Nature of Human Mind

What is the function of our mind or brain, the physical correlate of the mind? The most important purpose is to keep our body alive. Our mind does that without any break from birth to death working 24/7. It does so while we are awake, in dream and in sound sleep. It is necessary that this function be discharged without causing any awareness unconsciously and automatically, or we will not be able to sleep. Autonomic survival stimuli demand instant response. Survival cannot wait. Autonomic behaviour does not leave and conscious memory of our experience. Its experience memory is store unconsciously as epigenetic memory.

The next important function of our mind is to run our life as directed by our strong instinctive forces of self-protection, sustenance, procreation and ego identity. We refer to such a life as emotional life. Emotional stimuli of cognitive organs demand instant or immediate response depending upon their strength. Self-protection cannot wait while the others can wait a while, but not too long. Largely but not always, we unconsciously respond to emotional stimuli, but they do leave a conscious memory of the response. The response is delivered by our organs of action and it leaves an experiential memory trail of pleasure and pain or unpleasantness. Pleasant memories want to repeat giving rise to appetites, greed, habits and addictions and unpleasant want to be avoided giving rise to fear, aversion, hatred, anxiety, worry, depression etc. Lack of fulfillment of emotions gives rise to life sapping stress.

We already talked about such a human condition of mental afflictions earlier. Stress is a universal symptom of universal afflictions in the mental domain. Largely dismissed as a social determinant of health, we don’t pay much attention to it. As a result, there is a pandemic of stress in life, not only human but all life. Life seems to be in perpetual motion caused by the lack of emotional fulfillment of strong survival instincts of mind.

The last in immediacy but not in importance, our mind is also charged with directing our life by the weak instinctive forces of self-fulfillment. These forces do not operate unconsciously, automatically and naturally as the strong survival forces do. To be effective, they need to be cultivated with conscious effort by slowing down the speed of the perpetual motion in life.***

Human mind is capable thought. Thinking is a conscious activity. It is a human prerogative. We are humans only because of this conscious ability of the mind. We lose our humanity, if this ability is lost.

When we think about the long time suffering caused by unending, unconscious and automatic emotional demands arising out of the unconscious phylogenetic and epigenetic memory, we want to rest for a while from the natural and automatic perpetual motion of life leading us to momentary pleasures but not to lasting happiness.

But thought is conscious. How do we think deep when the unconscious genetic memory keeps randomly bubbling into our conscious mind constantly distracting it? Our physiology comes to our rescue.