 The brain-mind problem has been the subject of Western philosophical analysis for many centuries starting with Descartes. So what is the difference between the mind, the conscious experiences, and thoughts that we have? And the brain, which is a biological and neurological entity. How do they interact and influence each other? There are many different views on this. One prominent view is that the brain phenomena involves activity in a particular part of the brain, while the mind represents the activity of the whole brain. A functionalist perspective, on the other hand, has argued that biology is insufficient to explain and understand consciousness, and instead, we should be looking at how consciousness influences behavior, that is, thinking of consciousness as a completely independent activity. More recently, the information theoretic approach has argued that subjective experience is connected to a brain process. Does this mean that neuroscience might one day allow us to actually see thoughts? Neuroscientific methods allow us to see what's happening in the brain during activities like storing and recovering information. We can see that different parts of the brain become active when individuals perform various activities. These are biological functions that relate to brain architecture. The question scientists are now focused on is how specific brain states map onto or predict particular thought processes and behavior. Currently, we have some strong leads, but it's not something we have a definitive answer for yet. The brain-mind question is deeply metaphysical. It has a long history dating back to even before the Greek philosophers, and we still talk about the mind and the brain. Presently, there is an argument that we should only concern ourselves with objectively verifiable scientific phenomena. Therefore, the brain is all there is, and mental processes are reducible to brain processes. But for me, that doesn't really resonate. A complete and satisfying description of the universe requires some recognition, I think, of subjective phenomenal consciousness that isn't accessible to external objective scientific study. There is something about experiences that are mine and experiences that are yours, our private consciousness. Okay, Peter, can you tell me what is mental architecture, and how does this differ from brain architecture? That's a fascinating question, Robin, and on some levels it gets a little bit philosophical, but it also is very practical on other levels. Brain architecture is in a nutshell the process of how the brain develops into an intricate system and connect with other brains. As we know these days, brains are not a unit that we can study by itself. Brains are interconnected as we are discussing a particular topic. Your brain is having an effect on my brain, and at the end of this discussion, my brain will be slightly different because of us engaging. So we have an effect on each other. Which is very exciting on educational levels, but on a different level sometimes a little bit daunting because it also indicates that who we are as educators on some levels is more important than what we know. It's the level of engaging that forms that question and the sense of I want to learn more from this person, I want to engage more. All of this is part of our neural architecture. Neural architecture is this process of how the brain develops over years and eventually form the unique neural networks that we can describe as me. Having said this, we are a little bit more than just fibers and wires. There's a part of who we are that cannot just be measured in terms of neural chemicals or neural structures or neural networks. And that's what we refer to as the mental side of who we are, the idea of a mind. There's huge debates in whether there is a mind or not, whether it's all just neurochemistry or there's more. Probably one of the most prominent neuroscientists, Nobel Laureate Professor Eric Kandel, he talks about the architecture of the brain as a unique set of connections, but he still maintains that the mind is synchronized with these connections, but it's still slightly different. If you, for example, or I have some atrophy in the brain or there's a physical accident, it may have an effect on the mind as well. But it doesn't mean when a particular part of the brain has been compromised that we've lost our minds. So there's this interplay between the two. What this means in practical terms is we're not engaged just in the brains of young people, we're engaged with people. And working with a student is a whole package of the student within his or her environment. And all of that shapes who he or she is and shapes our structure. So education becomes a very important role player in facilitating a connectivity within this neural structure that eventually has an impact on the mind of this young person.