A Scientific Explanation of the Human Mind | Daniel Siegel | Big Think

A Scientific Explanation of the Human Mind

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The only things that travel at the speed of light are photons. Nothing with any mass at all can travel at the speed of light because as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass increases. And if it were actually traveling at the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass.Light does not experience space or time. It's not just a speed going through something. All of the universe shifts around this constant, the speed of light. Time and space itself stop when you go that speed.

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MICHELLE THALLER :

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit
NASA.
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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: So, Tom, you asked the question, "How does mass increase as you go faster?" And this is really a wonderful part of Einstein's theories. It actually is also relatively slippery and kind of complicated because to even answer this question at all, we have to ask the rather strange question: "What do you mean by mass? What is your definition of mass?" You may have heard that nothing with mass can possibly go at the speed of light. The only things that travel at the speed of light are photons pure energy, light, the speed of light. Nothing with any mass at all can travel at the speed of light because as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass increases. And if it were actually traveling at the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass.

So think about that. Even if you had a tiny little particle that was, say, billions of times less massive than an electron just a tiny, tiny little piece of mass if for some reason, that tiny thing accelerated to the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass. And that's a bit of a problem. So let's talk about this. One of the things that you really have to realize is the speed of light is very, very special. It's not just simply a speed of something moving through space. As you go faster and faster and closer to the speed of light, time itself begins to slow down. And space begins to contract. As you go close to the speed of light, the entire universe becomes smaller and smaller until it basically just becomes a single point when you're going at the speed of light. And time, as you go closer to the speed of light, gets slower and slower until basically time is a single point at the speed of light.

Light does not experience space or time. It's not just a speed going through something. All of the universe shifts around this constant, the speed of light. Time and space itself stop when you go that speed. So the reason you can't accelerate to the speed of light, and the reason we say you have an infinite mass is a little complicated because the idea that mass actually is a measurement of energy. You may remember Einstein's famous equation, E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy and mass are equivalent. Mass is basically a measurement of how much energy there is in an object. When you're moving, you have the energy of your motion, too. That's called kinetic energy, energy of motion. So E equals MC squared, now your mass has not just the stuff that's in you but also the energy of your motion.

And that's why mass seems to increase as you go faster, and faster, and closer to the speed of light. It's not that you are actually getting any heavier. The increase in mass is something that's only observed by people that are watching you go by. If you were on a spaceship going very fast at the speed of light, you don't notice anything getting heavier. You are on your spaceship. You could jump up and down. You can skip rope. You can do whatever you want. You don't notice any change at all. But if people try to measure your mass as you go by, they not only are measuring your rest mass — your mass when you were still — but this added energy of this h...

[angelic]

Glad someone is taking the time to express this. Almost nothing is entirely self contained or separate from the greater environment. And minds are even more susceptible than most systems given how one of its main functions is recursive and adaptive.
That's why we have minds to begin with in my opinion. Its a survival tool that gives evolution a way to work around and react to the environment.

[notrningwheels]

I got a little lost in the middle, but it all made sense at the end. I am very grateful that Daniel Siegel has taken this stance, which is strongly opposed to the neuroscience being funded by pharmaceutical companies.

We have to stop analyzing the mind as if it is contained within the skull. Psychology and neuroscience students were taught that "gut feeling" was cliche nonsense for more than 4 decades before someone actually checked and found that a lot of neurological processing occurs in the gut.

[Charles-Anthony]

Great video! People need to share this video with their religious friends on social media. Religious people just don't get it: they think of the mind as a noun--a thing--instead of a verb (a process). Once we understand the mind from a more materialistic basis, as an emergent property of the brain, then we can see why notions like the "soul" have no basis in reality. I'll check out his book, Mind. Daniel Dennett also wrote a great book on this subject.

[jamesthomas]

Information may be "flowing in many different locations", but where I'm sitting isn't one of them.

[Hombolicious]

I disagree that people find self organisation to be unintuitive. We obviously self organise even if we only consider the level of conscious attention. Our bodies are obviously self organised, the organs strip down food and turn it into usable energy. Our bodies are a continuous pattern of self organisation until the pattern ultimate changes i.e we die.

[citizenschallengeYT]

Looks like the wrong description. Daniel J. Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry. He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative.

[cogoid]

OK, flight is an emergent property of a Boeing 747. It is a cool thing to say. But does it really explain WHY or HOW it flies? Or how it became the way it is? That would be a much more satisfying story... I think Daniel Dennett has a much more interesting _general_ explanation of what mind is -- even though we are still very far from truly understanding the specifics of our Cognitive Architecture.

[ScottLahteine]

The collective actions of billions of cells (which themselves self-regulate and process information in a rudimentary way) gives rise to a singular reality-modeling and body-guiding process — which maintains a coherent self-image connected to physical self-preservation, social instinct, reproduction, security, nostalgia, experience, attachments, and so on. That it should feel and contain all the richness that it does for the experiencer is a bonus.

[spmSwy]

It's good to see this being talked about in scientific terms, as it helps show what's been known by many for millenium but where mind was referred to as "spirit" - ancient Greek pneuma and that some people's mind can even be visible extending outside the body as in an "aura" and seen depicted around the heads of so called saints and those thought to be deities from outer space (literal heavens). I remember seeing energy around my teachers heads when they were giving public meetings and that energy even seemed to grow to hover like a haze over the audience. I saw that again at another meeting and also saw it around certain students who were giving meetings thereafter. I had never had that experience before or since that time years ago but there was a few months where I saw different types of spirits - minds - that were no longer attached to and/or emanating from a physical body. Then there is another type of mind containing subtle "wind like" density physical object called a Soul that contains a certain quality of mind. This is the area of metaphysics which is a science of the mind.

One can tell that the mind is connected but separate from the brain by witnessing how people with damaged brains sometimes can establish new pathways to re-learn things that were lost by the damage. That would indicate the complexity of the system and the recursive aspect as the mind is searching for new pathways to stimulate the neurons in another part of the brain to generate the results that were lost by damage. I think of it as the brain is the hardware and the mind is the software. The software is initialized into the hardware at birth and the software, as in OOPS computer programming contains both it's "code" section and data section it uses but that grows as well. Another way to look at it is that every cell has it's genome in it's nucleus. The strands of DNA can be thought of as a database. The histones like a cpu and the organ that is made up of many hair like parts the antenna for communication and power. So the mind is then an highly organized, yet fluent electromagnetic field that though is generated via the cellular system of the genes grows beyond it's own cellular physical boundaries. Like so many things this was known thousands of years ago and was spoken about as "spirit" that still exists against the earth's electromagnetic field even after the hardware has "died".

[galesx]

This is what Alan Watts was talking about back in the 50's and 60's.

[MasterNeiXD]

2 consecutive videos. that's pretty good.

[believeconquer]

The human body is the vessel for our mind which takes physical form through this vessel. We are our mind at our very core experiencing life via our physical form on earth. Our brain is the control station from which our mind operates the body. The task of the individual is to use the vessel to discover the ultimate existence for the mind to rest. In other words have answers for all the minds questions. Rather than knowing every minor detail of life, have an ultimate knowledge covering all questions. When this ultimate or perfect life is discovered whats left is to enjoy.

[TheBanjoShowOfficial]

I started the video and it ended just like that. Nothing in between. I didn't understand a single thing. This video requires some background knowledge I guess.

[josephp.]

He Literally didnt say anything. I was going to wait until he explained how the mind can be within and "between" things due to it being related to the transfer of information and energy. But the moment never arrived. He just kept talking and talking without actually saying anything.

Does the emperor have no clothes?

[EezySeven]

None of this makes any sense, it's all just words. It's more mind activity.

[SerenityReceiver]

"completely counter-intuitive", he says it 5 times to make them out to be magic. Self-regulating, feedback-systems - call them "complex or emerging" - are totally intuitive, that's nature for you.

[EJMM]

So if the mind is the product of the flow of information and energy in an organized and reconcile form, there is no real way of prove that ideas do not exist outside the mind?

[terencedavid]

From an Upanaishadic Advaita Vedantic philosophical standpoint the MIND IS AN OBJECT. An object to consciousness, albeit a subtle, non material, non tangible object but an object nonetheless.
The argument put forward by it's propinents is called..drig drishya viveka in Sanskrit.( object/subject distinction) whereby it posits that the object and the subject can never be the same n in fact is never the same.
Try this and see for yourself, and observe your immediate experience..step by step.
Look at a pen.
Then blink your eyes 5 times.
Think a thought .. any thought.
Now ask yourself were you conscious of all those actions ??
Basically this is the evolution of that process
Pen < Eye < Mind/Thoughts < Consciousness.
Let's try understanding n analysing it step by step taking a pen...
The pen is obviously a gross/material object, to the eye which is the subject. The two obviously r not the same thing i.e. the pen n the eye..sub/obj dstctn.
On further investigation, when the eye is the subject, then the mind is the object. The eye n the mind being different n therefore not the same..again sub/obj dstctn.
At a deeper level of inquiry/investigation our thoughts/beliefs/memories etc etc are again objects subtle objects onto the mind which is the subject.
Yet again the obj/sub dstctn.
However, at the 4th n deepest level of examination 'the mind' (and all its contents etc etc) is but an object to 'Consciousness' which is the ultimate subject.
This consciousness is our true nature,
the Self luminous Light' within which all experience is made possible.
It is called 'turiya' or 4th state in Advaita Vedanta but in reality is the only state.
Tat Tvam Asi..That Thou Art.
Sat Chit Ananda.. Existence Consciousness n Bliss.
I hope i have made myself sufficiently clear with my clumsy use of words.
Lol.✌☝️❤

[christianrayfield]

Maybe if you would describe what a complex system IS before constantly using the term...

[carbon]

This is very important stuff - ie. both supervenience and downward organization.