Over 90% of all the scientists that have ever existed are alive today!
90% of what we know about the mind has been discovered in the last 10 years!
With such advancements being made in medical imaging technology we are now able to track a single thought through the brain. And, if you’re interested, the speed of thought is 225mph!
Even with all this knowledge and technology, scientists still can’t map the mind onto the brain. People believe the mind is located in the head & all experiences and perceptions are contained in the brain. Nobody seems to question this. But there is now a debate about “Where is the mind located?” as nobody seems to be able to find it.
This debate has led to some interesting suggestions such as :-
Consciousness is a virus that has infected the brain.
Candice Pert ( a neuroscientist) has said “ our body is the unconscious mind”
There is even a theory that consciousness is emergence!
What is emergence? If you were to observe a termite or ant nest for example, the impression one gets is of an organised colony that communicates instructions, that has intelligence and is consciously creating a social colony. Of course there is no consciousness or super-intelligence controlling the nest. The impression of intelligence emerges from many, many different individuals performing simple but different tasks over and over again. Soldier or worker ants for example each perform the same but diffent simple tasks again & again.
Within the brain we have billions of simple brain cells repeatedly performing the same simple tasks over and over again. This, for some people, equates the mind to a ant colony is as much as there is not a consciousness that actually exists - it is only that an impression of consciousness emerges.
In my mind, the best guess so far is that the conscious mind somehow sits on top of the part of the brain called the hippocampus as this is the part of the brain whose functions we seem to be consciously aware of. For example, we are not consciously aware of a memory until it is ‘loaded’ into the hippocampus.