping you alive.
If you’re like me and didn’t get dealt the best nature/nurture hand this lifetime, you will likely end up with a pretty tormented internal environment that doesn’t serve you or anyone you’re in relationship with.
And while keeping you alive is a noble function, those very neural mechanisms are the same ones that can prevent you from thriving in today’s society.
Let’s think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors. They were faced with many life-or-death situations, and we inherited genes from the individuals that survived. So, what were the characteristics of their brains?
Well, they were hyper-aware of anything that posed a threat – i.e. things that jeopardized their existence took up more mental real estate than things that posed no threat.
For example, what was more important for our ancestors to remember: there’s a cute family of bluebirds nesting in a birch tree, or there's an ill-tempered black bear that lives by the river?
Another brain characteristic of our ancestors was that they stuck to the familiar and resisted the unfamiliar. The individuals who survived and passed on their genes to us were, for the most part, the boring ones who ate from the same berry bush every day because taste-testing the berry bush further down the path could (and often did) result in death.
Now here we are, thousands of years later with a strong propensity towards hyper-focusing on threatening situations and resisting the unfamiliar. The problem is that while these characteristics served our ancestors beneficially, they don’t particularly set us up for success in modern times.
See, our ancestors actually were in life-or-death situations. We typically are not.
The things that our brain now perceives as “threatening” are things like public speaking, doing taxes, taking exams, driving in traffic, and meeting deadlines. Our brains are inappropriately perceiving life-or-death situations almost constantly, whereas our ancestors were appropriately perceiving life-or-death situations a couple of times each week. Unless we learn to regulate our nervous system using the power of the mind, we will end up a statistic in our society’s stress epidemic.
Resisting the unfamiliar also becomes problematic in a lot of ways – and it starts young. Up until age six, the brain operates in a low frequency hypnosis-like state called theta.⁴ Whatever is made familiar to you during those developmental years can become deeply programmed into your subconscious mind.⁵
So, if abusive relationships, lack of love, financial scarcity, yelling, alcoholism, etc. is what is familiar to you, then your subconscious mind will likely be drawn to those same type of circumstances even if you consciously wish to avoid them. Then when you try to have a loving relationship or a breakthrough in your career, the brain says, “Oh no, no, no - this isn’t familiar to me - time to self-sabotage.”
If we don’t use our personal agency to regulate our minds, this is what we end up with: a brain that keeps us alive, but doesn’t help us thrive. We will be unnecessarily stressed out and on a fast track towards our genetic/nature/nurture predispositions. In this option, the potential of the mind is not being utilized, and in most cases, it is quite literally working against us.
Fortune Telling for Option 2
By choosing the more empowering perspective, we recognize our phenomenal ability to intentionally harness and direct the power of the mind, and in doing so, we can rise above the path that is our so-called "genetic destiny". We are no longer victims of the hand we were dealt, and we no longer subscribe to the limiting beliefs imposed on us by society.
Our mind has the ability to change the physical structure of our brains by directing neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. When we get our minds on board with how we want to show up in this world and how we want our lives to look, our minds, in turn, begin changing the landscape of our brains through the planting and pruning of neuronal connections.
So we give our mind a clear blueprint, the mind begins to reorganize the brain to reflect that blueprint, and it’s through this process that we can change our body, our gene expression, our behaviors, our internal environment, and our personal reality.
In my next post, we’ll explore this topic further - in all its stunning glory - because it is my sincerest wish that you experience the immensity of power that lies within you. Just promise you’ll use your new found powers for good…Mmk? Mmk.
Until then, keep it legendary, world changers –
❤ Mica
P.S.
I felt guilty for reducing the brain to a mass of squishy, floating tofu, so let me hype it up with some additional facts for your intellectual pleasure:
There are 100 billion neurons (give or take) residing in your big, beautiful brain - to help you conceptualize the magnitude of that number, if we stacked 100 billion 1-dollar bills on top of each other, the stack would be 5,000 miles high.
Each neuron in the brain resembles a branching tree with limbs that reach out and touch each other. SO CUTE.
Our neurons can make up to 500 trillion connections and can perform 10 quadrillion calculations every second. The world’s strongest supercomputer is comparable to the human brain in terms of processing power, but the supercomputer is embarrassingly inefficient. Our 100 billion neurons are arranged optimally and seamlessly – i.e. there are no excess, redundant connections or missing links.⁶
And in one day, our brain generates more electrical impulses (has more electrical activity) than all of the cell phones in the world.⁷
**Oh, and if you think the brain is the coolest organ in the body - fair warning - this blog might convince you otherwise. There is an organ that generates an electromagnetic field that is 60x the size of the brain’s! That’s pretty powerful…stay tuned. :)
Resources:
1. Kramer M. Long-Range Studies of Mental Hospital Patients: An Important Area for Research in Chronic Disease. Milbank Q. 2005;83(4):10.1111/j.1468-0009.2005.00422.x. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0009.2005.00422.x
2. Merzenich MM, Van Vleet TM, Nahum M. Brain plasticity-based therapeutics. Front Hum Neurosci. 2014;8:385. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00385
3. Aimone JB, Li Y, Lee SW, Clemenson GD, Deng W, Gage FH. Regulation and function of adult neurogenesis: from genes to cognition. Physiol Rev. 2014;94(4):991-1026.
4. Lipton B. The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles. Santa Rosa, CA: Elite Books. 2005.
5. De-Graft Aikins A. Familiarising the unfamiliar: cognitive polyphasia, emotions and the creation of social representations. Papers on social representations. 2012. ISSN 1021- 5573
6. Human Brain Neuroscience Cognitive Science. 2019. Retrieved from http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/brain.html
7. Leaf, C. (2013). Switch on Your Brain. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.
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