Neural "Real Estate"

So, what takes up space in your head? How about your brain? Ok, now your mind.

What are your concepts of those 3 words used to describe the substrate of conscious experience? Are they the same thing?

Personally, I’m with the idea that the brain is the “wetware” on which the thing we call “mind” or “consciousness” runs, like how this web browser runs on my laptop’s hardware. This implies that the mind was put there to “run” on the “hardware” of our brain, if you take the simile too literally, so I should phrase it better: our minds are something that our brains do.

Your head is the beautiful case in which the magic happens. Let’s have a look at part of the magic machine in there:

A motor homunculus, courtesy of the fine folks at Wikipedia, because I spent a while looking for a better representation of a homunculus and this does the job most cleanly.

If you’ve ever seen a homunculus - and you probably did somewhere in biology class - you’ve seen that different parts of the brain are responsible for different things. Not a revolutionary concept, but it’s important to what I’m saying here, and the title of this blog post. The two strips that run horizontally next to each other across the lobes of our brains are responsible for sensation and action, and different parts of those are responsible for dealing with different parts of your person. Have a look up there, then think about your brain in your skull and realize how literal the translation from, say, a sensation on your hand to a perception in your brain is.

Here comes the part that maybe wasn’t in any textbook or study I’ve read (though obviously I haven’t read anywhere near all of them… but I’ve gone through my fair share): I think that the literal amount of your neural tissue involved in any particular process in your mind - memory, thoughts, perceptions, ideas, etc., and conscious or subconscious - directly translates to its significance to your internal experience and external behaviour in life.

That is, the amount of “neural real estate” taken up by a mental entity is a direct representation of its prominence in your life.

So here’s what you can mull over, meditate on, or have a chat with someone who won’t judge you about (our inbox is always open!):

What owns your mental real estate, and what are you going to do about it?

Love,

Sad Guru