The Brain and the Mind

I have, for a long time now been thinking about the distinction between the brain and the mind.  For me, they are two completely separate identities.

Some call them the unconscious and the conscious minds, but I feel a better explanation is the brain and the mind as we do actually have control over both but we generally just let brain get on with it.

They are both housed in the same lump of squishy matter inside your skull, and without the body nourish and protect them they couldn't survive.

The body protects and feeds this fantastic organ, and in return, we are 'human' capable of creating everything from civilisations to ice cream.

It really is mindblowing when you start to think about it.

So what is the difference between the brain and the mind?

Have you ever done something and then instantly thought 'Why did I do that'?

One of the strangest things about being a human is that we often do things we don't mean to do.

You eat chocolate when you're on a diet; you stay up way too scrolling facebook when you should go to bed because your exhausted.

Sometimes it feels like your brain is on autopilot and your mind is trying to reason with it.

So which of these driving forces is the real you?

Philosophers have wrestled with this conflict for centuries.  Christion theologists used the terms grace and sin.

Enter the grandaddy of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, he and his contemporaries like Carl Jung developed the idea of the 'unconscious mind'.

Sigmund and his buddies liked to think of the unconscious as a dark place full of dark secrets and wild often highly sexualised desires and compulsions.

Modern psychologists think of the unconsciousness in very different terms now, and indeed, it has moved from being dark and scary to merely a mental process you can't identify or control, which happens without your choosing.

Some people think of this as your reptilian brain - or automatic responses that keep you alive - fear, love and anger all serve to save your physical life.

Most of what happens in the unconscious far from being wildly erotic and dark is pretty dull. It digests your food, let's you know when you're hot, alerts you to a sabre tooth tiger, or a lousy selfy on Instagram, it remembers how to read, and it makes you come over all warm and fuzzy when you watch cat videos and so on. Beneath your conscious thoughts, your brain is keeping track of everything for you from how many numbers are in your pin, to your heart beating to that nagging doubt that you forget to lock the front door.

Your brain is like a very helpful personal assistant - handling the mundanity of keeping you alive and safe while your mind gets on with the more interesting stuff like painting the Mona Lisa or inventing the light bulb.

Here is my point, to know yourself your conscious thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg.  To really know yourself you're going to have to go quite a lot deeper and that is where The Sprinter and the Thinker come in.