The Brain Boggles The Mind! Or Is It The Opposite?

While anyone considers effective performances of even common humans, a concept is bound to come up for the person’s concentration on the mind as its basic support. It becomes necessary to deal with the concept which normally brings up overwhelming challenges. One even starts doubting one’s own intelligence wondering whether it will be possible to convince oneself how the mind works to lead humans not only with thought processes but also with their results including the connections or correlations between the brain and the mind. The more one studies, analyses and understands the working of the brain, and its great inhabitant the mind, one is bound to search to know how each human can create one’s own mind.

During the late seventies and early eighties of the last century, about seventy students drawn from the then seven colleges in the city of Mangalore, used to assemble together initially to learn public speaking and later to develop their leadership. Working with them seven lecturers from each of these colleges came to a conclusion that the development of the skills of the mind for making communication and leadership effective, the age of the college students may be a little too late, though not irrelevant. Therefore, students from high schools were offered training in both communication and leadership which showed greater effectiveness in the development of the competencies associated. One of the areas with which these school students worked continuously was the development of mind skills. The participation by school students showed a faster development of the competencies stressed and involved.

Several thousands of teachers from schools went through learning and development interventions on mind skills development as a part of their curriculum for teacher effectiveness training. This resulted in such trained teachers taking to schools sixteen different mind skill exercises for training school students. The reports from these trained teachers were extremely rewarding from the perspectives of the developments that they were able to notice in the high school students. The small booklet that they carried for reference to conduct the exercises were very much in demand for the use of those teachers who did not undergo the learning and development interventions. All these teachers individually and collectively brought plenty of units of learning about development of the skills of the mind alongside social skills and language skills.

It was a chance occurrence that a reference was made to Charles Darwin and James Watson in an endowment lecture in Mangalore, in mid nineties of the last century, delivered by Prof. M.R. Srinivasan who was also the Chairman of the Atomic Commission then. His first reference was to Charles Darwin’s books Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle. However, his second reference to James Watson; Watson died on 07 November last year at the age of 97; was more interesting because the speaker was stressing on the molecular biologist’s discovery of DNA structure for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1962 jointly with Francis Crick. Their discovery created a revolution not only in biological studies but also in the medical sciences.

The first part of the title of this article is from the statement from the book ‘How To Create A Mind’ by Ray Kurzweil in his introduction to the book itself. When I bought the book I did not know that Kurzweil was described by the Wall Street Journal ‘The Ultimate Thinking Machine’ and that he was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the US. It is noteworthy to state that he holds nineteen doctorates from different universities. He also received honours from three American presidents.  

Kurzweil quotes a statement from James Watson stating that ‘the brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe’. Reading this took me to refer to ‘The Society of Mind’, a book by Marvin Minsky who happened to be Kurzweil’s professor. The latter joined MIT only to get guidance from Minsky who researched and came upon several agents of the mind which would combine together to create an effective mind. Both worked together to understand how the human brain works and how the mind processes thoughts with the help of millions of cells in the brain, a matter which was not new to me because of an earlier reading of the Miracle Brain by Jean Carper. Another book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman had to be read alongside Jean Carper’s Miracle Brain and understanding both came to my rescue to understand Ray Kurzweil and his discoveries and consequential suggestions on making one’s mind.

Kurzweil rests on Watson’s statements particularly that the human brain ‘contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections’. He goes on to prove that there is more complexity in a single neuron than in the overall structure of the neocortex in the brain. He explains in detail the working of the ‘auditory cortex’ which processes information that comes in through the sound; the ‘visual cortex’ which processes the information that comes in from sight and ‘cerebellum’ which processes knowledge and skills to be developed to use the information that comes in. According to him, the neocortex is arguably the most powerful and complicated in the world and it is capable of representing knowledge and skills, as well as creating new knowledge.

Charles Darwin, James Watson, Francis Crick, Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil are all scientists who appeal to all humans to concentrate on the development of brain and mind. Undoubtedly, Howard Gardner’s; he has many books on development of the skills of the mind including the Five Minds For The Future; statement that the brain ‘houses the mind’; he explains that the phrase is used just to make everyone understand and not a phrase with definite meaning; and emphasises the importance of the mind. What schools ought to do is to do as many drills as possible to develop the skills of the mind of the young. Of course, for this the teachers have to be prepared first to offer an education based on the most recent research results from practical scientists’ equally practical discoveries. The young who keeps growing needs to develop the skills of their minds not only to accept new knowledge but also to create new knowledge at their own levels.

‘Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru. Email: [email protected]’.