A case of mistaken identity?

Gerry stood at the front of the lecture room and tapped the laminated wall chart with his index finger.

"Now, where exactly do you think the mind is located?" he asked. "Can anybody tell me?"

We peered at the diagram, a room full of psychology students, mostly teenaged, mostly with backcombed hair, mostly dressed in army surplus shirts, most of which had tiny German or Danish* flags sewn on them. There was no gender in evidence in the life-sized picture, nor any skin or hair, but plenty of muscles, veins, tendons, organs and a delicate web of scarlet capillaries set inside a human shaped outline. We peered a bit more.

"Er, in the brain?" a tentative voice piped from the back of the room.

"Ah," said Gerry, "yes, that's what we think, don't we? But we don't actually know for sure. There is no 'mind' organ that we've found, not as such, not yet" he continued, "so it could just as easily be found here. Or here." he said, vigorously tapping a foot and a forearm. "We just don't really know."

I've thought about this many times on and off during the twenty or so years since this lecture, and I've certainly met my fair share of folks whose minds indeed seem to be located in bodily areas quite far removed from the brain. But even if my foot is occasionally to be found in my mouth, I'm fairly sure my mind is usually in my brain.

(In fact, I can tell you where exactly. If you imagine my brain as a boiled egg standing on its round end and sliced in half from top to bottom and then in half again from side to side, it's in the top quarter above the nose. The bit that also contains eyeballs. That's where the me-ness of me lives, in a little section at the top of my head like the periscope shaft on a submarine. How about you?)

The only trouble that I've found with my mind's occupation of this lofty penthouse suite is that it sometimes neglects to take into account that it is forced to lug around a person-sized body with it wherever it goes. And that the form it is accompanied with on all appointments is recognisable to others beyond just a set of sometimes blue sometimes greenish-tinted eyes and a splodge of travelling grey matter. Thus requiring my mind to remind my hands to attempt to brush my hair and to apply mascara, shoes and appropriate clothing to the outlying districts.

In the last week, two people that I've met for the first time have remarked to me that I bear a striking resemblance to their cousin, in one case, and a good friend in the other. I didn't think at the time to ask if the similarity was in appearance, gesture, manner, stature, voice, age, colouring, temperament, type or whatever else it is that makes us perceive same-nesses, although I'm assuming that my unknown others are both female. Maybe I've got a doppelganger or two long-lost twins out there somewhere. Or maybe my mind has been lending out my body whilst I'm not looking. I'd probably never notice if it had.

*Even in the two decades since, I've never managed to work out why that was; one can only suppose that the soldiers of those two nations were more careful with their garments than their quartermasters had predicted.