How does the brain produce the mind?

3/19/08. Short answer: We don't know how the brain produces the mind - or how consciousness flows from brain tissue.

This brain-mind discontinuity is unlike conceptual dilemmas faced by other health care professionals who stay at the level of physical understanding, relying on knowledge of biology, chemistry, anatomy, physical development, and so on.

To circumvent this brain-mind gap in our knowledge and to organize and clarify our knowledge and treatment approaches to the complexity of people, we can approach understanding people from four perspectives: diseases, dimensions, behaviors, and life-stories. We can understand psychological disorders as life under altered circumstances (see Paul McHugh and Philip Slavney, Perspectives of Psychiatry, 1998). Life can be altered by what a person "has" (diseases such as bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder), what a patient "is" (dimensions such as very shy and exceptional intellectual abilities), what a patient "does" (behaviors such as uses alcohol to excess or starves herself) or "encounters" (life-stories such as death of a loved one, a victim in a violent crime).