What is the brain compared to?

What do we think with? Only the brain? Hardly. The brain is like a telephone exchange. It is the switchboard, but not the whole system. Its function is to receive incoming signals, make proper connections, and send the messages through to their destination. For efficient service, the body must function as a whole.
    But where is the "mind"? Is it in the brain? Or perhaps in the nervous system? After all, can we say that the mind is in any particular place? It is not like the leg or even the brain. It is a function, an activity Aristotle, twenty-three hundred years ago, observed that the mind was to the body what cutting was to the ax. When the ax is not in use, there is no cutting.
    If this activity is necessary for thinking, it is also necessary for carrying thought from one person to another. Observe how people go about the business of ordinary conversation. If you have never done this painstakingly, you have a surprise in store, for good conversationalists are almost constantly in motion. Their heads are continually nodding and shaking sometimes so vigorously that you wonder how their necks can stand the strain.
    Even the legs and feet are active. As for the hands and arms, they are seldom still for more than a few seconds at a time.
    These people, remember, are not making speeches. They are merely common folk trying to make others understand what they have in mind. They are not conscious of movement. Their speech is not studied. They are just human creatures in a human environment, trying to adapt themselves to a social situation. Yet they converse, not only with oral language, but with visible actions that involve practically every muscle in the body.
    In short, because people really think all over, a speaker must talk all over if he succeeds in making people think.