How the mind works

How the mind works is a matter of immense interest. As much as the mind is a privately-owned possession and as much as we are each privy to our own minds, we are most of the time in complete astounding, or rather cluelessness, as to what the mind really is and how it really works. In fact, the truth is that the mind becomes consciously aware of its own doings when interacting with the physical surroundings. Interestingly, most of the time we are not even conscious about our conscience at work.

The irony is that the only way to find how the mind works is by trying to observe our mental processes as they are going on from an outsider’s perspective. This is particularly difficult because of the reason that the mercurial thought slips away the moment you try to put your finger on it.

Our minds are constantly going through several thinking processes as we go about in our daily lives, many of which are most of the time involuntary, such as our constant spatial and temporal adaptation, our diverse network of social associations, our balancing of emotions and desires, our balancing of physical and mental work, etc.

Sometimes, while going through these regular patterns of daily life we are broken away by a trance of a few moments, when suddenly questions of the essence erupt: where am I, what am I doing, what is the meaning of all this? These questions occur to us, but soon we are brought back to the real, unquestioning world. For this reason, it seems that although we are in full consciousness most of the time, following our whims, we find ourselves unaware of what our consciousness really is and whether we are the sole drivers of it.

Is a conscious thought not a cloud of possibilities? Are different ideas from diverse fields of interests not popping up and then disappearing and others occupying their place in our minds all the time? There are moments when you say, “Wait a minute, what was I thinking?” You try to recollect, just like when you have awakened from a dream and are trying to recollect the events and their sequence that you dreamed about.

Yet, only when we think of a certain thing, we are sure what that thought is. Yet in doing so, we scatter or lose all the other potential possibilities that were there before. Sometimes, we know a fact by the impulses of the aggregate of our thoughts. Sometimes, broken thoughts flying or rippling around catch our attention when we are really not being able to bring them into a module of satisfactory comprehension.

This cloud of thought, maybe what we call the subconscious, is creating the urge for us to contemplate on certain lines of thought. Is it so that the subconscious is creating the conscience, the urge to perhaps find it, or find something out of it, by simply diving in for comprehensibility of some sort? Diving in, because in the innate compartments of the mind have hidden all the forms of comprehensibility. And the urge is to fit into its inner modules, the experience of the outside world, or perhaps to impose its own modules upon the outside world — as in, only accepting the outside world in the forms that are part of its innate framework.

This does not necessarily mean limiting what we know partially, that is, a selected part of the objective world. There may be limits to our sensual perceptions, but that does not mean that the innate framework of the mind cannot accept or know about other realms that are not sensually perceived. In fact, the vessel of the mind seems to be so wide and deep, it seems it has the capacity to assimilate all sorts of knowledge, both physical and metaphysical.

We have learnt in the age of the internet that when a variety of information is available to everyone on computers, we are able to comprehend it only when we do some required mental work. Understanding subjects like botany or chemistry or astronomy only takes place with prior knowledge and existence of schemata, no matter how advanced and deep the efforts are to channel the learning.

The amazing thing about this kind of an experience is the realisation that the mind feels like an otherwise inert, huge library of potentially all things that can be known, and when the conscious mind pulls out a book, however diverse from what it had known before, suddenly the mind opens up to and embraces that new form of knowledge like finding a departed loved one.

Another thing about cognition is normativity. The first time we are introduced to someone, a new environment or a new subject of study, we feel strangeness, irritation, burden and a feeling of detachment. But then, there is a second time and a third time and more, and we are gradually familiarised with the person, thing or situation. The strangeness disappears and we are relaxed. This happens at the societal level, too, and more knowledge is generalised and absorbed into a society with every moment and every generation, so that Newtonian mechanics and quantum physics that were developed with the hard perseverance of geniuses who dedicated their whole lives in developing these ideas, are now part of primary and secondary school syllabi.

So, is the mind a huge, unread library, or is it the reader that encounters serendipity in its surroundings? The mind rushes towards its inward unread encyclopedia to find the right segment and consequently, its new discovery conforms to the bigger jigsaw puzzle that the mind presents to itself, in the urge to complete the even bigger murals of truths that are huge intersecting sciences. This keeps growing deeper and wider as the mind keeps attempting to surmount them, keeping to itself at every moment of time. The authority of the mind, or rather its art of chopping off all the unseemly details to make for itself a clean, dreamy version of reality suffices in answering the vital questions of life.

Yes, the mind does endeavour to answer all the vital questions of life that relate to finding beauty, love and belonging, connecting with the origins of the universe and life itself. It creates the urge to find the purpose of life. The mind is the soul of life, not just a complex calculator battling for mere survival.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2024.

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