One Body, One Mind

For every person that you know, there is a body. You many never have given any thought to this simple relationship but there it is: one person, one body; one mind, one body - a first principle...

Why should we not commonly find two or three persons in one body?.. Or why should not persons of great intellectual capacity and imagination inhabit two or three bodies?.. Why should there not be bodiless persons in our midst, you know, ghosts, spirits, weightless and colorless creatures?.. The sensible reason why [such creatures don’t exist] is that a mind, that which defines a person, requires a body, and that a body, a human body to be sure, naturally generates one mind. A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind. For any body, never more than one mind.

Body-minded minds help save the body. When creatures like us appeared, which had bodies and conscious minds, they were, as Nietzsche would call them, “hybrids of plants and of ghosts,” the combination of a bounded, well-circumscribed, easily identifiable living object with a seemingly unbounded, internal, and difficult-to-localize mental animation.

- Antonio Damasio
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness pp 142-143.¹

Damasio wrote three books to describe how events in the body give rise to the mind, feelings, consciousness and the sense of self. It’s groundbreaking work by a brilliant neuroscientist. He is a master of the trope: brain lesion A causes defect-in-self B. These patterns show how brain systems give rise to numerous aspects of the self. Neuropsychology goes so far as to report we have a brain system for nouns and a different one for verbs.

Yet Damasio still feels the need to step back and make the singular point - one body, one mind. He acknowledges the ghost-sensation we all experience. It can also be found on Steven Pinker’s list of innate intuitions:

• An intuitive version of biology... Its core intuition is that living things house a hidden essence that give them their form and power and drives their growth and body functions.
• An intuitive phychology, which we use to understand other people. Its core intuition is that other people are not objects or machines but are animated by the invisible entity we call the mind or the soul. Minds contain beliefs and desires and are the immediate cause of behavior.

-Steven Pinker,
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, pp 219-221.²

Damasio’s ghost-sensation and Pinker’s essences: These concepts seem so obvious and valid. Our innate sensibilities say so. Where do we go when we reflect on these qualities? Up? Out? Elevated?


If elevation and admiration really do involve feelings of self-transcendence—a reduction in attention to the often all-consuming self and its goals—then a simple-minded prediction would be that these emotions dampen brain activity in regions that map and track the self and its bodily incarnation. But the findings of Immordino-Yang et al.³ suggest a much more interesting possibility: that brain areas related to introceptive processing may be more active during self-transcendence.

-Jonathan Haidt⁴

Haidt acknowledges the more our ghost-sense takes us out of our body, the more our brain is grounded in body-awareness. The less we feel it’s about our physical body, the more it seems to be about just that.

To add to the circularity of this discussion, Haidt’s citation references work by Damasio. Should it be circularity or singularity or synchronicity?

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1. Damasio A. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harvest Books; 2000. ↩

2. Pinker, S. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin; 2002 ↩

3. Immordino-Yang MH, McColl A, Damasio H, Damasio A. Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2009;106(19):8021-6. ↩

4. Haidt J, Morris JP. Finding the self in self-transcendent emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2009;106(19):7687-8. ↩