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The Mind-body Problem and Cognitive Neuroscience: A Brief History and
Outlook
Alex Ball

 Abstract
Cognitive neuroscience investigates the relationship between mental processes (such as perception, attention, thought, and
memory) and physical states of the nervous system. This relationship gives rise to the mind-body problem, which has long
been the subject of debate in philosophy. Over the last century, discussion of the problem has been informed by a deluge of
empirical evidence from brain and mind sciences. While promising as a method of inquiry, cognitive neuroscience runs into an
exceptional difficulty in explaining how non-conscious physical systems gain the ability to have an internal, first-person
conscious experience that is characteristic of a mind. The challenge of this gap in explanation is commonly known as the “hard
problem” of consciousness. Unlike the conceivably resolvable “easy problems” for cognitive neuroscience, such as merely
correlating specific brain states with wakeful mental states, the “hard problem” does not have a readily apparent path to solving
it. This article will explore early conceptualizations of consciousness, how cognitive neuroscience and related fields have
changed how we think about conscious mental states, and what future possibilities there are for achieving a complete
understanding of the conscious mind.

The Challenge of Consciousness
The mind-body problem is a long-standing question in
philosophy: what exactly is the causal relationship between
the properties of the mind, particularly conscious experience,
and the physical brain? Consciousness, while a notoriously
contentious term, generally means possessing subjective
experience with varying levels of wakefulness. A person,
animal, or thing is said to be conscious when they are in
some capacity phenomenally aware of the contents of their
cognition, such as thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, and
emotions. Such contents are referred to as mental states in
philosophy of mind, and a person possesses conscious
mental states in wakeful life or when dreaming and is
seemingly absent of them when in deep dreamless sleep, a
coma (Laureys, 2005), or under sufficient general anesthesia
(Alkire et al., 2008; Pavel et al., 2020).

Conscious mental states are considered to be part of the
mind; they are mental phenomena. For cognitive
neuroscience, the challenge of the mind-body problem lies in
explaining the precise relationship between such mental
properties and the physical brain in an objective manner to

establish a unified scientific understanding of both mind and
body. Intuitively, the mental is separate from the physical.
There is an apparent difference between the third-person
objectivity of the world examined by the sciences and the
first-person subjective nature of conscious mental states,
which has historically led to the mind and body being thought
of as fundamentally separate (but related) phenomena. 

Historical Origin of the Problem and Mind-body
Dualism 
The mind-body problem may have earlier conceptual origins
in western philosophy, but the most influential early attempt
to resolve it came from rationalist philosopher René
Descartes. Descartes posited that mental and physical
activity occurred in a fundamentally separate, but connected
view called substance dualism. He claimed that there are two
fundamental aspects to reality: the substance of matter,
which is spatially extended in the world and includes the
physical body, and the substance of mind (or soul), which is
immaterial and non-spatial (Descartes, 1641/1986).
Descartes speculated that the pineal gland, recognized today
as a melatonin-secreting endocrine organ (Axelrod, 1974),
facilitated the interaction between mind and body as the “seat
of the soul.” While research into the pineal gland has failed to
support such a hypothesis of interaction, Descartes’ idea of
the body as a purely physical system paved the way for
further objective scientific inquiry into human biology, as
immaterial causes were localized to only mental activity and
the body largely lost its sacred status (Shapin, 2000). Mind-
body dualism continues to be a popular notion in folk
psychology. Regardless, the view has fallen out of favor as a
viable theory of the mind due to the lack of a coherent
explanation for interaction between substances and, chiefly,
in light of our modern understanding of the nervous system.

Figure 1. Schematic Diagram of GPCR Structure 
(Neumann et al., 2014).Figure 1. Schematic Diagram of

GPCR Structure (Neumann et al., 2014).

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Additionally, WM can be further explored at the genetic and
molecular levels. For example, Hsiao et al.’s (2020) findings
suggest that boosting or hampering the expression of the
gene Gpr12, which encodes the G-protein-coupled receptor
GPR12 in mammals, has substantial effects on WM. The
researchers associated a higher concentration of GPR12
proteins in the thalamus of mice with better performance in
WM tasks in mice, and found that performance suffered when
the encoding gene was underexpressed. GPR12 is an
orphan G-protein-coupled receptor, meaning its exact
endogenous ligand is presently unidentified, but the path to a
molecular understanding of WM is entirely conceivable. At
first glance, it seems possible for cognitive neuroscience to
provide an explanation of the entire causal relationship
between particular states of the brain and the functioning of
WM and countless other mental processes in the future.
However, in the above scientific theories, something vitally
important has been left out of the picture. WM is a conscious
mental process, and the phenomenal awareness of mental
content – one of the most basic properties that separate a
conscious state from a non-conscious one – has managed to
evade a reductive explanation. 

The Explanatory Gap 
Physicalism is often thought of in its reductive form, in which
a higher-level property (such as heat) can be functionally
explained in the terms of its lower-level properties (molecular
motion). A reductive physicalist theory of the mind maintains
that the basic elements of consciousness, subjective
conscious mental states, can be translated into lower-level
properties. A completely reductive understanding of the mind
needs to take mental phenomena and reduce them to the
language of biology, which can be further translated to
chemistry and physics, neatly fitting consciousness with our
best scientific theories about the world. Reductive physicalist
theories of the mind have increasingly come under fire,
including from other physicalists who propose that reducing
subjective experience to physical terms is an impossible task.
Such perspectives emphasize the epistemological limits of
science, irrespective of the ontological status of the mind as
physical. Nagel’s (1974) widely influential article “What is it
like to be a bat?" argues that consciousness means there is
“something that it is like” to undergo mental states for
organisms, such as bats, and that such an internal
experience is inaccessible to understanding from the outside.
According to Nagel, a human cannot understand what it is
like to be a bat just by understanding every physical fact
about the animal. Levine (1983) highlights that while we can
find certain biological correlates for conscious perceptions
such as pain, a scientific explanation for the actual subjective
feeling of something like the slow nociceptive pain that seems
to result from the activation of C-nerve fibers is nowhere to be
found. The central element to these arguments against
reductive physicalism is the idea of qualia: a conscious
mental state has a qualitative, subjective feeling that is
experienced, such as the redness of an apple or the
sourness of a lemon. Perceptions like color can be reduced
to physical explanations in the objective sense by
understanding electromagnetism and how the nervous
system converts photons into neural activity, but the

The Mind-Body Relationship Today:
Contributions From Cognitive Neuroscience 
Dominant philosophical theories of the underlying nature of
consciousness, and the most relevant for cognitive
neuroscience, are under the umbrella of physicalism: the
doctrine that reality, including the mind, fundamentally
consists of only physical things. Contrary to substance
dualism, only the material substance exists. The popularity of
physicalist theories of the mind can be attributed to the
empirical study of the brain indicating that the instantiation of
the mind is dependent on physical systems, and that its
mental processes can be disrupted by physical alteration. For
Descartes (1649/1989), the ability to think and to reason was
a facet of an immaterial and rational soul. Contrarily,
conscious mental processes have been shown to be just as
functionally indebted to the physical structure of the brain as
the unconscious regulation of the heartbeat, respiration, and
digestion. One such example is working memory (WM),
which is critical for the conscious manipulation of information. 

Neuroimaging techniques have discovered that the
frontoparietal network and regions such as Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas, the basal ganglia, the thalamus, and the
caudate nucleus variously activate depending on the WM
tasks performed (Chai et al., 2018). Lesions following
traumatic brain injury to such regions (often in the frontal
lobe) consistently impair WM tasks (Owen et al.,1990;
Barbey et al., 2013). 

Figure 2. Simplified illustration of Baddeley’s (2010)
multicomponent model of working memory, demonstrating multiple
cortical structures thought to be involved in various tasks (Chai et

al., 2018).

Figure 3. Highlighted regions of an fMRI scan display activity
during two different working memory tasks (Graner et al., 2013). 

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 explanation lacks subjective quality, instances of which are
called qualia. Trying to explain redness to a congenitally blind
person is fruitless because there is, supposedly, no
explanatory means to understand qualia without actually
experiencing them. If non-reductive accounts of the mind are
true, then the intractability of subjectivity is concerning for
reductive physicalism and broader hopes that cognitive
neuroscience can resolve the mind-body problem. 

The gap between explaining physical systems and explaining
the capacity for qualia is an important point of the
contemporary debate over the mind-body problem. Some
reject the commonsense idea of qualia, viewing the concept
as a category mistake that requires further progress in
neuroscience to truly understand (Churchland, 1985;
Dennett, 1988); others posit that qualia are (however
rudimentarily) a fundamental aspect of some or all physical
things (Strawson, 2017). Regardless, bridging the
explanatory gap is what Chalmers (1995) has coined “the
hard problem” of consciousness, which every complete
theory of mind must address in some capacity. The “easy
problems” of consciousness, according to Chalmers, are
those that are conceptually possible for a physicalist inquiry
into the mind, such as a complete understanding of only the
neural correlates of consciousness. As the above arguments
from philosophy of mind have demonstrated, finding a place
for the phenomenal awareness aspect of consciousness
alongside our reductive explanations of the natural world
seems to require a radical reconsideration of either qualia or
reality itself. 

Concluding remarks
Cognitive neuroscience has contributed to the debate
surrounding the mind-body problem by narrowing the realm
of possibility through the scientific study of the mind’s
relationship with the body. When it comes to consciousness,
cognitive neuroscience may only be capable of fully
explaining the far from trivial “easy problems,” leaving the
explanatory gap unbridged. The fundamental nature of the
mind and consciousness may always remain an unsolvable
mystery. Alternatively, the present difficulty in reconciling
reductive physicalism with certain properties of
consciousness may open the door to entirely new ways of
thinking about the mind that have yet to be known or even
conceptualized. Whether the mind-body problem can be
ultimately solved or not, cognitive neuroscience and related
fields provide valuable and practical insights into the mental
processes of the elusive conscious mind.

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Strawson, G. (2017). Physicalist panpsychism. In The
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