Mysteries of Mind and Body

Sigmund Freud believed that his theories of the human mind correlated with actual physical processes in the brain. They were not just useful metaphors. Freud wrote, “In view of the intimate connection between things physical and mental, we may look forward to a day when paths of knowledge will be opened up leading from organic biology and chemistry to the field of neurotic phenomena.”

The day when the brain is reduced to biology and chemistry is still far away, but a new book by Jonathan Winson, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York, takes several important steps in that direction. In the book, “Brain & Psyche” (Anchor Press), Winson proposes “a neuroscientific theory to explain Freud’s observations,” particularly with regard to dreams and the unconscious. He claims to have found physical underpinnings for these mental phenomena.

The so-called mind-body problem has intrigued philosophers since Plato asserted that the mind could exist outside its residence in the body. More than two millennia have passed since then, however, and no one has yet given a completely satisfactory account of the distinction, if any, between mental and physical events.

Thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, memories, moods, motives, judgments, likes, dislikes and aspects of personality--are these all reducible to physical states of the brain? No one knows. If machines can be built to mimic the brain, will they experience these “mental” phenomena? Will a machine one day quit work and say, “I am bored”? No one knows.

Winson’s book is consistent with much work in this century in attempting to reduce mind to body. There are undoubtedly clinical benefits to be gained by this research, for psychiatric problems might be curable by drugs or surgery, just as medicine treats the rest of the body. But the overarching question is still far from solved, and it is unlikely that it will be any time soon.