Here’s an embarrassing truth about humanity: the thing we use to understand everything is the thing we understand the least. You don’t believe me? Just look up “How does the mind work?” and see how everyone dances around the issue.
You either get a bunch of technical information about the brain, or you get a lot of spiritual meditative self-helpy stuff. We probably skip over the real issue because we’d rather not admit how little we really understand about it.
All of our needs are met with energy that flows through us, and since we run on energy, humans follow the laws of thermodynamics. Every energy system in the universe, from cars, to squirrels, to planetary bodies, to single fuel cells, must follow the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms.
You might not realize it, but this unassuming little law is, by orders of magnitude, the most powerful force in human life. It shapes how we think, behave, operate, and from the time we are born to the time we die, and we usually don’t give it more than a glancing thought.
Think of your mind like a machine built for flight—like a dragonfly with a four-stroke engine at its core. The wings represent the different areas of your life where energy must be applied: Survival, Achievement, and Experiential needs, both for yourself and for other people.
But wings alone don’t create lift—the engine matters. That’s where the laws of thermodynamics come in: energy has to be pulled in, transformed, and used efficiently, or the system stalls. Your mind constantly distributes and directs limited energy to keep you moving forward, balancing all those wings in flight. Too much weight on one wing? You veer off course. Run out of fuel? You crash.
The Mind Machine helps you recognize those imbalances, so you can course-correct and fly with agility.
Mental combustion, just like physical and mechanical combustion, is a four-stroke process of intake, compression, power, and exhaust. This cycle involves fuel, an oxidizer, oil, a fuel pump, and a spark. In combination, these elements enable us to generate work to turn the axle or output shaft of this engine, and fulfill our needs.
The mind has one purpose, making you interact with your environment in a way that fulfills and protects your needs. The human need system is called THE AXIA, it includes six categories of need, in an open energy system.
Brett McDonald holds a doctorate degree in business administration and works as an organizational leadership and team developer. Before that, she spent 17 years as a mental health therapist, and co-founded a martial arts-based experiential retreat for people with eating disorders.
She loves the idea of loving skiing, hiking, distance running, and paddleboarding, but she mostly prefers working on puzzles, eating candy, and practicing Solid Gold dance routines in the living room. Her favorite color is rainbow sparkle, her favorite American Gladiator is Malibu, but she hates buffets and audience clap-alongs.
Brett is blessed to have two wonderful sons and an equally wonderful husband to complete the set, as well as a stinky cat, a mean cat, and a fat cat who are in a dead heat to win the stupid contest. Writing in the third person makes Brett feel awkwardly self-important.
Is there ever really anything new under the sun? I was always told there wasn’t. When I was in graduate school, the teachers of my research classes would say, “The idea you want to investigate, your theory, your profound and novel approach, has already been done before by someone probably more qualified, smarter…better looking. There’s nothing new so don’t even fool yourself.” I think subconsciously I took issue with that because it’s so boring not to create something original, and I’m not very good at regurgitating other people’s ideas anyway. When I was twenty however, I only wanted to learn all I could, get passing grades, and start practicing the way I was taught, in a Good Alice manner.
And why would I buck the field of study I had had been in love with since I was six years old? I grew up fascinated and inspired by the everything about psychology, following it with a blind and infatuated trust that held fast—as long as my learning remained confined to the soft bosom of academia and the classroom cocoon.
When I got out into the real world to practice traditional approaches on people though, the shine began wearing off like lipstick in a kissing booth. With each passing year of my therapy practice, I grew more and more fed up with constantly trying to fit square, or rectangle, or triangle, or oblong pegs into round holes of my clients (that came out a little awkward, but you get the message). As much as I wanted to steadfastly ahere to and apply the tried and true gold standard evidence-based treatments, I couldn’t overlook the fact that the proverbial emperor was at most wearing a mankini.
Although a better mousetrap was clearly needed, I knew the tried and trodden paths weren’t going to get me there, because too many for too long had extinguished the insights of “on the map” thinking. Fresh intellectual territory had to be found, so I shoved Good Alice, her starched apron and straight-lined rules aside, and stopped believing the patent office was closed on psychology. Once I let go of what I thought I knew, my hands were opened to receive answers from those who had always been most qualified to teach me--my clients.
Upon leaving the shores of standardized treatments and theories, I was surprised to find myself venturing into the waters of physics, a field far removed from the intangible material in the humanities, and even further removed from my comfort zone. That’s because I always got C’s in the STEM subjects, and never considered myself interested or even capable of applying those hard concepts to the soft canvas of the human mind.
But I overcome those hesitations aside when I saw how the more objective and tangible angles of physics were more comforting, inspiring, and overall better fitting for clients than the traditional angles of psychology. That people seeking counseling would find more solace and footing in physics might seem incongruous, but it took away the self-blame and confusion that “soft” theories of mind create, and revealed the unseen currents pulling and pushing the mind. The experience was a lot like Dorothy stepping out of her little house into OZ, and the world was in color for the first time.
If humans behave based on logic, values, and a desire for good things, then why do we sometimes act so destructively? Why do we feel good about ourselves one day, and bad about ourselves the next? Why are we so driven toward self-sacrifice and service to others? To solve these mysteries and more, we must understand that the mind is a machine, operating under the laws of physics.
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What if we could understand the mind with the same clarity and precision we use to study physics? Unlocking the Mind explores how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can be mapped and managed like physical phenomena—offering a path to well-being grounded in science.
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