Getting to know your brain is essential in order to get to know yourself. It helps us understand our emotions and how they work. It helps us to learn where our emotions originate and how to control them.
The brain is amazingly complex and we don’t understand everything there is to learn about it. We may never know every detail about the brain, but knowing the essentials will help our knowledge of how it works. I don’t think that there are any negative things I can say about the brain other than I regret sometimes the multitude of pointless emotions I have. I admit that some emotions are required for me to exist and not be a mindless robot, but I think the brain gets addicted to emotions and pops them on you when it feels like it.
Your unconscious part of your mind is cut off from our reasoning and control. It influences you in making decisions, but aren't your decisions based on your life experiences? With those being based on what you were taught by your parents? I can picture my mom yelling at me, and asking what makes me act a certain way or why I make bad decisions? I admit it’s not all your parents’ fault, but you do base everything on what you were taught. So in the end I guess without my brain I wouldn’t be able to exist, but at the same time I kind of wish we were separate entities.
I found an article about the mystery of consciousness. In this article the author is trying to explain the true meaning consciousness. Consciousness is the activity of the brain. With most of us we are taught that we have souls and that the soul lives beyond death, to travel to paradise or heaven. After reading this article I don’t necessarily denounce my faith but have a different point of view on it. The research done by neuroscientists is very extensive and would sway the most concrete of believers.
One of the tests they did involved how electricity can alter the state of mind. It can make us see things that are not there. So in turn our brain tells us what is real and what isn’t. But doesn't it also enable us to see? So it could make things seem to disappear from our sight when there really there. Back when Columbus discovered America, the first boats that arrived on the beach could not be seen by the natives. They have never seen anything like that before and thus could not see something they didn’t know existed. It wasn’t until they came ashore that they acknowledged that the ships were there. So everything we see isn’t necessarily real, or a definite reality. At the end of this article it says, “...imagining faces or places lights up the same neurons as actually seeing them.” (Steven Pinker- 2007)
References
Pinker, Steven. “The Mystery of Consciousness. (Cover Story)” Time 169.5 (2007): 58-70 Vocational and Career Collection 3 February 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment