A recent Instagram post shared by digital creator Amar Singh features Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi explaining the root cause of fear and anxiety in modern people. Shi Heng Yi states, ‘the problem is the mind’, and he proposes the solution as ‘learning more, what is the mind’. He suggests that by better understanding ‘what the mind actually is’, people can begin to access and change what is troubling them.

This suggestion seems simplistic at first—worries are naturally products of the mind—yet it begs the question Shi Heng Yi poses. When challenged to define what the mind is, it’s not easily done. The mind is, perhaps, the thinking self—but what is it made of? A simple search yields a definition of the mind as ‘a set of faculties’ including ‘thought, imagination, memory, will and sensation’, which are responsible for ‘mental phenomena’ such as ‘perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention and emotion’—all of which are generally understood to be features of consciousness.

Psychologist Gregg Henriques proposes a physical understanding of the mind to ‘ground’ these aspects of consciousness, which have generated a dualism known as the ‘mind-body (MB) problem’—the tendency to view the mind and brain-body as distinct, when they are not. According to Henriques, a Unified Theory of Psychology (UT) serves to reconcile this dualism through a ‘computational theory of mind’, which posits the nervous system as ‘an information processing system’.

Henriques offers a useful analogy to explain this unified theory of what the mind is:

We can now conceive of ‘the mind’ as the flow of information through the nervous system, and this flow of information can be conceptually separated from the biophysical matter that makes up the nervous system. To see how we can consider the separation of the information from the actual nervous system itself, think of a book. The book's mass, its temperature, and other physical dimensions can now be considered as roughly akin to the brain. Then think about the information content (ie. the story the book tells or claims it makes). In the computational theory, that is akin to the mind. The mind, then, is the information instantiated in and processed by the nervous system.

If the mind is information processed by the body, it follows that how we care for our bodies is potentially the key to changing that mental information.

This scientific understanding may or may not be what Shi Heng Yi had in mind… but it’s a good place to start.