Heroes Not Zombies

In the wonderful “The Republic of Tea” Mel says

The whole problem with Western civilisation is that ever since the Greeks we’ve been trying to squeeze the mind into the brain and it won’t fit.

Wonderful!

My first thought was Alva Nöe’s point in “Out of our Heads” – “Brains don’t have minds, people do”

Then I recalled Dan Seigel’s definition of mind as being an “embodied inter-relational process of regulation of energy and information flow” – which certainly doesn’t fit the mind into the brain!

Andy Clark talks about the “extended mind” in his “Supersizing the Mind” –

According to BRAINBOUND, the (nonneural) body is just the sensor and effector system of the brain, and the rest of the world is just the arena in which adaptive problems get posed and in which the brain-body system must sense and act.
Maximally opposed to BRAINBOUND is a view according to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the extraorganismic environment. Call this model EXTENDED. According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realise certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops; loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.

And then there was that recent map of body emotions which showed where we locate different emotions (certainly not just in our brains!)

But the mention of the brain-based focus of Western civilisation since the time of the Greeks producing such limits to our understanding, I couldn’t help thinking again of Iain McGilchrist and how I’m sure he’d say it’s not just that we’ve been trying to squeeze the mind into the brain, but that we’ve been tried to squeeze it into the left hemisphere!