The controversy of mind over matter: Mead's solution and applications from neuroscience

In this essay, I relate G. H. Mead's emergent theory of mind and reflexivity to neuroscience evidence that “minded” practices can be applied in restructuring the neural structures involved in obsessive-compulsive disorders, stroke patients, and depression. The demonstration that such efforts can become causal factors in changing material brain structures attests to the emergent reality of mind as conceived by Mead, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry, and others. This means that mind, arising from the material brain cannot be completely reduced to the biological properties that make it possible. Schwartz and Begley (2002) and Begley (2007) describe the six-step program in minded practices producing structural brain change in The Mind and the Brain. The authors argue for a voluntaristic framework transcending SR behaviorist approaches to behavior modification, which ignore distinctively human capacities. fMRI evidence of the structural changes in brain systems involved in OCD after patients were trained in “minded” behaviors is described.