Is The Brain A Muscle?
Takeaway Points:
The classical mind/body dualism philosophy is a bit inaccurate when you think about the numerous ways in which the body and the mind are clearly intricately connected.
Training for the body, and training for the mind, are remarkably similar - and our bodies and minds react in similar ways to these various types of stimuli.
I don’t think it’s productive or meaningful to think of mental training as being significantly different from physical training.
A long time ago, I used to write a lot about how I feel that mind/body dualism is a bit misguided and outdated. Admittedly, this is nothing new for philosophy, which has been arguing that theory to death, and which I would say has long since moved past it.
But the theory still has a lot of hold in the common imagination, where it gets trotted out as a kind of justification for various religious and supernatural beliefs. If the mind and the body are separate, distinct entities, that makes it easy for people to rationalize the possibility of the spirit surviving without the body.
I don’t think it’s an accurate theory for describing the world. As someone who has a decade of personal training experience, experience with lifting weights, and personal research, I have a very good sense about how everything tends to work. The body is a set of complex systems all designed to work together in order to achieve a variety of normal, everyday functions.
It’s very easy to mess with these delicate systems. Something as simple as changing the clocks for daylight savings time can wreak havoc on our physical and mental health. Likewise, the effect of changing time zones frequently will mess with us. Our bodies like to get into normal circadian rhythms and routines, and tend to function best when we don’t deviate from them too often. Major life events can cause our habits to spiral out of control, causing us to find ourselves stuck in patterns of behavior that we would previously find difficult, impossible, or potentially even undesirable.
Likewise, it’s clear that our body has serious impacts on our mind and the way that it functions. When we think, our thoughts are constantly limited and managed by biases, emotions, and environmental factors. When surrounded by loud noise, we become irritable - when we get hungry, our thoughts will naturally gravitate towards food and how to get it - when we experience pain, we think about it until it goes away or until something more interesting manages to overpower our attention - in the case of the loss of a limb, the brain experiences phantom limb syndrome as a way of trying to cope with the fact that the brain was used to having a certain mental model of the body, and now that model is wrong.
In short, I don’t think that we can think of the rest of our body as being separate from our brain. A hand may be less immediately essential, in that you can lose a hand without dying immediately, but the body exists as a kind of harmonized unit, with all its parts working together to create a greater whole - I don’t think we can really think of a brain, or consciousness, as being separate from that.
Is the brain a muscle?
Well, obviously not. It doesn’t meet the classical qualification for the kinds of things muscles do - muscles contract to create movement. The brain, obviously, doesn’t.
But the purpose of the question is to get at something more fundamental - in what ways do the brain and the muscle act similarly? In what ways can learning about one, teach us more about the other? How is the brain like a muscle?
I think there’s a lot of crossover, realistically.
How do muscles behave? Muscles can complete tasks, use energy in doing so, can get exhausted from repeated use, and then require a recovery period before they can be used to full effect again. During the recovery period, the muscles adapt to handle further stress, and thus are more prepared for future workouts. If you overdo it, you may find that you injure yourself or exhaust yourself so much that it hinders the rest of your day. Your body doesn’t like to sit down or sit still for too long, which causes it to atrophy and has negative health effects over time.
How does the brain behave? Your brain can complete tasks, uses energy in doing so (focused mental activity burns calories!), can get exhausted from repeated use, and then requires a recovery period before it can be used in full effect again. High stress situations place great strain on the mind, and require a longer period of rest and relaxation. We can’t all be turned up to 10 all the time - we need to veg out in front of the television, or revert to comforting, mindless, easy, or routine tasks, in order to let our brains recharge. If you overdo it, over long periods of time, it will lead to mental upset and burnout. Even the most mentally stimulated people are constantly finding ways to relax and recover. Your brain also doesn’t like to be without stimulation for too long, which causes serious negative effects - for example, solitary confinement tends to wreak havoc on prisoners’ mental states, in large part because of the lack of interaction with other humans.
In many ways, the two are somewhat similar. “Overtraining”, the bogeyman of the lifter, refers to a state in which the lifter becomes burnt out due to high volumes of training - but the effects more closely resemble the same psychological burnout we see with people who overdo it with more “mental” work. The things which are good for the body (periodic stimulation, rest, recovery, and adaptation) are essentially similar to the things which are good for the mind.
Additionally, there’s the ways in which mental and physical training are similar. If you want to learn a new skill, for example, a new language - you have to regularly practice, focus on consistency, not overdo it, stick with it in the long run, vary your training a bit to keep everything interesting and meaningful, be resilient to failures, and make your training harder and more intensive as you get better. This isn’t too fundamentally different from the way that you get better at exercise - the only difference being, of course, that the kind of stimulation and stress you experience, and the way you experience it, is a bit different.
Very often, the mental aspect of physical training is overlooked, even though we have plenty of research demonstrating the ways that the body and the mind are intricately connected. The things which are bad for the mind are often bad for our workouts - and the things which are good for our minds are often good for our workouts. An often-overlooked aspect of training and coaching is simply how much of it involves managing the schedules and mental states of clients to help them achieve their desired goals. Training our bodies helps our bodies to process and manage energy, which keeps our minds sharp longer, in addition to the fact that it simply helps us stay alive longer and avoid many age-related aches, pains, and other forms of decline.
I don’t really think of the two as separate. I see training of the mind and the body as extensions of the same concept.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.
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