Healing the ‘Split’ between science and the humanities.

or almost 100 years (since Wm James) the social sciences have ignored, suppressed, and neglected personal consciousness.

Everybody has a mind and a brain, but we have a tendency to divide the world between the two. Half of the content words in English are “mind words” — they refer to conscious experiences, like seeing, hearing, understanding; acting, deciding and willing; loving, hating and forgiving. But since 1900 scientists in psychology, biology, and education tried to reduce mind words to physical words. With the rise of methods to observe the living brain in more and more depth and detail, we can now see neural activity revealing how the brain makes mind possible. The old-fashioned argument of mind versus brain is gone.

But we aren’t yet used to thinking that our mind-brain is one, single, organic unity. MBSci believes that the old mind-body split is dehumanizing, as if we can think about human beings as nothing but objects-in-the-world, rather than being feeling, experiencing, and willing minds. We are both.

The goal of MBSci is to support education, communication and participation in the emerging, unified mind-brain sciences. Thus we believe that humanists, artists and musicians stand on an equal basis with psychologists, brain scientists, and biologists. The split between science and art is imaginary. We learn from each other.

Natalie Geld and Bernard Baars, MBSci co-founders, have pursued this vision for years, with enthusiastic support from others.

For 24 centuries before that (in Western and Asian history) consciousness was at the very center of human concerns.

In science today we are in a comeback, but the curriculum and the institutions are still behind.

It’s high time to heal the split between the two cultures of “mind” vs. “brain” education.