Take a moment to think about anything and then think about what you are thinking.
Reason about it.
Isn't it surprising that you can do it?
We not only think, we also think that we think.
It is called self-awareness and it is the most sublime and powerful capacity of the human mind.
We do not believe that any animal inferior to ourselves has it.
But let's go further.
Where are your thoughts?
In your head?
In your brain?
You may believe it, but it is not true, because, in reality, the thoughts are nowhere.
In other words, they are not a product, something that can be here or there, relocated or carried from one place to another, like a chair or a car.
Thoughts are conscious mental states that we have when the brain works.
A metaphor can help to understand it: movement is not a product or something that the wheel drops along the way, but a state of the wheel when it does its work.
Believing that the mind and its thoughts are a product of the brain is a wrong way to understand their nature.
But let's go even further.
Why do we have the impression that our thoughts are clinging to us without being able to abandon us?
Why can't we just take a run to leave our thoughts behind until they catch up with us again?
Precisely because of what we have just said, because thoughts are not something, they are not something that we can leave on the way.
They are a state of mind that goes with us everywhere, wherever we go.
Everyone has always felt this way, even our wisest ancestors, such as the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, although he did not associate this state with the brain, but with the heart, an organ that, with its beats, is always more present than any other of the body.
The discovery that the brain is the organ of the mind and thoughts came much later, except for a few lucid thinkers, such as the Greek physician Hippocrates, one of the first to realize this.
Why do we have the impression that our thoughts are clinging to us without being able to abandon us?
Why can't we take a run to leave our thoughts behind?
And now, the most fascinating thing, because the feeling that thoughts go with us, that is, they are always within the physical limits of our body and never outside of it, is, in reality, an illusion, the greatest that creates the brain.
Those who have ever taken a hallucinogenic drug know this very well and have seen how the mind can wander through the room in which they are while their body lies away from it.
Fortunately, that does not happen without taking drugs because the brain continually creates the illusion that the mind always accompanies the body, thus facilitating us to move effectively to achieve purposes instead of making us feel that we are living outside of ourselves, which would seem like a madness.
Certainly, the brain, without our realizing it, is a great factory of illusions, to the point that it is not unreasonable to say that we feel the world in a more virtual than real way.
We have the impression that it is the eyes that see, the ears that hear, the nose that smells, but all that is not true either.
It is our brain that does it, and nothing better than the sense of touch to see it clearly: the hand feels the touch and the temperature of what it touches, but it is not the hand, but the brain, that feels that touch, as we can deduce from the phenomenon of the phantom limb in the person who continues to feel touch, pain or temperature in the hand that it no longer has because it was amputated to avoid gangrene.
It is something that fascinates us, because even today we cannot explain how the brain manages to make us feel in the hand or another part of the body what only it is capable of feeling.
So is the brain deceiving us?
This repeated question is very tricky.
To verify this, let's reply with another: Who is the brain fooling?
To his empty body?
Are we, an empty body without a brain?
Could I hold my brain in my hand and accuse him that he is fooling me as if I were something other than him?
Certainly not.
The brain does not deceive me because I am, above all, my brain and the mind that brain creates.
If one day it were possible to transplant the brain from one person to another, what we would actually be doing is not a brain transplant, but a body transplant: from a brain we would be taking away the body to which it belongs to put in that of another person.
If the brain deceives someone with its illusions, it is none other than itself.
Evolution and natural selection have shaped it that way and made it the most intelligent organ we know of.
The French philosopher René Descartes was right when he said "I think therefore I am", because it would be impossible to know that we exist if the brain did not provide us with the ability to think, to have a conscious mind.
Ignacio Morgado Bernal
is Professor of Psychobiology at the Institute of Neuroscience and at the Faculty of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Gray matter
it is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior.
The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.
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