Although we are only beginning to understand the workings of the brain, it clearly isn’t the same thing as the mind

Here are some reasons why they aren’t really the same:

1.Is the human brain unique in some way? Yes, but not so much in its structure as in the things we do with it. For example, the human, mouse, and fly brains all use the same basic mechanisms, which is a bit of a puzzle, considering the different things we do with our brains. The human brain is bigger than most. But then lemurs performed as well as chimps on the primate cognitive test battery (a primate intelligence test) and lemurs only have brains that are 1/200th the size of chimps’ brains. So, what we humans are doing differently from lemurs and chimps doesn’t depend wholly on brain size either. One recent surprise for neuroscientists is that the white matter (connectome) in human brains is quite orderly, not the haphazard accumulations of aeons of evolution that the researchers expected. Another basic assumption has been that the brain operates like a series of switches. But most parts of the brain are involved in, for example, processing signals arising from touch. And that’s just the beginning. So we know that human thinking is different from animal thinking operationally but just how it comes to be different has not been found in the brain.

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