Dan Siegel who has created an area of understanding known as Interpersonal Neurobiology makes the point that most mental health professionals have not been taught a definition of the mind, and, often, aren’t clear about what good mental health looks like.
He answers these issues as follows –
His definition of mind is that –
mind is an embodied, inter-relational process of regulation of the flow of energy and information
His definition of well-being is the integrated flow of energy and information. He explains that health is like a free flowing river with two banks, one of which is rigidity, and the other, chaos. We veer towards one or other of the two banks as we make our way through life.
He uses a three-aspect model of well-being to explore this, the three aspects being the mind, the brain and relationships.
I like this definition. What do you think? Is this an interesting way to think about the mind?
In some ways, this builds on the ideas of embodied and extended minds by writers such as Varela, Ogle, Clark and others.
Heroes Not Zombies 
[…] concepts in this “Mindful Therapist” were already familiar to me before I opened it up – the idea of the mind as “an embodied, relational process of regulation of energy and information flow”, the idea of […]
[…] Dan Siegel, whose book, Mindsight, I highly recommend. He teaches around the essential triad of brain, mind and relationships and understanding the links between these three turns out to be tremendously illuminating. On the […]
[…] (the mind, the nervous system and the endocrine system), and in more recent times, interpersonal neurobiology (the links between the mind, the brain, and others), have all advanced our understanding of the […]
[…] is almost identical to the way Dan Siegel and the Interpersonal Neurobiologists put it – “the mind is a process of regulation of energy and information […]