What Makes Up My Mind?

Earlier this year, Jim Olds gathered a bunch of big thinkers at George Mason University for a two-day conference on the mind. He and his allies want the federal government to invest $4 billion in an initiative that would be called the "Decade of the Mind." This would be a follow-up to a 1990s program called the "Decade of the Brain," which brought increased attention to neuroscience. The new initiative would be an attempt to take science into a realm previously explored only by philosophers, theologians and mountaintop yogis.

"Brain science is an exhaustive collection of facts without a theory," Olds says. "This is for the nation as a whole to invest in one of the fundamental intellectual questions of what it is to be a human being."

In a letter published a few weeks ago in the journal Science, 10 scientists said that a Decade of the Mind would help us understand mental disorders that affect 50 million Americans and cost more than $400 billion a year. It might also aid in the development of intelligent machines and new computing techniques. A breakthrough in mind research, the scientists wrote, could have "broad and dramatic impacts on the economy, national security, and our social well-being."

There's reason to be optimistic. Look at what has happened in recent years with the development of brain scans, such as MRIs, that let us observe the brain at work in real time. As the technology improves, the brain becomes more transparent, less of a black box.

That said, the mind isn't something that pops up on a computer screen. People have been poking around the brain in search of the mind for many centuries, and no one is even sure what neurological structures are the most critical to generating consciousness. Descartes, who gave us the most famous line in the annals of philosophy ("Cogito, ergo sum" -- I think, therefore I am), believed the center of consciousness to be the pea-size structure known as the pineal gland. Nice stab, but it turns out that the pineal gland does not seem to have much to do with creating the "I" in our head.

Other brain structures are important, such as something called Brodmann area 46, and the anterior cingulate sulcus, and the thalamus, and of course the knurled, dipsy-doodle structure called the cerebral cortex. We can also be confident that consciousness does not depend on the cerebellum, which is 50 billion neurons worth of brain matter that you could surgically remove without "losing your mind." As Tononi puts it, you could toss the cerebellum in the garbage and " you would still be there."

The classic idea of "dualism" solves the location problem by defining it away: The mind is perceived as separate from the body, something that can't be reduced to machinery. It's unreachable by the tools of the laboratory. Dualism flatters us, for it suggests that our minds, our selves, are not merely the result of rambunctious chemistry, and we are thus free to talk about souls and spirits and essences that are unfettered by the physical body.

Dualism is pretty much dead to serious researchers, though an echo of it can be found among philosophers who are sometimes called the Mysterians. The philosopher David Chalmers has famously made a distinction between the Easy Problems, which involve the ways that the brain creates specific elements of consciousness (vision, language, memory, attention, emotion, etc.), and the Hard Problem, which is the mystery of how all the elements come together in that powerful sense of self (" I am Spartacus").

But here's the most radical idea of all: The reason why the mind is hard to define is not because it has some mysterious, ethereal, spooky qualities but because it doesn't really exist. We just imagine it. You might say it's all in our heads.

When you see a Toyota cruising down the street, you know that you're looking at a complex machine with many parts. You also know that there's a person inside, some intelligent being who's directing the Toyota's movements. The human brain is another complex machine with many parts -- but it doesn't seem to have a driver most of the time.

The brain operates day and night and performs myriad functions of which we have no direct awareness. Even our "conscious" brain is actually many different operating systems. It's as though the Toyota is being driven by hundreds of tiny elves, with no single elf in charge.

This is the view espoused by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of "Consciousness Explained," who argues that the notion of a central executive in the brain is an illusion. "It's a mistake to look for the president in the Oval Office of the brain," he declares.