Ideas, minds and brains

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"Nothing as dangerous as a broad idea in narrow brains."

Hippolytus Taine

Sometimes, I argue with acquaintances and with people from my daily life about the mind and the brain. It is always something that can be surprising as it happens that sometimes, the common people assume that the brain and the mind are the same.

Well, the brain is the material base of the Central Nervous System, an alteration in some of its areas or of its lobes triggers changes in the personality or in the memory or in the particularities or in the totality of all of the above. But despite what has been said, it cannot be assured that what we understand as mind is due only to the brain.

I do not want to enter into a religious discussion about the soul and other intangible things, but I try to consider that the mind, the human will and the individual personality or Ego, are multifactorial products, where the biological substrate, or rather neurological in this case, it is a very important part, but not the only element that constitutes the whole of the matter.

I suppose that a person with thyroid problems can understand this problem, after all, since the problem in their thyroid is activated, their personality shows changes, their irritability increases and it is something that is not being caused by anything other than a reaction to a hormonal release.

Thus, in many cases, the choices we make voluntarily have a strong endocrine factor and it turns out then that the sum of our decisions, the memories we create and the personality we exhibit is linked to many things that are outside the skull.

Despite everything that has been said so far in this post, I share this author's metaphor, as a "narrow brain" is an appropriate phrase to identify petrified minds, stubborn personalities and people with poor ideas. In all cases, when such people are exposed to a new, overwhelming idea, their worlds collapse and they tend to react very badly.

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