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Interesting places we went to Monday night, starting with "me" as "all of me" and "containing multitudes" and ending with .... a new (?) definition of "mental health" as "the freedom/wherewithal to create new meaning"? Which would mean that mental health is not a particular state but rather an ability to engage in a process? And that one might have, at any given time, various amounts of that ability but could always move towards having more of it? And could contribute to others also moving towards having more of it as well?

It will be interesting to look at the recently passed mental health parity legislation to see how much of that perspective is reflected there, and how good that legislation is as a foundation for further improvement in thinking about mental health.

Interesting post-class conversation among several of us on the issue of what "consciousness" (the story teller) is good for. It seems not to make us "superior" to other organisms, and indeed may have disadvantages as well as advantages. Yes, it enhances our ability to get it less wrong in particular contexts, but it create new ways to be wrong as well.

Among the advantages of having a story telling capability seems to be some increased "coherence" in the "community of mind," an associated ability to create meaning and hence to conceive additional alternatives for behavior/being. And among the disadvantages ... the host of mental health problems. That are in essence conflicts between unconscious understandings and aspects of one's conscious story of oneself and one's relation to the world? And should be understood/dealt with not as illnesses/disabilities but rather as opportunities to create new meaning that will to varying degrees impact both on the unconscious and the story? Of both oneself and others? The latter to further develop next meeting.

A few other thoughts that struck me from last Monday that I also want to think more about ....

The internal diversity of the unconscious ("I contain multitudes") is really important in thinking about the brain, more so than I've sometimes recognized in the past.

The Capgras syndrome provides a really nice illustration of the multitudes and its significance (the info the story teller gets is, separately, image information and feeling information; when it gets one but not the other it needs to create an explanation/story for the combination). But it also, as recognized by Richard Powers in the Echo Maker, updates an older problem. Yes, "story" is a function of the brain, and yes it affects behavior. But are we back to saying, at a more sophisticated level, that people are "nothing more" than their brains, that Capgras "results from" interruption of a particular pathway (the one conveying "feeling" info to the story teller)?

I don't think so. What's important is to recognize that the "imposter" explanation that the story teller comes up with is only one of many possible stories the story teller might create to account for the observations (just like a particular hypothesis is only one of many that a scientist could come up with given the observations at any given time). My guess is that interruption of a particular pathway will, in different individuals, lead to different stories, of which the idea of an imposter is only one. To understand why someone has Capgras syndrome would require much more than knowing that a particular brain structure was damaged; one would have to know as well all of the things that make a particular brain indvidually distinctive. And the ways that randomness has been turned into meaning by that particular brain (the "choices" it has made).

Yes, its all brain, but to say its "nothing more than brain" is to miss entirely not only the complexity of the brain but its creative capabilities in making meaning.