The brain is the mind is the brain. one hundred billion nerve cells, give or take, none of which individually has the capacity to feel or to reason, yet together generating consciousness. For about 400 years, following the ideas of French philosopher Rene Descartes, those who thought about its nature considered the mind related to the body, but separate from it. In this model-often called "dualism" or the mind-body problem-the mind was "immaterial," not anchored in anything physical. Today neuroscientists are finding abundant evidence of an idea that even Freud played with more than 100 years ago, that separating mind from brain makes no sense. Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist-neuroscientist Eric Kandel stated it directly in a watershed paper published in 1998: "All mental processes, even the most complex psychological processes, derive from operations of the brain."
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