60+ Aspects of the Human Mind, and Whether Brains Explain Them

Below is a table listing many aspects of the human mind. In the right column I consider whether brains help us explain such aspects of human mentality. 

Aspect of the Human Mind	Description	Is There a Brain Explanation?
Abstract thinking	Example: creating a new idea	No one understands how a brain could create an idea
Apparition sightings	An apparition may often be seen by more than one person, and many see an apparition of someone they did not know was dead, shortly before learning the person died at the same time (link)	All the better cases of apparition sightings are not explicable by brain activity, and cannot be credibly explained as hallucinations, with the sightings generally occurring to people who had no other hallucinatory experiences
Attention	An example is focusing on one person speaking in a room where ten are speaking	Eyes have a physical focusing mechanism, but brains seem to have no such mechanism, lacking any moving visible parts
Appreciation	This includes the ability to appreciate natural beauty, and things such as the ability to appreciate great works of art and literature	There is no brain explanation and no evolutionary explanation for appreciation
Auditory Perception	Perceiving some sound you heard	A region of the brain seems to aid this
Belief origination	A new belief may arise instantly	No one has any understanding of how a belief could ever arise from a change in a brain state, and there is no evidence that a brain changes when someone forms a belief
Belief persistence	Once formed a belief may persist for 60+ years	Given rapid protein turnover and the relatively short lifetimes of dendritic spines and synapses, lifelong beliefs cannot be explained as brain effects
Calculation, normal	Examples include counting, multiplication, probability estimation	Despite people constantly comparing the brain to a computer, the brain has none of the main characteristics of a computer; so normal calculation cannot be explained as brain activity
Calculation, exceptional	There are many known examples of math marvels who could compute with enormous speed and accuracy, such as autistic calendar calculators	Extremely fast and accurate math calculation cannot be explained as brain activity, particularly given the relatively slow average speed of brain signals (caused by factors such as cumulative synaptic delay), and the relatively low reliability of synaptic transmission (estimated to be as low as 10% to 50%)
Clairvoyance	We have two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance, with serious scientific study beginning in 1825, and producing very strong cases described here, here, here, here and here	Obviously not explicable by brain activity
Concentration	The ability to mentally focus on some particular topic or problem	Eyes have a physical focusing mechanism, but brains seem to have no such mechanism
Comprehension	This includes the ability to understand very subtle concepts such as philosophical theories	There is no understanding of how a brain could understand anything
Consciousness		Scientists cannot even explain the most simple consciousness
Creativity	Includes common creativity and heights of creativity, shown in geniuses such as Picasso, Shakespeare, and Wagner	There is no understanding of how the brain could cause creativity
Curiosity	Can be a major motivator of human behavior, but has no survival value benefit	There is no brain explanation
Desire	The longing to possess something you do not possess, or to experience something you have never experienced or do not experience as much as you wish	There is no brain explanation for desires not involving sex, appetite or thirst
Dreaming		There is no brain explanation for dreaming, and experiments such as the Dream Catcher experiment show that brain scans are insufficient to predict whether someone was dreaming
Emotions – fear, anger		It is claimed that there are brain structures or chemicals that can contribute to fear or anger
Emotions – guilt		No brain explanation for guilt
Emotions – hate		No brain explanation for hate that persists for years
Emotions – joy		No brain explanation
Emotions – love		No brain explanation for love that persists for years
Emotions – sadness		Despite endless efforts, no brain basis for depression has been found. Frequent "chemical imbalance" claims have been debunked.
Emotions- wonder	Wonder or awe is a subtle emotion occurring when someone encounters grand or impressive but not threatening.	No brain explanation.
Empathy, compassion and sympathy	Often involves the subtle skill of "putting yourself in someone else shoes," and imagining how they feel	No brain explanation
Esthetic abilities	Includes the ability to enjoy art and music	No brain explanation
ESP (telepathy)	The evidence for ESP (psi) is very massive, and includes a wealth of very convincing experimental evidence and a huge amount of anecdotal evidence (discussed in the 66 posts you can read here by continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right)	No brain explanation
Fascination	May be healthy or unhealthy (as in the case of obsessive-compulsive disorder)	No brain explanation for syndromes such as obsessive-compulsive disorder
HSAM (hyperthymesia)	Rare people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory can remember every day of their adult lives	No brain explanation. The memory abilities of ordinary people are not explicable by brain activity, and HSAM cases multiply the explanatory shortfall.
Happiness	The biologically superfluous state of enjoying your existence	No brain explanation
Hypnosis	The 19th century produced endless very detailed accounts of the most inexplicable mental effects occurring during hypnosis (summarized here).	No brain explanation
Humor, laughter		No brain explanation
Insight	An extremely subtle and high-level mental ability allowing someone to perceive the essential nature of some phenomena with many forms, or a likely common cause of a large class of events	No brain explanation
Interest	A person's interests (topics they are interested in) may last for 50 years.	No brain explanation. High component turnover in the brain makes very long-lasting interests beyond any brain explanation.
Imagination, normal	Includes the ability to visualize things you've never seen, such as a big room filled with pizza pies, from floor to ceiling	No brain explanation
Imagination, exceptional	Includes the ability to imagine realities vastly different from any humans live in, such as strange worlds of fantasy and science fiction	No brain explanation, and no evolutionary explanation
Introspection	Someone's ability to ponder and analyze his own feelings, moods, goals and motivations	No brain explanation
Mediumship	Some spectacular  examples well-documented by scientists and doctors include examples of mental mediumship and physical mediumship (see here, here, here, and here for examples)	No brain explanation
Memory formation – episodic		No brain explanation. No neuroscientist can explain how life experiences could ever be stored as neural states or synapse states. "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?"
Memory formation – conceptual, factual	Examples include all the facts and skills you learned in school	No brain explanation. No neuroscientist can explain how school-learned knowledge could ever be stored as neural states or synapse states. "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
Memory formation – instantaneous	Humans can instantly form new memories. If you learn your child or parent died, you will instantly form a new memory that will last the rest of your life.	No brain explanation.  All of the sketchy, hand-waving attempts to explain memory formation by brain activity appeal to processes (such as synapse strengthening) that would require at least minutes, and probably many minutes.
Memory loss: Alzheimer's disease, amnesia	Amnesia can sometimes occur without corresponding brain injury	Not well-explained by brain effects. As discussed here, many Alzheimer's patients have healthy brains, and many people with good memories have damaged brains.
Memory persistence, lifelong		No brain explanation. The short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the high component turnover in the brain should make it impossible for a brain to store memories for decades
Memory persistence, despite massive loss of brain tissue	Surgically removing half of brains in hemispherectomy operations does not seem to cause loss of acquired memories, and there are countless cases of little memory damage after very large brain damage	No brain explanation. Appeals to "plasticity" (one part of the brain taking over the job of a lost part of the brain) do not explain dramatic cases in which acquired memories persist despite massive brain tissue loss
Memory recall, instantaneous	Example: you hear the name of some obscure historical figure you haven't heard about in years, but instantly remember some facts about that person	The lack of any addresses or sorting in the brain means instant recall cannot be credibly explained as brain activity. "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
Memory recall, eidetic	Some people have exceptional memory sometimes called photographic memory or eidetic memory (see here for examples)	Eidetic memory examples multiply the failure of the brain to explain human memory
Memory recall, massive sequential recall	Examples: many  Moslem scholars can recall the entire Quran with 6000+ verses; Aitken and JB  memorized epic poems of about 10,000 lines; and Hamlet actors can recall 1,422 lines in one evening.  Young Leste May Williams memorized 12,000+ biblical verses including the whole New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, a work with only 63,719 words. An old newspaper article says this: " 'Far more noteworthy,'  thinks American Medicine, 'is the memory of an expert piano player, who will play an entire season's concerts without a note of printed music before him. His memory is so perfect that hundreds of thousands of notes must be at the orderly and instant disposal of the will, and this is combined with a multiplicity of synchronous recollections of timbre, tempo, expression, etc.' "	No brain explanation, as discussed in my post "Why Brains Are Not Suitable for Storing Long Sequences Like Humans Remember."
Morality		No brain explanation
Muscle skill learning	Examples: learning to swim, learning to ride a bike	May be partially explicable by imagining a strengthening of certain brain areas used when such skills were acquired
Navigation	Example: your ability to navigate back to your home from some spot far away	No brain explanation. Claims of "place cells" in the hippocampus are legends of neuroscience, not supported by well-replicated studies using adequate study group sizes.
Near-death experiences		No brain explanation. Near-death experiences are commonly very vivid experiences occurring when the heart has stopped and brain waves have flatlined. According to "brains make minds" ideas, such experiences should be impossible.
Out-of-body experiences	In such experiences a person will often report viewing his body from a position outside of his body	No brain explanation. According to "brains make minds" ideas, such experiences should be impossible.
Pain (physical)		The reception of pain signals is explicable by pain sensors in the central nervous system
Pain (mental)	Example: anguish about a poor choice you made	No brain explanation
Personality	Humans may have particular long-standing mental tendencies that tend to persist for decades (for example, a person may tend throughout adulthood to be shy or outgoing or boastful or modest or adventurous or timid)	No brain explanation. The short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the high component turnover in the brain should make it impossible for someone to have stable personality characteristics lasting throughout adulthood. See my post "Study Finds No Robust Link Between Brain Structure and Personality."
Pleasure (physical)		Gustatory and sexual pleasure is partially explicable by sensors in the central nervous system
Pleasure (mental)	Example: the pleasure you get from reading a good book or thinking about a pleasant outcome in your future	No brain explanation
Recognition, visual	Example: recognizing a face as belonging to some particular person	No brain explanation. Claims of a "fusiform face area" helping to explain face recognition are not-well founded, and are based on low-quality, poorly replicated studies.
Recognition, verbal	Being able to recognize the meaning of 100,000+ words in the language you speak	No brain explanation
Selfhood, self-awareness	You have a single unified self, and feel like a single person, not like some concentration of nerve impulses	No explanation of why two brain hemispheres each consisting of billions of neurons would give rise to a unified sense of self. When the nerve fibers connecting the hemispheres are severed, there remains a single self, not two selves (contrary to what we would expect from the idea that the brain makes the mind).
Sexuality		No brain explanation for many aspects of sexuality, such as why one person may be gay
Social behavior, social needs	Humans are extremely social, forming social groups of many sizes, including simple two-person marriages, families with children, clubs, national organizations, nations, etc.	No brain explanation
Speech abilities		Only partially explicable by muscle activity aided by brains.  The ability of people to speak as fast as they do is beyond any brain explanation, particularly given the slow average speed of brain signals.
Spirituality	A very important factor in the behavior of large fractions of the human population	No brain explanation
Volition (will)	Volition may be physical (deciding to move in a particular direction) or mental (a decision that you will do something in the future)	No brain explanation. Neuroscientists cannot explain how even the simplest of decisions can occur.
Writing abilities	Average humans can type accurately at a speed of about 60 words per minute, with some humans reaching speeds of more than 200 words per minute	While the muscle movement occurring during writing is aided by brains, there is no brain explanation of how humans are able to write as fast and accurately as they can write, particularly given the relatively slow average speed of brain signals (caused by factors such as cumulative synaptic delay), and the relatively low reliability of synaptic transmission (estimated to be as low as 10% to 50%).

The thorough list above helps show the dehumanizing and depersonalizing folly of trying to describe minds mainly with the word "consciousness," which is a type of shadow-speaking in which human beings are depicted as mere shadows of what they are.  We do not have any mere "problem of consciousness," but instead have a vastly bigger problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences in all their diverse richness, an incredibly rich reality far beyond any explanation that merely refers to brains. 

The idea that most of the aspects of mind listed above are top-down effects arising from some mysterious external reality is necessary because of the many severe failures of bottom-up explanations.  But such an idea may seem unthinkable merely because we have been "bottom-up brainwashed" all our lives to believe that mind must be a bottom-up effect with a merely molecular explanation. To gain some insight on how we have been conditioned to favor a bad type of explanation, let us consider a hypothetical planet rather different from our own: a planet in which the atmosphere is much thicker, and always filled with clouds that block the sun. 

Let's give a name to this perpetually cloudy planet in another solar system, and call this imaginary entity planet Evercloudy.  Let's imagine that the clouds are so thick on planet Evercloudy that its inhabitants have never seen their sun.  The scientists on this planet might ponder two basic questions:

(1) What causes daylight on planet Evercloudy?
(2) How is it that planet Evercloudy stays warm enough for life to exist?

Having no knowledge of their sun, the top-down explanation for these phenomena, the scientists would probably come up with very wrong answers. They would probably speculate that daylight and planetary warmth are bottom-up effects.  They might spin all kinds of speculations such as hypothesizing that daylight comes from photon emissions from rocks and dirt, and that their planet was warm because of heat bubbling up from the hot center of their planet.  By issuing such unjustified speculations, such scientists would be like the scientists on our planet who wrongly think that mind can be explained as a bottom-up effect bubbling up from molecules. 

Facts on planet Evercloudy would present very strong reasons for rejecting such attempts to explain daylight and warm temperatures on planet Evercloudy as bottom-up effects. For one thing, there would be the fact of nightfall, which could not easily be reconciled with any such explanations. Then there would be the fact that the dirt and rocks at the feet below the scientists of Evercloudy would be cold, not warm as would be true if such a bottom-up theory of daylight and planetary warmth were correct.  But we can easily believe that the scientists on planet Evercloudy would just ignore such facts, just as scientists on our planet ignore a huge number of facts arguing against their claims of a bottom-up explanation for mind (facts such as the fact that people are just as smart and still maintain their memories when you remove half of their brains in hemispherectomy operations, the fact that the proteins in synapses have very short lifetimes, the fact that people who lost the great majority of their brains due to disease can be above average intelligence, and the fact that very large numbers of people report floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from meters away, which should be impossible if minds are produced by brains). 

Just as the phenomena of daylight and planetary warmth on planet Evercloudy could never credibly be explained as bottom-up effects, but could be credibly explained as effects coming from some mysterious unseen reality unknown to the scientists of planet Evercloudy who had never seen their sun, the phenomena of mind on planet Earth can never be credibly explained as bottom-up effects coming from mere molecules or brain components, but can be credibly explained as top-down effects coming from some mysterious unknown reality we cannot currently fathom. The minds of humans must come not from some part less than a human (a brain), but from some reality greater than any human.