This is how the brain creates 'you', your mind or soul

Who are you? Or what are you? There are countless ways to define who we are. In it, most commonly people divide themselves into two parts , body and mind. We can imagine our body as a machine, a piece of hardware, while the mind is like an operating system, containing installed software to control that hardware.

But the neural connections and workings of our brains are actually much more complex than how a machine works, even if they already have artificial intelligence. This makes many people unable to escape from the classical spiritual conception that we are divided into two parts, the soul and the body. In particular, the new soul is what defines who you are and it can exist independently of the body.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor at Northeastern University, USA does not think so. She is currently one of the most prominent psychologists and neuroscientists in the world, ranked in the top 1% of the most cited research authors on the planet.

According to Lisa Barrett, our mind and body are two inseparable parts, and the brain is what is ultimately creating who you are. Constantly, your brain activity is defining who you are, or what you are. There can't be a " friend " without a brain or a body.

The article below is how Professor Barrett explains these concepts, in the most understandable way we can approach .

What is your mind? It's a strange question perhaps, but if you're serious about answering it, you could describe it as a part of who you are — the place where your consciousness, dreams, emotions, and feelings reside. your memory.

For a long time, scientists have believed that such aspects of the mind have specific locations in the brain, such as a circuit of interconnected neurons dedicated to fear. area for memory, desires, dreams.

But in recent years, new studies increasingly reveal the fact that the human brain is really the master of deception, your experiences and actions do not reveal its inner workings. . In fact, your mind is an ongoing construction of your brain, your body, and the world around you.

Every moment you look, think, feel, and navigate the world around you, your perception is built on three components.

One is the signals that you receive from the outside world, such as light waves entering your eyeball allowing you to see a garden full of flowers, sound waves vibrating your eardrums allowing you to hear sounds, pressure on the skin when you hug someone you love, taste chemicals hit receptors in your nose or tongue that allow you to smell and taste.

All these signals are collectively referred to as sensory data .

The second component of your experience is the sensory data that comes from within your body , such as the blood flowing in your veins, your chest expanding when you take a breath, inflating your lungs, stomach. yours boils when you're hungry…

However, most of the sensory data from within the body happens silently without you noticing it. Our bodies have also not developed internal sensing mechanisms, such as in your brain there are no nerves to sense pressure or pain – that's why surgeries Brainstorming can be performed while the patient is awake.

This is a survival strategy, as creatures need to perceive the outside world better if they want to survive in a dangerous environment.

Finally, the third factor that influences our cognitive experience is the past experiences we have experienced. Without past experience, all the sensory data you receive will be just meaningless signals.

Just like you can't hear and understand foreign languages ​​without learning them. You also won't understand your own mother tongue if your brain doesn't use its experience with previous exposures as you learn to speak, read, or write.

Our brain is always checking to recall what it has seen, heard, or felt in the past to interpret the sensory data it receives in the present. It then uses this explanation to help you make decisions or predict what will happen in the future.

All of these processes are handled completely unconsciously by your brain, and are so fast that you can't even notice them if you don't try to pay close attention or meditate to slow down and observe your mind.

You are continuously existing in creating abstract thoughts

However, the three cognitive components may not be the whole story. We also need a fourth axis which is time. Accordingly, the human mind, like our brain and body, is always immersed in continuous, moment-to-moment communication with the outside world.

For example, when your brain remembers, it recreates fragments of the past and combines them seamlessly. We call this process " memory, " but what the brain is actually doing is fitting those pieces of memory into a picture that already exists and is still perfecting each moment.

In fact, your brain can build the same memory in different ways, at different times. For example, when you watch a movie for the third time and realize new meanings in each of its scenes. And this change in perception over time can even happen on an unconscious, automatic level without you even realizing it.

All of these re-awareness acts are an ongoing process of construction over time. As a result, you not only see everything around you with your eyes, but also with your brain or mind. The same goes for all your other senses.

Your brain compares the sensory data you have now with the sensory data you had before in the same situation, when you had similar goals. These comparisons combine all of your senses at once, because your brain creates all the sensations at once and presents them as synthetic patterns of neural activity, allowing you to experience and understand the world around you.

The brain also has an amazing ability to put together pieces of the past in novel ways. Not only do they restore old content, they also create new content on their own. For example, you might recognize things you've never seen before, such as a picture of a horse with a pair of wings.

You've probably never seen Pegasus in real life, but like the ancient Greeks, you can see a painting of Pegasus for the first time and immediately understand what it is, because - miraculously - the set Your brain can assemble familiar ideas like "horses," "bird wings," and "flying" into a consistent mental image. And you know when a horse has wings it's a mythical creature that can fly.

Your brain can even impose on a familiar object new functions that are not part of the object's physical nature. For example, look at the photo below. Today's computers can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to easily classify an object and know it's a feather.

But that's not all that the human brain can do. If you find this object on the ground in the forest, it is definitely a feather. But if you go back in time and go back to the 18th century, it can be considered a pen.

For a warrior of the Cheyenne tribe, it was a symbol of honor. For a kid pretending to be an agent, it's a handy fake mustache.

Your brain classifies objects not only by their physical properties but also by their function, or how the object is used. This process will happen every time you look at a piece of paper with a leader's face on it and see numbers written representing the value of goods that you can exchange it for. Come on, who hasn't realized we're talking about bills?

This amazing ability of the brain is called exceptional portfolio building. At a glance, your brain uses past experiences to build a category, such as a " symbol of honor"  tied to that feather in the same folder.

To group two objects into a folder, we rely not only on their physical similarities, but also on functional similarities — how you use the object in a particular situation. body.

Such categories are called abstractions . The computer cannot "recognize" a feather as a reward for bravery, because that information is not in the directory in which a feather is being listed. It is an abstract category built only in the brain of the conscious person.

Computers cannot do this. Or it can be said that it has not been done yet. They can assign objects to pre-existing directories based on previous examples (a process known as supervised machine learning), and they can cluster objects into new directories based on predefined features, usually physical objects (unsupervised machine learning).

But machines don't create abstract folders like  "feathers used to pretend to be secret agents ". And they certainly don't do it enough to understand and act in an incredibly complex social world.

Our mind always values ​​everything around

Just as your memory is a construction, so are your senses. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste and feel is the result of a combination of factors outside and inside your head.

In the process of processing that data, the brain always has to decide which data fits and which doesn't, separating meaningful signals from interfering signals. Economists and other scientists call this decision a matter of  "value".

Value itself is an abstract feature built up by the brain. It is not of the nature of the sensory data emanating from the world, so it cannot be directly detected and measured from outside the world.

Suppose you are an animal wandering in the woods and you see a faint image in the distance. Would you think it was food or just a noise signal? Your brain will have to decide if it is worth the risk or the effort to run out there to see what that blurry image really is or not?

The answer depends in part on the state of your body : If you're not hungry, that fuzzy shape has less value. It also depends on whether your brain predicts it's an animal that wants to eat you back.

Humans don't forage as often as animals, except when we go to a market. But the same valuation process applies to everything you do in life.

Is the person approaching you a friend, a harmless person or an enemy that can hurt you? A new movie has just hit theaters, should you go see it or not? Should you work the weekend or go out for coffee with your friends, or maybe you need a little sleep? Each alternative is a plan of action, and each plan itself is an estimate of the value you are making.

The same brain circuit involved in estimating values ​​also gives us our most basic feeling, which you call mood, and scientists call " affect ".

"Affect"  does not refer to influence but to the latent experiences of feeling or mood within you. It has only two very simple dimensions: are you feeling good or bad, motivated or uninspired. Moods are not emotions (Emotions are a more complex category structure).

Accordingly, mood is just a brief summary of the brain's beliefs about the body's metabolic state, like it is reading a barometer.

People use their moods to indicate whether something is relevant to them - that is, whether or not the thing has value. For example, if you feel that this article is absolutely brilliant, or that its author is insane, or even if you have spent the energy to read this far, then it has value to you.

In the end, we are just living beings on a higher level

At this point, once you understand all of the concepts like "value" and " affect ", you can begin to understand how your brain is controlling your body in the simplest way of survival. Accordingly, the brain is like a command center for the complex systems inside the body, coordinating and working with each other.

It controls the transportation and distribution of necessary resources such as water, salt, glucose, and oxygen to where and when it thinks your body needs it. This control process is called " allostasis " : it involves anticipating the body's needs and trying to meet those needs before they arise.

If your brain does this job well through allostasis, your body's systems will get what they need at the right time. And to do that well, your brain needs to maintain a model of your body and embed it in the world it's trying to learn.

This model includes conscious things, like what you see, think, and feel; an action you take without thinking, like walking; and unconscious things beyond your awareness.

For example, your brain models your body temperature. This pattern regulates your perception of whether it's hot or cold, automatic actions like walking into the shade, and unconscious processes like changing blood flow and opening pores.

In every moment, your brain guesses (based on past experiences and data from your senses) what might happen next inside and outside of your body. It then distributes resources around, kicks off your actions, creates your sensations, and goes back to updating its model.

You can think of this model as your most basic form of mind – as a higher being . The allostasis process is at the core of that model. Your brain is not developed to think, feel and see. It evolved to regulate your body. Your thoughts, feelings, senses, and other mental capacities are only the result of the process of allostasis.

Since allostasis is a fundamental element of your mind, consider what would happen if you did not have a body. Scientists are trying to create and grow brains in test tubes. The question is, without the body, without the senses, how would allostasis function?

Without allostasis, the brain would not be able to create concepts like values ​​or moods. Therefore, a brain in a test tube would not really have a mind the way we have.

After all, your body is part of your mind – not in any fancy, metaphorical way, but in a literal sense based on how the brain works.

Your thoughts and dreams, your feelings, even your experience right now as you read these words are merely a consequence of the central mission of allostasis, which keeps you alive. Chances are, you've never experienced your mind in a way like this, but under the hood (inside the skull), that's exactly what's going on.