Science explores the brain, but fails to explain how our subjective experience of the world is linked to it. This is the ‘mind-brain problem’. Many theories have tried to solve the issue: some are based on dualism, most are based on materialism. A third current suggests that the mind and brain may have a common root (this is often called ‘double-aspect monism’). In this paper, this common root is called ‘psychiagenia’ and the impossibility of directly assessing it is placed at the core of the mind-brain problem. In order to explain why psychiagenia is not directly assessable, a theoretical model of physics known as the ‘superstring theory’ is used as an analogy. This model offers a very unusual description of nature that has proved to be useful when confronted with the inconsistencies in a unified description of the world. The logic of the superstring theory (a ‘gauge theory’ for quantum physics) is here applied to the description of psychiagenia. New perspectives for the understanding of the mind-brain problem are then raised and discussed.

psychiagenia, mind-brain, gauge theory, quantum physics