Mind versus brain

Is it mind over matter or the first ruled by the latter? Do you mind? Doest it matter?

“The Economist” (a magazine) recently published a news item that read like this:

“Images of an illness: schizophrenia

Diseases of the mind may appear inscrutable compared with those of the flesh, and schizophrenia epitomises this apparent divergence. Encompassing a spectrum of behaviours and psychoses, schizophrenia has until now been characterised by a dearth of brain volume. But research published this week in Brain , a neurology journal, is the first to identify two distinct subtypes of the illness. Researchers scanned the brains of 307 schizophrenics and used machine learning to cluster individuals based on neuroanatomy alone, irrespective of sex, ethnicity or use of medication. Surprisingly, 115 of the patients had normal brain volumes, showing no loss of tissue, and indeed some areas of their brains were slightly enlarged. The rest exhibited the expected brain damage. It is too early to know how the two subtypes might differ, but debunking brain-volume loss as general to schizophrenia may help to understand why treatments to treat the condition have proven so frustratingly hit-and-miss.”

There seems to be a popular approach in the US and the UK to try to understand mental illness as not being “mental…” but rather as being “physical.”

Instead of trying to understand the psychology of mental illnesses, and to treat “the mind,” most…