What Is Your Mind Actually Made Of?

The brain is the meat. The mind is something else. And the difference is where all your power to change lives.

Here’s a question I love, because it sounds abstract at first and then turns out to be extremely practical: what’s the difference between your brain and your mind?

In a nutshell, the brain is the meat. It’s gushy; it’s physical; it’s made of matter and energy together—three pounds or so of tissue, sitting in the dark inside your skull, doing its work.

The mind, as I use that word, and as most people in neuropsychology basically use it, refers to information that is being processed by the nervous system.

Notice the distinction there. The nervous system is tangible. Information is intangible. Both tangible meat and intangible information exist. And intangible information needs something material to represent it. But the information itself is different from the underlying material substrate, like the nervous system that represents it.

That’s fundamentally what’s happening. As you read these words right now, the experiences you’re having are based on information being processed in your nervous system. The meaning of this sentence, the little flicker of recognition or doubt or interest as you take it in: that’s mind, running on brain.

And here’s something that surprises people. Most of the information in the nervous system is outside of awareness. Forever outside of awareness. Most of the mind is below the waterline. We’re aware of the part of the mind that is conscious, and that part is small compared to everything humming along underneath: the regulation of your heartbeat, the assembling of your perceptions, the old learnings that shape how you react before you’ve had a single conscious thought.

This isn’t a human specialty, by the way. Cats have minds. Any creature with a sufficiently complex nervous system has some rudimentary mind. And of course, we human beings have the most complex mind of all.

So why does any of this matter? Why should you care whether the mind is information and the brain is meat?

Because the mind and the brain are connected. They’re a single, looping system. Which means you can use your mind to change your brain to change your mind for the better.

That’s the whole game. Every time you deliberately rest your attention on something, you’re shaping the information flowing through your nervous system, and over time that flow leaves physical traces in neural structure. What you attend to, what you practice, what you let land in you: it’s all quietly sculpting the meat, and the sculpted meat then shapes the mind that arises next.

So here’s the takeaway. Your experiences are not just passing weather. They are, little by little, building the brain you’ll be living with tomorrow. Choose a few good ones today, let them sink in, and let the loop work in your favor.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.