Let be be finale of seem. I guess.

I was talking about bees over the weekend. We know really a lot about bees. The hive has a language, some of it chemical, that determines all sorts of things about bee behavior. If you take bees out of the hive, one by one, you reach a point at which there just aren't enough to communicate; they can't do bee stuff any more. There is a minimum number of bees that allows the survival of the hive.

I remember an old group facilitation exercise we did 40 years ago; six people sitting on the floor, forbidden to talk, each with an envelope containing cardboard shapes. The instruction was to make squares out of the shapes in our envelopes. We each started out trying to fit just the pieces in our own envelopes together to make the square. After a while, we noticed that it was impossible. We started trading pieces with the others. Impossible again. Finally, we understood: we threw all the pieces on the floor in the middle of the group, and were able to make the squares pretty quickly. I remember that after each square was completed we sat up straight and all smiled and clapped for ourselves for a few seconds. Very nice group dynamics lesson.

The group developed a language: gestures, odd grunts and that delightful clapping, which allowed useful cognition to exist. There was just no other way to get it done. We had all been "cogitating" unsuccessfully. I don't want to say that the problem solving was done in some weird groupthink. Not at all. What was done was the emergence of mind, an implementation of informal rules in which we guided ourselves toward useful problem-solving, out-of-the-box activities. "Mind" is not a place or a thing; "mind" is a set of utterance used to shape, define and control the behaviors that allow -- and require -- us to be human.

What of those who can't communicate -- the comatose, the demented, the brain dead? What of their minds? Do we say that they have minds, even though their brains are either dead or terribly compromised? I've never heard anyone talk about "minds" in that way. We do talk, ordinarily, in these cases, about brains and their dysfunctions. But, what of those who have seizures, or less extensive damage to the brain? Obviously different; those with seizure disorders still have language. Do we say that their minds are disordered? Or just their brains? I think brains. In all the discussions I've had with neurologists, nobody has said anything about my mind. Brain, sure. What is up with that? Don't they think that a mind can be damaged by a stroke? Maybe they're on to something. Ordinarily language seeps over into specialized language. Ack. I'm getting too abstract; how about some concrete examples?

The most confounding and interesting, for me, are the folks with the various language disabilities: the various aphasias, on the expressive end, and the decoding disorders on the receptive end. This is the arena in which the folks with the damaged brains often have some problems with mind, too. Stories of extensive brain injury with no apparent mind disorders are many, and, I'm sure, are sometimes apocryphal; still, the lesson is clear. An injury to the brain does not have to be an injury to the mind.

More: I once evaluated a young man who had shot himself in the head. He recovered all his physical abilities, but his cognitive functions were very strangely impaired. He could communicate only by telling jokes, or stories, or singing songs. His "talk", in that form, was precise and complex; however, it took a long time and a lot of patience and effort to listen in the right way. I also found it difficult, even with all my own capabilities, to help other people learn how to listen to him, and recognized after a while that my own problems mirrored his, at a much less severe level.

I also evaluated stroke patients, who were disabled and unable to function on their own physically, but whose thinking and language were just fine.

Well? Who is worse off? I think the first man; talking to him is so difficult that he was, ultimately, dismissed from the tribe, and banished to a unit in a chronic care facility. Brain and mind the same, in this instance, both damaged terribly. The stroke folks? Bad, but clear brain injury with no mind injury; rehabbed, back to work, back to family.

And what of my own brain and mind? I think it is not so much the physical changes that bother me since I had the stroke six years ago; those are pretty minor. Some loss of coordination, middling pain in the extremities. But the recent TLE stuff: yipes! It threatens my ability to be part of the tribe, and that is scary. The hallucinated smells, compusive talking, occasional misspeaking -- am I more like my first example, or the second? Hard to tell.

Right now, I don't have any way to pull it all together. The philosophers are off in Middle Earth, having fun arguing. No joy there. The neurologists are looking at scans. No joy there, either. I am between them somewhere. I still have a sense that there is something important that no one is exploring, something about minds and groups and tribes and social facts.

Contributions not just welcome, but demanded!!!! Maybe that will work. How about I up the ante just a little??? A $10 iTunes Store card for whoever recognizes the quote first. What quote? Part of the puzzle.

Miles the Cat is ineligible, but everybody else, relatives included, is welcome to guess.

Addendum: The prize has been claimed. It was claimed by a treacherous snake who used Google. Shame.