Although the heart has been traditionally viewed as the ‘seat of the soul’, the ancient Egyptians recognized that the brain is the home of the mind. Even for mind-body dualists, who believe the immaterial mind and physical body to be quite separate, the brain is where the two communicate (René Descartes believed that mind and body met in the pineal gland in the center of the brain). In biopsychological terms, however, a better explanation is that the brain and nervous system are the interfaces, not between our mental and physical selves, but between our selves and the external world.
Information from the sensory organs is transmitted to the brain, and ‘instructions’ from the brain are sent back to control our actions and behavior. As well as enabling us to interact with the outside world, the brain’s neural networks deal with incoming data and are associated with our consciousness, experience, and perception, as well as thought processes, such as reasoning and decision-making.
