What is Mind vis a vis Mental Health?

Mind Defined

At a meeting of 40 scientists across disciplines, including neuroscientists, physicists, sociologists, and anthropologists, the aim was to come to an understanding of the mind. After much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is: “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”

The most immediately shocking element of this definition is that our mind extends beyond our physical selves. Dan Siegel, MD argues that it’s impossible to completely disentangle our subjective view of the world from our interactions.

Mind and Mathematics Definition of a Complex System

The definition has since been supported by research across the sciences, but much of the original idea came from mathematics. Siegel realized the mind meets the mathematical definition of a complex system in that it’s open (can influence things outside itself), chaos capable, and non-linear. Optimal self-organization is: flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. This means that without optimal self-organization, you arrive at either chaos or rigidity.

Belonging and Mental Health

Siegel says he wrote his 2016 book Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human because he sees so much misery in society, and he believes this is partly shaped by how we perceive our own minds. When Siegel was asked whether he belonged in America, he replied: “I thought how isolated we all are and how disconnected we feel. In our modern society we have this belief that mind is brain activity and this means the self, which comes from the mind, is separate and we don’t really belong.”

Dan Siegel, M.D., is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. Interested in mental healthcare that understands this definition of the mind? Check out all courses at Integrative Mental Health University.