Gehirn, Geist & Verstand

English, not being my first language, has always intrigued me from the day I started to learn it. Naturally, like most folks who picked it up as a second or third or fourth language, I used to go through a number of awkward moments fumbling for the right equivalent of one word for another. As an example for this musing, I chose gehirn, geist and verstand above – three German words – because they exemplify many instances where one word in one language may not always have a direct equivalent in another. Added to the complication of language are phrases and combinations of words and idioms whose meanings confound and confuse every non-native speaker.  And, of course, the manner in how they’re spoken (pronounced) and the way they’re accented or emphasized are like nuanced features to the architecture of the proverbial Tower of Babel.

Well, geist is supposed to mean mind while verstand is about understanding. However, geist can refer to spirit or ghost.  Hence, poltergeist, which loosely means a noisy spirit or one which causes rattling noises, where polter means create disturbances.  Then, as in most languages, there is a different word for brain. In German gehirn is the word for brain when referring to the anatomy and hirn if it was alluding to cooking (for which there are countless recipes to prove that). So, a German-speaking cannibal can make a clear distinction between where he formulates his culinary creations (from what is inside his head- gehirn) and to what is on his dinner plate (hirn). Anthony Hopkins who played Lecter in “Hannibal”, had to deal with it differently altogether as he was explaining the dish he was preparing while chatting with FBI agent Starling (Jodie Foster) as Ray Liotta’s character Fred Krendler, his mind still apparently intact, was listening and smiling but oblivious to his own physiological predicament. If you have not seen the movie, well … if you are particularly squeamish and the macabre is not your thing, then don’t watch it.

That was quite a very convoluted way to get to the subject of the difference between the brain and the mind.

“A million thoughts went through my mind. What little mind I have”

 ---- Fuzzy Zoeller

 

Encased in our cranium is a three pound mass of tissue that is the central processing unit of the human body. It is a grayish beehive populated by a hundred billion neurons. If it were a marketplace filled with a hundred billion people, imagine each individual talking at a speed of five to fifty words per second to neighboring individuals by the thousands, each of those answering back with as many words per second, to and from among billions of others. A trillion exchanges occur every second, night or day.  That marketplace is the human brain. 

While much of what the brain does is for the proper functioning of the human body, doing it with such autonomy for the most part and doing it very well, there is a discarnate part of it that is hard to define, incorporeal, nonphysical but quite the essence that makes us human – our mind. Once we get past the physical attributes, the material possessions, family background, education, etc., there is the one entity that defies physical description; yet it is ultimately what defines each of us as discrete individuals. Identical twins and infrequently occurring identical-multiple-birth siblings become discrete individuals the moment they form their own minds. How does something that cannot be physically described be so powerful? Not only that it is how and why we become self-aware, it is also how or why we are able to create all advances in technology, the sciences, the arts, and how we are able to deliberate independently of other people’s ideas and opinions. In a nutshell, it is the mind that created civilization as we know it today.

Put simply, the human mind is a most powerful thing.

It separates us from all other organisms because it alone makes us feel compassion, love, anger, hate, remorse, sympathy and so many other layers of emotions denied to other living things. So, from the quote above, that little mind we have will let through as many visitors as it is willing to let in, keep some, ignore others and often forget many. As a result of all that, the mind will form its own biases, fears, affiliations, deep love and affection for other individuals, repulsion for others, profound beliefs and opinions and on and on.

Again, to put it simply, the human mind is a complicated thing.

The brain had been studied, dissected, sliced to the thinnest wafers, peered at with the most powerful microscopes, scanned, probed, etc. to the point where there is very little scientists and researchers do not know about its physiology, down to the network of neurons and synapses. It’s been said that Einstein’s brain was not extraordinarily different from other normal brains. It weighed no more or less than average and it did not have more folds or deeper fissures than usual. Its topography was no different either. Brain disorders and physical anomalies in the physiology of the brain aside, it appears that average normal brains are meant to be the same identical computer hardware for every user. I am not a physiologist or brain doctor but I cling to this analogy that given the same desk top or lap top or the latest and the greatest smart phones, it all comes down to how the user uses any of these devices. In college, our class got our first slide rules as we transitioned into the second year of engineering. Granted we bought different brands, all the slide rules had exactly the same functions and worked the same way: the K+E (more expensive U.S. made) and the economy Hemmi (Made in Japan, with bamboo slides). The slide rules did not determine who got A’s or C’s. The same thing happened when later generations of engineering students were presented with the first electronic calculators. The expensive Texas Instruments did not have any latent advantage over the Casio, Sharp or Canon. Individual users determined that.

The same can be true with the human brain.  I could be on thin ice here, again, because I do not have the academic credentials past common sense to make these assumptions. But I’ll have to say this. The capacity of the human brain, regardless of ethnicity or gender, had to be the same. Where it gets difficult in any kind of objective analyses is factoring in the environment, the cultural, sociological and societal influences that encourages or curtails the mental development of individuals. Long before the feminist movement was even a glimmer, Lise Meitner (born in 1878) was a Swedish-Austrian physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission of uranium long before the Manhattan Project. Mileva Maric (Serbian, born 1875) lived in the shadow of Albert Einstein with whom she was married and had three children (only two sons made it to adulthood). She was supposed to be the more capable mathematician than Albert E. and she was the only female student in the physics class in Zurich Polytechnic School (where she and Albert met). Marie Curie (Polish, born 1867) was the first and only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice and the only person to have won it in two different science categories. Female chess grandmasters are a recent phenomenon, but only because of the culturally but inadvertently-imposed limitation on their participation in the past. In earlier era only boys were encouraged and nurtured to play the game.  There are many similar examples that prove ethnicity and gender had nothing to do with brain capacities. Therefore, it can be said that there is a universal distribution of genius from all ethnic and gender groups. I know it is hard to prove or disprove because of the so many factors cited earlier.  In addition to all of those we will have to factor in nutrition, the stresses or simple effects of socio-economic scale differences. Lack of opportunity for higher education in general is a natural barrier in many places and particularly limiting for girls and young women.

After all of that where so much is known about the brain, the mind is still veiled with much mystery. It is akin to having much of the features of a computer hardware written down but very little by way of a comprehensive understanding of the software, let alone an easy to read manual. I am not discounting the advances in psychology and psychiatry but can we clearly conclude that both are able to provide clear definitions of the sciences they represent? While physical and physiological injuries to the brain can be addressed precisely, mental disorders are less tractable: multiple personality dissociative disorders, PTSD that varies from person to person, amnesia, profound differences in traumatic reactions to similar experiences, etc. The phenomenon of savant syndrome is particularly puzzling if not mysteriously intriguing. There is more under addiction, phobias, manic behaviors, etc.

So, is it too farfetched to believe that the mind is the software that gets written up as the user gets along in his or her development? It is as if we, as individuals, get the same hardware with all its potential and capacity but we get to write the software, tweaking it, improving it, changing it as time goes by, growing up until a period of time in adulthood when the software is at last set. Like any software, the individual mind will have had established parameters for personal values, ideals, goals, aspirations, bases for emotions and profound sets of beliefs. Then to be human, it will have gathered up its own biases, prejudices, and other negative attributes from years of external and cultural influences, etc.

This takes us back to where we started – the three German words. God gave us the Gehirn, the physical brain, allowed us to have verstand, and Geist – the God like qualities of the spirit, the discarnate feature associated with the mind so someday perhaps, if there is a transformation at all, we may at last know if there is a meaning to all of these. We may even stumble upon a far deeper understanding of why we are here and then to know where exactly we are heading. If the mind ceases after the gehirn has stopped operating, it would seem like a waste. And there lies the mystery of the mind. If we are able to even ponder these things, then maybe the universe is far more astounding than we can ever imagine it to be and, wishfully, longingly, we may know that God may yet have a surprise for each of us.