Which is more important - mind or body? Jason Karp: "Whether you are a mouse or a human, a sound body creates a sound mind"

I bet 10 grand Rojo does not have a friend who wrote for Hillary Clinton

FYI. This was a TedX talk not a Ted talk.

He's on the right track but the real truth is there is no difference between body and mind. False dichotomy.

I mean this literally. Meditate for as long as it takes - can you be conscious of only the inside of your head? No, consciousness is in the entire body. Only some types of thinking stuff can be pinpointed as in the head.

Well I certainly think there were slaves 300 years ago who might have been exhausted but still could have been depressed or anxious. They might have been anxious about getting whipped or raped, for instance. They might have been depressed about being slaves so their fatigue offered no immunity against depression. Maybe your friend wasn’t thinking about all of that as he displayed his brilliance.

Humans are evolved biological organisms. Mind and willpower are just fuzzy words from pre scientific thinking

You don't have a mind and you don't have willpower

You have a body and brain. You have genetic endowment, an environment, and an incredible complexity of nutrients and poisons coursing through your body and environment

Some people are lucky to be healthy and have a steady supply of things they need

Others not so much and they get strokes and brain tumors which completely changed their personality and ability to function

It's easy to spot nonsense when you're healthy and have a good supply of food and like-minded people around you

Try going to darfur and talking about mind and willpower... Or auschwitz,... Or Ethiopia in the 1980s... Or the suburbs around Kiev couple weeks ago... Or Dresden in world war II...

Try talking to a starving baby about willpower and mind... And you'll see how meaningful that gibberish is

Agreed. There is nothing "out of the box" nor illuminating coming from rojos great friend. Its just an ordinary thought.

Imagine how difficult life was 300 years ago. Shelter, food and water was the top priority of your day. If you became injured you had no therapist to help mend you. You were fkked. At night the fauna were at war. Thirty to forty times more voices in the woods with only one mission -- kill or be killed. You could imagine how one would be hunkered down over his desk with a feather dipping in the ink well, and writing stories about headless horseman and such.

Baths were rare and everyone stank. Everyone. They smell worse than those bums on the street or in the subway.

Life was hell. You didn't have time for anxiety or depression. You just survived somehow .... like everybody else.

I meant to say spout nonsense... Those poetic notions (mind or will power ) won't cure people of disease and they won't feed people and they won't help us understand the universe or human potential

Your understanding of History might be true for certain times...

But let's not forget that we have had incredibly advanced civilizations going back 5,000 years... Including the ability to have regular baths and pretty good sanitation and medical Care

Of course things would have ebbed and flowed and civilizations ran into problems

BBut egyptians, greeks, Romans, aztecs, Incas, not to mention dozens of more created some pretty sustained good living for many years

300 years? Try 100.

Spanish Flu was Covid x 10, and no vaccine. World War I. You could buy cocaine and heroin at the corner store, and everyone did. Wreck your car, and you're dead, or bleeding to death.

And the food, though better in a lot of ways, wasn't really ...

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Book Review: A Square Meal – Part I: Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s

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[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk] They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Gr…

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Huh? I’m sure anxiety and depression existed back then

My body is destroyed, but I have a healthy mind.

My brother has a healthy body, but his mind is destroyed.

I have a dignified life as a human being, he lives in unspeakable squalor.

The body is very important, but the mind is the tool of survival.

mind and body

Not Jason Karp, Jason Koop.

Oh wow. I’ll be darned it is Karp. Didn’t know that guy was still around.

carry on

Dude hasn't coached anyone of note. All hat, no cattle.

They would've had depression and anxiety but maybe just not put a name to it and obviously didn't seek out help for it either in the same way as some people do currently. As others have pointed out, when most of the day was spent trying to get enough food, stay warm and avoid being killed you wouldn't have much time for thoughts or ponderings. There also wouldn't have been the same amount of awareness (which is possibly a good thing IMO), it's all over social media, the internet, adverts, taught in school and so on. It's crazy to think how different it was. Living in a one room house, made of natural materials, with the animals inside in one corner overnight, fire in the middle. Food in a big pot on the fire. Cold. No windows maybe. No carpet, dirt floor? No running water, get water from the stream, no plumbing, sanitation, toilet, shower. And we're not even going back that far. We are living in such a tiny tiny percentage that has a good standard of living out of the whole history of humans, e.g. approx last 100 years (if that!) out of 200,000ish/etc. And going back 100 years was pretty dire. And a lot of people in the world don't have access to this. I'm talking about the majority of modern US/UK people on this website, obviously some people still don't have electricity, running water and so on.

It’s an interesting question, but I think, like some of the other posters, I reject the basic premise, which seems to assume Cartesian dualism. If you look at the work of many (most?) cognitive psychologists, the notion of a “mind” somehow divorced from the material body is pretty out of step with the science. What do we even mean by “mind”? Are we talking about the organ called the brain? If so, then we can be certain that the “mind” is actually part of the physical body (duh). Anxiety, depression, General dissatisfaction—these are sentiments caused by hormones. In short, our entire being is grounded in a material body. If we ascribe to a different definition of “mind” as the supposedly non-material sum of our consciousness and personality, then it’s still true that our very consciousness—our essential being—is a densely woven tapestry of our experiences (in a material world) and our genetics (also part of the body) and the millions of microorganisms that live on and inside us (we do, biologically speaking, contain multitudes).

But Rojo is making a more complex point, I think. How does the modern world condition us in ways that are different than the world of centuries past? Fossil fuels have liberated us from drudgery in ways that horrific chattel slavery did for a sliver of the population. Clean water, sanitation, germ theory—all of these things represent vast, vast improvements in pretty obvious and measurable ways. But, Rojo, I think your friend is pointing out something about the basic essence of a good life that might have gotten lost along the way for many people. Maybe what we (collectively) have lost is satisfaction in hard effort or a world that moved in more predictable, human-scale ways. A conservative would talk about it in terms of losing the bonds of community, a progressive might talk about in terms of the materially alienating features of industrial capitalism. Perhaps remedying both of those changes of the past two centuries would result in greater happiness all around. Of course, the existence of nuclear weapons, climate change, unhinged people who don’t care about anyone—all of these things pose legitimate concerns that can ratchet up anxiety (and the alarmism of mass media doesn’t help).

So, would lives of physical toil make us all happier? If that toil gave us purpose and connection to others and some perspective on our place in the world, then yes. But our physical labor won’t rid us of the legitimate anxieties that are responses to the uncertainties of life. In short, our anxieties and fears aren’t just in our “minds,” and they aren’t so easily cleared away by lives of hard labor.

IThree hundred years ago, millions of people migrated across the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas. These weren’t happy people. They were often worried or scared as they searched for opportunity in a land they knew little about. Relatively high Infant mortality meant that people routinely did the hardest thing a person can do. I imagine anxiety, depression, long-term grief, and survivor’s guilt plagued colonial North Americans.

So, perhaps things aren’t as good today as you imagine them to be and maybe people weren’t as mentally stable a few centuries ago as we’d like to think.

In summary: mind-body dualism makes no sense and the people of the present and the people of the past might be roughly the same when it comes to emotional anguish. And yet, exercise is good for us. A good hard tempo run puts things into perspective because the physical effects of running alter brain chemistry in good ways, and the act of running reinforces (or can reinforce) our connections to the world around us.

We used to be able to poop everywhere back in the old days and now we’re worried that Sedona high school track closes because of poop