In The Mystery of the Mind, famous Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield makes the following striking observation. When he probed the human brain with an electrical stimulus, the patient/subject (who remained conscious during the open-brain exploration/operation) told him what awareness the probe had provoked. Sometimes a childhood memory would come to the patient’s awareness, another time perhaps a sensation of being touched or an emotion was evoked. However, when Penfield touched a part of the brain that made the subject move a limb or recall a particular childhood experience (the so-called memory tapes that transactional analysis has used so extensively) the subject would respond, “You did that…I didn’t!” No matter where the stimulation was applied to the brain the subject always knew that the doctor had caused the resulting reaction. What was striking to Penfield was not only the memory tapes, but the “I”

Try as he would, Penfield could not find that “I” with his electrical probe. In other words, he could not find a place in the brain where, when stimulated, the subject actually believed “I did that”…that the subject himself/herself was the cause of the consequent reaction. Penfield concluded that this aspect of the mind, this “I”, dwells in a “separate essence,” distinct from all other aspects of the brain. It is, he claimed, this “independent essence” of the mind that enables it to be the controlling power over the brain itself.

Although Penfield was criticized by colleagues for promulgating this sort of hypothesis (a hypothesis which, by the way, is finding more confirmation today), this remarkable observation has far-reaching consequences. Mind and brain function as a unit…but what is this “mind” which so many of us use in our formulas, “body, mind and spirit?” What is this essence that knows apart from its material substance?