[attributed to Albert Einstein, although the authorship of this quote is still uncertain.
Some sources attribute it to Thomas Robert Dewar (Scottish baron and entrepreneur known for the production of whisky), others to James Dewar (British physicist and chemist, researcher of vacuum in the laboratory who carried out the liquefaction of gases considered non-liquefiable and worked alongside F.A. Abel on the synthesis of the explosive dust called ‘Cordite’), who both lived in a similar historical period]
The phrase is of such clear and disarming evidence that it somehow leaves us astonished and enchanted at the same time.
If we think about our mind, our parachute, a small doubt starts to niggle, lasting just a moment and as light as a breath – is it open? Is it open enough so that we can save ourselves from the fall? And immediately afterwards, does a tenuous trace of will not manifest itself in us, one that requires an awakening, a reactivation of our energies and strengths for our personal progress, in the best sense of the word ‘progress’, the one focused on the fullest realization of human existence and the true, successful meaning of life?
Man’s mind contains intellectual and psychic faculties that are absolutely individual and complex; his nature is the object of such interest that it feeds a debate that philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists and psychoanalysts have cultivated over the course of the centuries through to the present day.
How can we represent, even minimally, rivers of thought and studies and research projects that have determined those philosophical, psychoanalytic, evolutionary, cognitivist and many other mental models proposed thus far? Great and deserving minds of mankind have dedicated themselves to it for the sake of Knowledge (to name just a few: Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, Pierre Cabanis, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Gerald Edelman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Umberto Galimberti).
And despite all this, the human mind remains a mystery to man, since nothing that has been investigated and then represented, however completely and accurately, has an irrefutable character.
There remain, therefore, many areas of future progress, stimulating those who will nourish personal motivation in the boundless fields of science and knowledge because, as the great Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran said: “The significance of man is not what he attains, but rather in what he longs to attain.”
Speaking of the mind, we would like to devote some attention to one of its most unexplained and inexplicable attributes: creativity.
This term is used to indicate the cognitive capacity of the mind to create and invent. Among the innumerable definitions that are given, we would like to recall the one enunciated by the mathematician Henri Poincaré, which arouses great curiosity every time: “Creativity is the combination of existing elements and new connections that will be useful.” Creativity is so simply defined that it is even clear that it is one of the most peculiar characteristics of the mind, to the point of being considered a distinctive emblem and a rare quality where present in man.
For science fiction writer Brian Wilson Aldiss, it has the functional connotations of problem solving: “Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem”.
For the American writer and applied linguist Ursula K. Le Guin: “The creative adult is the child who has survived” meaning that in order to be creative, it is necessary in some way to maintain the characteristics of a child’s ‘conscience’.
Creativity even took on the characteristics of ethics in the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr. who, in defence of the civil rights of African Americans (and of man himself by extension), said: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness” a practical assertion that love for one’s neighbour has creative, fruitful connotations in itself.
Finally, after having dealt with this subject so briefly and with undeserved superficiality, what always amazes us is the spectacular complexity of the human being and their enchanting mind: “Often, left free, an existence that is not constantly stirred by the anxiety of having to produce lets its thoughts decant spontaneously, slowly settling to the bottom and crystallizing, at times, in forms of rare beauty” (quoted from the book ‘Il gioco delle tre carte’ (‘Three-card Monte’) by the Italian writer Marco Malvaldi).
American scientist Robert George Jahn, a brilliant engineer and physicist as well as a professor of aerospace science (who died in November 2017), spent nearly thirty years of his life trying to unite ‘heart and mind’ in modern science. Like him, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Max Plank also believed that science and spirituality were two sides of the same coin.
And we, who can still certify what a sidereal mystery the human mind is today, ask ourselves whether the ‘materialist’ scientific reference models are somehow limited when it comes to explaining something as complex as our mind?
