THE BRAIN MIND CONFUSION —AGAIN

I just finished reading The Immune Mind: The Hidden Dialogue Between Your Brain and Immune System (2024) by Monty Lyman, M.D. The book describes the current state of neuro-immunology and lots of recent discoveries in the neuro-sciences. Overall I appreciated his systemic thinking about body, brain, immune system, and microbiome. He speaks often and elegantly about the problem with the Descartes’ dichotomy of mind–body; body–brain, etc. He focuses mostly on inflammation as one of our biggest biological problems and how it undermines the immune system as our “defense system.”

As a storyteller he relates the history of how we got to where we are in terms of brain and body anatomy and discoveries regarding the immune system. He notes that “the brain and the immune system live parallel lives.” (17). He described in detail the discovery of meningeal lymphatics and “the immune highways between brain and body.” (25).

“Your skull is not just a crash helmet, protecting your brain from the punches, falls, and bites of the macroscopic world. It is also an immune watchtower, surveying the brain for microscopic threats.” (28). “If the brain and the body are intimately connected, we are only just beginning to decode their language and listen in on their conversations.” (37)

Now in spite of all of the good stuff in the book especially at the end about eating, sleeping, exercising, playing, etc., Lyman makes one big mistake. Namely, he constantly confuses the brain and the mind. For the first three chapters he mostly described the brain and the nervous systems and how they work, including the immune system. He constantly used the phrase, “our body and brain” (35). Then he began substituting “mind” for brain and continued that false equation throughout the rest of the book.

(You can see this on pages 66, 69, “the many ways our gut microbiota can communicate with our mind” 82, “mind, immune system, and microbiome’s three parts of the same process” 89, anti-NMDA encephalitis is a case of the immune system attacking the mind” 100, 103, 107, 109, 111, “between brain and immune system— between mind and body” 142, italics added, etc.)

When it came to defining terms, he did an excellent job on nearly all of the terms he introduced. He even wrote, “We need to define our terms.” And he did a thorough job defining “depression.” (p. 116-7). But shockingly he never defined “mind.” Instead he just assumed that it is the same thing as the brain. Now why would he make that assumption? As a physician and psychiatrist, his focus is on the body, the physical, and

the medical, not the psychological. And since the brain “thinks” he seems to assume, “ah, that’s the mind.” He also equated the effect of neuro-chemicals to changes in mood to those chemicals making the mind do what it does. “Endotoxin has proves a great way of studying how inflammation affects the mind” ( 38).

“We now know the brain and the immune system are tightly enmeshed, and this enables the immune system and the mind to achieve the common goal of surviving and thriving in a microbial world.” (48, italics added).

At one point, Lyman does mention the mind and the functioning of the frontal lobe and it’s role in personality, self-control, etc. (76), yet he makes no distinction here from his previous uses of ‘brain.’ His big mistake comes from his equation: “Remember psychology is biology” (149). To say that is an over-statement is an under-statement! Psychology emerges from biology, but is not the same. Later he diagramed his model with 3 items: Immune system — Microbiome — Brain (183). So where is the mind? Sadly, the “mind” is missing here!

Does the brain “think?” It depends on what we mean by “think” doesn’t it? The brain certainly processes information. Most of this information processing and transfer occurs outside-of-consciousness and we not only are not privy to it, we cannot become aware of it. Bateson and Korzybski described this abstracting and cognizing of the brain as occuring below conscious awareness. In this the brain does a lot of unconscious learning and remembering which enables us to function as we do. So like Korzybski (and NLP), Lyman writes, “our brain generates a model of the outside world which it constantly builds on and updates.” (50)

It’s the brain working outside of our consciousness that screens sensory information and abstracts what it perceives. He’s ‘right on’ when he writes, “The brain is not primarily there to think; it is to serve a complex and fragile body in an ever-changing world.” (54). But then he really misses it when he says, “humans always seem to be seeking novelty and uncertainty.” That’s because he fails to distinguish between primary, automatic, and reactive “thinking” and the ability to be conscious of our consciousness (thinking about thinking).

The distinction that both Korzybski and Bateson made, and all of the theorists in the field of Meta-Cognition, is that between the levels of thinking. All thinking is not the same. Thinking can and does occur on multiple levels. Certainly the brain “thinks” unconsciously when it (or the immune system) does the following: “The brain can powerfully perceive infection...” (57). “Your brain is constantly interpreting your body...” (59). “You could say that your immune cells are listening to your thoughts” (61) well that’s going too far!

But the brain does not do conscious thinking, that’s the role of the mind. The mind, based in the brain and completely dependent on the brain, arises as an emergent property from the brain. In other words, you are not your brain. You have a meta-awareness that allows you to be aware-of-your-awareness—that’s the first meta-state we all have. This arises from the reflexivity mechanism or your self-reflexive consciousness. How does that

work? Ah, the big mystery that has, and continues to, mystify philosophers especially those in the field, ‘the philosophy of mind’ (yes, that’s an entire field in the narrow area).

Lyman quotes many neuro-scientists throughout the book and most of what he presents is really good and valuable. But as I’ve mentioned before— NLP is not about literally “running your own brain” even though we use that phrase. Yes, we take care of our brain by eating right, sleeping sufficiently, exercising, etc. and stimulating it intellectually. But NLP and Neuro-Semantics is about managing our mind, controlling our consciousness, and in that way increase our IQ and our EQ.

The bottom line: The brain is not the mind. With the brain we “think”—the intelligence within our body, our nervous systems, our immune system, etc. processes information and does so apart from our consciousness. With your mind, you consciously think (at least we hope you do!). You are able to become aware of the results of your brain’s processing and aware of your conscious thinking and because of that, you can become mindful and you can live mindfully.

The brain is mysterious enough and this book is about demystifying the brain’s immune system that distinguishes self and not-self. The Mind —however— now that’s where the mystery really lives. And when all of the mysteries of the brain are finally revealed, there will still be the mysteries of the mind.

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