American Buddhist Net

THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery

With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is the mind-brain relationship, and my guest is Dr. Karl Pribram, professor of neuropsychology at Stanford University, in the Department of Psychology and in the medical school. Dr. Pribram is the author of Languages of the Brain and hundreds of articles about the mind-brain relationship. In fact I would say fairly that Dr. Pribram is probably one of the most influential scholars alive today in probing the mysteries of the mind-brain relationship.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, many academic psychologists -- and perhaps you have some sympathy for this point of view -- over the years have taken a perspective which laymen tend to laugh at, at times. They claim that the mind doesn't exist. I wonder if you can explain that perspective -- talk about what we mean, or what you mean, by the mind.

PRIBRAM: Well, I don't like the term the mind, because it reifies -- that means it makes a thing of -- something that's a process. We pay attention, we see, we hear. Those are all mental processes, mental activities. But there isn't a thing called the mind. There might be something you want to call yourself, but the mind sort of makes something concrete out of something that's very multifaceted.

LINK TO ORIGINAL