Your Brain vs Your Mind

Your brain and your mind are two completely different things:

It resembles the difference between science and philosophy

They can both be interpreted into the same concept but the result and approach towards them are completely different.

Like we said in “listening vs feeling”, Science is the study of facts. Anything that revolves around facts. Philosophy is explaining the unknown using motives and concepts known to us through evolution and social norms.

Now let’s take the brain vs the mind as far as emotional reactors/receptors:

• The brain is what gives you the concepts and tools needed to create a reaction. If you don’t have the brain you can’t use what you know and have developed to know to formulate an opinion or reaction to a situation using common known norms.

• The mind is anything that is controlled or analysed through emotion. It is the common practice of connecting, conceptualizing or believing something through the derivative of an emotion. This can happen both subconsciously and consciously.

We use both concepts simultaneously when assessing a situation or creating a thought process to believe our opinion on a situation. The brain enables us to believe in something through fact.

So for example: Believing that you did bad on an exam because you didn’t sleep enough. You took the concept of rest as a source of recovery, applied it to a problem (caused by you) and used a fact to justify it.

Your brain is the fundamental construction of your being. Without it you have nothing to work off of, because it hold all things commonly known to us (facts). The mind correlates to the brain at exactly this stage. The mind (in this instance) takes the idea of not resting and adds a negative connotation to it (from the word “not”), leading you to put yourself into a negative atmospheric view on the situation. You then use this to justify yourself through blaming the fact that you didn’t do well, hence making you believe that the cause was the derivative (the rest itself and not the physical exam). This is simply known as “blaming something else to put your mind at peace”.

When in reality you led yourself to believe in a false use of a fact.

The reason I decided to bring this topic up in a blog is simply because a lot of people combine the two, when in reality they are two separate things that work simultaneously to create a reaction on any given situation.

In life, (through maturing and evolution), we have created norms. Norms that are now second nature to us because we use them so much that the brain does not wish to make us think about it constantly so it puts the thought of it to the side, but the action of doing it into our mind.

So you actually feel like you are constantly thinking about it because your mind tells you it is. This is the simple stage of “emotional substitution/displacement.

Let’s clarify something quickly. The mind is engaged through EMOTION...In EVERY scenario! Whether you wish to believe it or not.

Maturing and evolving as people, we use emotion to benefit ourselves, to react within and through ourselves to manipulate our mind to believe something to be true. Within everything comes an emotion and a common fact with it that we asses and react to. This gives us the certain response that we desire!

The Placebo:

Here we have another scenario:

You like candy because society has led you to believe that it tastes good. If people told you all your life that it tasted gross, you might not like candy as much now. I’m not saying that everything is a placebo, simply that your emotional impulse (derived from society and anything that influences you) can change your perspective on anything. It’s the impulse that is different, thus a different result of thought.

There was a study where a man was sitting on his deathbed in a hospital. The nurse blindfolded him and told him that they were going to cut his finger. Every time he heard a drop, they convinced him that it was his blood dripping into a bucket. They never actually cut his finger, they just pricked him and there was never any blood dripping, it was simply water falling in through a small tap that he did not know of.

Well, he died. The placebo effect actually made him believe that he was slowly being drained. He conceptualized an emotion through fact.

The facts were:

• His body needs blood to circulate and to complete the circulatory system

• Organs are functioned through blood circulation + oxygen

• If you lose blood you die of blood loss -------> organ failure

The concepts were:

• If I lose blood -----> I die

• If I hear a drop ------> then i lose blood ------> so i die

• I felt a prick, so my finger is now cut open

• I’m slowly dying because im slowly losing blood

This man died from hearing water drip into a bucket…

Let me reiterate: A MAN DIED FROM HEARING WATER DRIP INTO A BUCKET!!!

This is an exact example of the placebo effect working in full effect. It combines with our statement of the Brain vs Mind theory. In anything we do, we use both fact and emotion to make an assumption on something. No opinions are the same, we just believe they are, everyone is a different genetically embodied being so this makes perfect sense as to why it happens this way.

Now the next thing to ponder on is: In what order does this occur? Emotion then fact? Or Fact then emotion? To answer that ill give a short scenario.

If you you look at a knife. What’s the first word that comes to mind?

“Sharp” is usually what I hear first.

Sharp --------> it can cut things ---------> safety from cutting yourself --------->safety from pain --------> blood.

The Brain vs the Mind:

All these consecutive steps happen in the time it takes you to respond with “sharp”. Your brain takes emotion and turns it into fact (some may argue that you combine this with fact. Not in this case). The word sharp is a fact, yes, but what makes it sharp is the correlation to emotion that we thought of before saying the word sharp, because we went through the process above (emotional speculation). Essentially we combined the idea of what is correlated into our social norms with the idea of sharp and labelled it.

People argue that sharp is simply a statement of its physical foundation and no emotion has been attached to it at the stage of responding with the word “sharp”.

I simply believe that there are two people in the world: The “it’s physically sharp” kind and “its sharp because” kind. This,(to me) demonstrates what type of responder you are in both situations, both in conversation and in self reflection. If you are a “physically sharp” person you respond to fact. Meaning you're not very emotional (to a degree) because you use facts to base your emotion on before making a response or decision on something.

Being a “sharp because” kind of person shows your reflex is usually geared towards emotion. In the span of a split second you have taken an emotion, used the facts to explain the emotion to your mind, categorized it, then acted upon it (responding). These people tend to be over compassionate (subconsciously this is). They constantly think about how people see them, or how they see others or maybe how they see them self. I call them “The thinkers”.

Believing you are one over the other:

There are people who believe that they are one or the other. The fact is, you can’t know unless someone knows you well enough to make an assumption, but even that could be wrong since they could be using emotion to make a decision so that hypothesis is already unjustifiable. I say, simply embrace both factors and don’t dig too deep into it. Simply being aware of both will help you (often more than not) subconsciously change how you act towards people because you have spent the time thinking about the thought processes that comes with each category. You will maybe notice different things in people, do something nice for someone YOU NEVER KNEW YOU WOULD DO.

If you believe that you are one over the other it will change your dimeaner. You will begin to believe you are a certain way and that it is somehow set and stone. Problem with that is both sides alone are unstable, meaning your emotional response will be unstable, you’ll react through an unstable foundation etc etc... I’m sure you can see where this is going. This is one of the main causes of Anxiety, Depression or any disorder involving self regulation or emotional preservation.

A friend of mine told me about her anxiety as the following:

“It’s almost as if i take an idea, think it won’t be stable and then it leads to another thing and another and i simply think too much in one manner and it all crumbles and i feel like there is no end and I essentially go insane.”

This is because you are using facts in a way that makes you notice emotion in the wrong context. That’s all what perspective is. If you perceive something to be a certain way, it will be exactly that to you because you will only notice those things when looking/thinking about it. Just like if you think everyone hates you, you will only notice the things correlated to that ideology.

So in conclusion, we need to take more time in noticing the difference between our brain and our minds. Both are used ALL THE TIME but they are very different in how we approach a situation or feeling. This is usually engraved in us, but there are also other factors,(believing you are something when you aren’t -----> using an emotion to create a fact with a false approach). There’s a very fine line between the two sides.Our whole life’s goal is to read between the lines and figure out why we do it.

Funny enough, we do it ALL THE TIME without noticing, but if we noticed it what do you think would happen?

Think about it next time you talk or respond to something/someone.

With all that being said, join me next week to discuss the concepts behind anxiety as well as the world of depression. The concepts stated above are fundamental to help us approach this next topic.

See you next week,

Nawfel