Understanding Mind and Behaviour

For a long stretch of its history, the term 'mind' was almost a taboo word in psychology, precisely because it could not be pinned down in concrete behavioural terms or given a physical location. The word has since been rehabilitated, in large part through the work of neuroscientists such as Roger Sperry and physicists such as Roger Penrose, who took the concept seriously enough that some scientists now consider a unified theory of the mind a real, if still distant, possibility.

Is the mind simply the same thing as the brain? Documented clinical cases suggest not, even though the mind plainly cannot exist without the brain. Patients whose occipital lobes -- the brain region responsible for vision -- had been surgically removed have still been found to respond correctly to the location and shape of visual cues. An amateur athlete who lost an arm in a motorcycle accident continued to feel a 'phantom arm,' which seemed to reach for a coffee cup and which he protested when someone pulled it away. In another documented case, a young man who suffered a brain injury came home convinced that his own parents had been replaced by impostor 'duplicates.' In each of these cases, part of the brain had been damaged or removed, yet the person's mind -- their sense of self, their perceptual and emotional responses -- remained active and largely intact, which is exactly why mind and brain, though mutually dependent, are treated as related but distinct. …