Mysteries of the mind

What is mind? It is the part of a person that thinks, feels, remembers and reacts. The mind is actually the activity of the brain. The brain is one of the most powerful and complex organs in the human body weighing roughly about three pounds with convolutions of gray and white matter with neurons running here and there. It is just a handful organ, but it is so mysterious that nobody could predict its working process.

There are many mysteries of the mind like dreams, extrasensory perception or ESP, hypnosis, brainwashing or mind control, etc. Let's look into the above mentioned one by one.

Dream, what is a dream? It is basically a series of thoughts, images, and sensations that occur in a person's mind during the sleep. Can we predict a dream? Like, say, I am going to see this tonight and that the next night and so on. Is it possible for us to do that? No, never. Oneirologists have done various studies and researches on it and each one of them has their own theory, but nothing has been proved for sure due to the enormous nature of the mind. The mind is an ocean and what we are trying to learn is just handful only.

One very interesting story of a dream is that of a mother and son. This mother kept on having dreams of an air crash that her son was going to have and she never let him use their aircraft even though he wanted to experience flying and he loved to fly up in the air. After her death, he wanted to try flying and he did board an airplane even though his family opposed. He was scared too, but reluctantly he tried it and he died in an air crash.

ESP, extrasensory perception, it is the ability to perceive the past or the future events without the use of the known senses. It is the sixth sense. My college lecturer told me about an incident that happened to her friend. A person with a high ESP told her that at the age of 24 she will get married, at the age of 28, she will have a son, at the age of 35, she will build a house, at the age of 50, her son will get married and at the age of 52, she will die. Everything happened the way he had said exactly at the same age, and then she started nearing 52. She called all her friends and relatives for her 52nd birthday and told them that she was going to die. She bid adieu to everybody and waited for her death day. But to everyone's surprise, she did not die at all. She is still alive at the age of 80 playing with her great-grandchildren.

Hypnosis also is known as hypnotherapy is the stage in which we have the extreme focus and concentration. Researchers have shown that whatever happens from our birth is recorded in our brain and even though we know everything we do not remember them at all. By hypnotic therapy, we can diagnose a disease, cure the ailment and see to it, it does not return back, etc. How powerful human mind should be? For the past 200 years, people have been trying to unfold this mystery of the mind with respect to hypnosis but nobody has proved it fully.

Brain washing or mind control is the attempt of changing one's thoughts and beliefs against their wishes. During the Korean war American prisoners of war were brainwashed and out of more than 20,000 soldiers only 21 responded and never returned back to America after they were freed. This is just a meager number and how resistant and patriotic the other remaining soldiers would have been being the biggest mystery of all.

Whatever we have discussed is just a small bit from a huge giant jigsaw puzzle of how the mind actually works.