Where is the mind?
In these summer days, I have taken some time to create a column entitled: “Where is the mind?”.
It is a collection of some texts, quotes and anecdotes that can facilitate the theoretical understanding of the work transmitted within my dance workshops.
CHAPTER 1: Extended Mind
From the book of the biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake, “The sense of being stared at”, 2003, New York.
“We have been brought up to believe that our minds are inside our heads, that mental activity is nothing but brain activity. Instead, I suggest that our minds extend far beyond our brains; they stretch out through fields that link us to our environment and to each other. […] Mental fields are rooted in brains, just as magnetic fields around magnets are rooted in the magnets themselves, or just as the fields of transmission around mobile phones are rooted in the phones and their internal electrical activities. As magnetic fields extend around magnets, and electromagnetic fields around mobile phones, so mental fields extend around brains. […]
Images outside our heads
Look around you now. Are the images of what you see inside your brain? Or are they outside you – just where they seem to be?
According to the conventional theory, there is a one-way process: light moves in, but nothing is projected out. The inward movement of light is familiar enough. As you look at this page, reflected light moves from the page through the electromagnetic field into your eyes. The lenses of your eyes focus the light to form upside-down images on your retinas. This light falling on your retinal rod and cone cells causes electrical changes within them, which trigger off patterned changes in the nerves of the retina. Nerve impulses move up your optic nerves and into the brain, where they give rise to complex patterns of electrical and chemical activity.
So far, so good. All these processes can be, and have been, studied in great detail by neurophysiologists and other experts on vision and brain activity. But then something very mysterious happens. You consciously experience what you are seeing, the page in front of you. You also become conscious of the printed words and their meanings. […].
When you see this page, you do not experience your image of it as being inside your brain, where it is supposed to be. Instead, you experience its image as being located about two feet in front of you. The image is outside your body. For all its physiological sophistication, the standard theory has no explanation for your immediate and direct experience. All your experience is supposed to be inside your brain, not where it seems to be.
The basic idea I am proposing is so simple that it is hard to grasp. Your image of this page is just where it seems to be, in front of your eyes, not behind your eyes. It is not inside your brain, but outside your brain. Thus, vision involves both an inward movement of light, and an outward projection of images. Through mental fields, our minds reach out to touch what we are looking at. If we look at a mountain ten miles away, our minds stretch out ten miles. If we gaze at distant stars, our minds reach out into the heavens, over literally astronomical distances.”
From the book of the biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake, “The sense of being stared at”, 2003, New York.
