Thinking Beyond Science

Every moment you open your eyes, feel a heartbeat, or imagine a new idea, your brain is mapping — not the streets of your city, but the inner and outer landscapes of your life experience. Brain mapping is one of the most distinctive features of the system that manages and controls all aspects of living. It allows the brain to detect dangers or opportunities and decide whether to avoid or seize them. Over time, these maps of sight, sound, and motion fuse into a multiplex view of the universe around us. When stored in memory, they fuel imagination—letting us plan ahead, anticipate outcomes, and create entirely new possibilities.

The Body’s Role in Mind-Making
Interestingly, the spinal cord — though central to movement and sensation — is not essential for basic mind-making. Even when severe injuries cut off voluntary movement or bodily sensation, the vagus nerve continues vital cross-signaling between body and brain. This allows emotions, autonomic control, and even consciousness to persist. As tragic as spinal damage can be, it shows that the roots of mind and feeling lie deeper than physical motion.

The cerebellum and hippocampus, while crucial for coordination, emotion modulation, and memory, are also not the core machinery of consciousness. Their loss disrupts learning and continuity but not the very making of the mind. Patients missing both hippocampi, for instance, cannot form new memories yet still possess rich perception, emotion, and awareness — proof that consciousness survives even when memory fades.

The Cortex: The Great Canvas of Mind
The cerebral cortex, often seen as the seat of the mind, plays a central role in image-making. Its specialized “islands” — for vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — generate the sensory scenes we experience. Surrounding regions help record, recall, and manipulate those images in reasoning and action. Damage to these sensory cortices can cripple perception: those with bilateral visual cortex damage, for example, suffer cortical blindness, losing not only visual sight but the ability to visualize in memory.

Still, the cortex alone doesn’t tell the full story. The mind, it seems, begins even deeper.

The Brain Stem: The Cradle of Consciousness
Contrary to popular belief, the first stirrings of the mind arise not in the vast folds of the cortex but in the brain stem — the ancient, life-sustaining core connecting brain and body. Within it, two nuclei—the nucleus tractus solitarius and the parabrachial nucleus—generate the foundational feelings of pain and pleasure, signaling that an organism is alive. These primal feelings are likely the earliest sparks of consciousness, the raw awareness that precedes thought and memory.

Evidence supports this view. Even when higher structures like the insular cortex (long associated with bodily feelings) are destroyed, sensations of pain and pleasure persist. The brain stem, it turns out, is the first stage where the body’s inner states are mapped and translated into felt experience.

A Network Built to Feel and Survive
These lower brain structures are wired in astonishing detail. They receive signals from the spinal cord, the bloodstream, and even direct chemical messages from unprotected brain regions like the area postrema. Together, they assemble a complete portrait of the body’s internal state. Nearby sits the periaqueductal gray (PAG) — a command hub of emotional expression. It triggers laughter and crying, fear and disgust, flight or freeze, defense or coping.

When we zoom out, the evolutionary sense becomes clear. The machinery that generates our most basic feelings lives right next to the systems that keep us alive. Before the brain learned to think, it learned to feel. And those feelings — simple, raw, and ancient — remain the foundation of everything we call the mind.

Source : Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by António Damásio

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7766914-self-comes-to-mind

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