I have attempted to develop insights into the role that language has played in the development of human thought and activity by combining ideas on the nature and function of language, the concept of bifurcation from chaos theory, and Merlin Donald’s notions of evolutionary psychology. Building on these ideas I would like to tackle the age-old question of the relationship of the human mind and the brain. For some psychologists this is a non-problem as they believe that the brain and the mind are synonymous, just two different words to describe the same phenomena, one derived from biology, the other from philosophy. For others there is a difference. Some define the mind as the seat of consciousness, thought, feeling, and will. Those processes of which we are not conscious, such as the regulation of our vital organs, the reception of sense data, reflex actions, and motor control, on the other hand, are not activities of our mind but functions of our brain.

I believe that there is no objective way to resolve these two different points of view but that a useful distinction can be made between the mind and the brain based on our dynamic-systems model of language as the bifurcation from concrete percept-based thought to abstract concept-based thought. Therefore, I assume that the mind came into being with the advent of verbal language and, hence, conceptual thought. Verbal language extended the effectiveness of the human brain and created the mind. Language is a tool, and all tools, according to McLuhan, are extensions of the body that allow us to use our bodies more efficiently. I believe that language is a tool that extended the brain and made it more effective thus creating the human mind, which I have termed the extended mind. I have expressed this idea in terms of the equation: mind = brain + language.

The human mind is the verbal extension of the brain, a bifurcation of the brain which vestigially retains the perceptual features of the hominid brain while becoming capable of abstract conceptual thought. It also represents, for me, the final bifurcation of hominids from the archaic form of Homo Sapien into the full-fledged human species Homo sapiens sapiens. Humans are, therefore, the only species to have developed verbal language and also to have experienced mind. This is not to deny that our ancestors, the earlier forms of hominids, experienced thought and consciousness. Their thought patterns, however, were purely percept-based and their brains functioned as percept-processing engines operating without the benefit of the abstract concepts that only words can create and language can process. It follows that animals have brains but no minds and that the gap between humans and animals is that only humans possess verbal language and mind.