Introducing a new fusion of ideas about the human mind!
What is a Mind Model?
The mind is not a 'thing'. We cannot physically measure it and we cannot easily define where or what it is. We all experience it on a daily basis but we do not share the same experiences and we struggle to communicate our deepest experiences. So, we invent models and metaphors that we hope go somewhere to encourage shared understandings.
Our body is a thing though and our brain is a thing and our experience of being human is vitally linked to our body and our brain. Any purposeful and serious model of our mind must include awareness of the ways that our body and our brain function and influence our mindful experience. There is a lot of very important work going on to find out how our brain, our brain and body immune systems, and our gut interact in ways that can impact what goes on in our mind.
We also know that our body, brain, and hence mind, are the product of evolution and that evolution will have selected for capabilities that enhance our chance of survival. Our body needs to be effective, resilient, and efficient. Our brain needs to manage our senses to defend us from potential threats and exploit potential advantages. But what does our mind do?
I suggest this as a working hypothesis: Our mind is the collection of processes in our brain, and influenced by our body, that drive our behaviour.
This firmly associates our experience of being human to our physical brain (where we may 'imagine' such things as clear thought, aspiration, and amazement) and body (where we 'feel' our emotions, our gut-reactions, and our heart's-desires). The hypothesis also points to the mind's prime focus (as a product of evolution) to drive our behaviour in all situations. It is our mind that reacts to our surroundings. It is our mind that produces and acts out our emotions. It is our mind that dreams and aspires to create new futures.
The Aspirational Mind: A Summary
The Aspirational Mind is based on an appreciation of the way that the demanding influence of evolution has distilled the capabilities and behaviours that we experience today.
The Aspirational Mind is a functional model rather than an experiential model, though it must also show how our daily experience of being human matches the behaviours that we and those around us exhibit.
The Aspirational Mind provides a tool to enable us to better understand the influences of our physical brain and body and to better understand our very human aspirations and drives.
Among many potentials, the Aspirational Mind allows deeper appreciations of personality, intellect, solitary and herd motivations, therapeutic interventions, and potentials for personal self-care.
The Aspirational Mind is also a functional description of the mind that is a fusion of some of our existing popular mind models. I created the model to support my development of accessible approaches to personal self-care in areas such as wellbeing, addictions, depression, anxiety, burnout, purpose-work, and so on.
The descriptions on this page are very brief but should give most people a basic idea of how I think our mind actually works.
To "Tell Me More", follow link buttons like this:
Sources and inspirations:
Tell Me More: Background
Our Mind is The Result Of Evolution
I have long struggled with the inherent difficulty of using existing descriptions of the mind that seem to focus mainly on our personal experiences from the inside of our head and which do not easily describe or relate to our multi-varied behaviours, our supposed disorders, and our possible developmental evolution.
Starting with the assumptions that we are the product of evolution and that everything that we experience is there for a reason has led me to a revised model.
How evolution has developed our mind:
Tell Me More: Evolution
The Aspirational Mind
The model that I describe here comprises a Subconscious part of mind which underpins all the rest of the mind that we are more aware of and experience on a day-to-day basis. The mind that we experience directly is, I propose, made up of five main 'focuses' (mind-parts that support our behaviour). Each of these focuses of our mind provide particular motivations and behavioural capabilities, each building on what has been previously evolved during millions of years of evolution:
The Subconscious
Handles sensory-processing, automatic reactions to certain situations, learned capabilities, habits, and many emotions.
Our Subconscious processing is very complex and can produce very sophisticated behaviour but it is limited in many ways to direct behavioural responses to particular situations. I suggest that the Subconscious, despite its sophistication, can be considered as automatic.
In touch with our Subconscious:
Tell Me More: Subconscious
The Planning Focus (Our Conscious Planning Mind)
Provides full conscious awareness and the ability to reason.
This allows us to solve problems, reason our own motivations out, and plan logically to suit the specific situation that we are presented with.
In touch with our Planning Focus:
Tell Me More: Planning Focus
The Social Focus
Handles inter-personal behaviour within an extended family group or troupe. Provides basic abilities to cooperate and to be able to engage in a variety of give and take relationships.
Attentive memory allows individuals to gain knowledge from other members of the troupe.
In touch with our Social Focus:
Tell Me More: Social Focus
The Aspirational Focus
Paired with the Social Focus but provides open-minded creativity and extended motivations concerned with the future. This is the essential playful, adventurous, competitive source that allows us to learn as children and aspire as adults.
In order to enable creativity this Focus has to become intuitive in order to transcend the limitations of so called rational thinking. Creativity involves thinking outside of the logical box.
In touch with our Aspirational Focus:
Tell Me More: Aspirational Focus
The Cultural Focus
Symbolic language capabilities allow for extended social behaviour that, in turn, enables the creation of long-lived cultures.
This Focus relies on increasing levels of awareness to learn the details of the culture that we are born into.
Allows us to work in increasingly sophisticated ways within family, troupe, and wider populations.
In touch with our Cultural Focus:
Tell Me More: Cultural Focus
The Noble Focus
Paired with the Cultural Focus and inspires our highest motivations. This allows for motivations that are not ego-based and that go beyond our survival-based sense of self.
The Noble Focus gives us such things as awe, wonder, connectedness with broad concepts of life and the universe, a sense of morality, wisdom, and even unconditional love.
An Focus less-focussed on self:
Tell Me More: Noble Focus
But, Why Suggest a New Model?
The Aspirational Mind approach is, I suggest, important for a number of reasons, such as these:
To provide a better understanding of how some of the major psychological approaches (Behavioural, Social-Learning, Cognitive, Mindfulness, and experiential/theological) interact together.
To better understand the significance of, and relief from, chronic problems such as self-destructive habits, emotion-based depression, anxiety, mood disorders, languishing, and burn-out.
To more easily understand mental biases and potential internal conflicts.
To evolve new ways to encourage mental wellbeing.
To better understand the role of intellect and it's relationship to personality.
To give an improved understanding of our motivations, which are often internally competitive, and to evolve better strategies to promote clear and rewarding personal and societal purposes.
To begin to understand why political and broader financial and cultural systems seem to so readily end up producing conflict and general social failure.
To achieve greater understanding of questions such as 'How does brainwashing work?', 'What happens when we don't care any more?', 'Why do we procrastinate so much?', 'What is depression for?', and so on.
I find the Aspirational Mind useful to imagine how some internal processes play out, but it can be important to remember this model is not reality. There is no single place in our brains where each of these 'Focuses' exist. These 'Focuses' are not actual independent and separate minds. They are, perhaps, functional aspects of our one mind. Using a model such as this, which focusses on function, can make it easier to understand some of the processing that goes on in our one mind and some of the problems that can appear when we have multiple purposes or when our mind is out of 'balance'. Any model of the mind is, of course, a gross simplification of the interconnectedness of our mental processes based in our brain, nervous system, and body.
Notes
Like all models of the mind, this model is basically a metaphor, not any form of actual or literal description. The human brain is intensely interconnected and any 'Focuses' or 'parts' that I or others may define don't actually exist as well-defined physical regions of the brain. This is a functional rather than a neurological model.
On the practical-side I have used this model to refine what seems, to me, to be a very promising self-care approach to changing chronic life-habits (smoking, drinking, drugs, eating-disorders, gambling, managing diet, etc..), for contributing to the management of general mood, and even for working in new ways to understand and alleviate conditions such as depression, anxiety, and burnout.
I try to keep everything in this website as simple and accessible as I can though inevitably some sophistication is required whenever we deal with the human mind!
I apologise in advance for my spelling and grammar mistakes (challenges for my particular version of autism) as well as for the 'scribbled-note'/'work-in-progress' status of many parts of this website.