Synaptic Stimuli

The mind is generally associated with feelings, sentience, and consciousness of self, while the brain is a dissectible biological tissue. But learning about the brain, which is part of a larger system called the nervous system, can teach us about the mind and thus about our nature.

The brain is a material network of neurons, synapses and biochemicals. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger and love.

consciousness — that ultimate lens of being, which shapes our entire experience of life and makes blue appear blue and gives poems their air of wonder — is not a mental activity confined to the brain but a complex embodied phenomenon governed by the nervous-system activity we call feeling.

When you wake each morning, you not only become freshly aware of your thoughts, you also resituate yourself in your body. We don’t experience the world purely in our minds, but as ‘embodied agents’, says Roy Salomon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Your sense of self is as connected to your limbs and guts as to the