I Hear This Cognitive Scientist Guy Claxton Waxing Lyrical About The SubConscious Brain

2005 August 2, Tuesday, 11:40

It All Started With PodCasting Where I Entered The New World Of Information That You Seek

One and another very pleasant experiences, the good feelings of having a revelation and knowing it fits in and satisfies the senses of knowing something is right, at least feels right, but really is right, cause it has a jigsaw piece slipping into place, that's how evolution built brains with knowledge I reckon... It all started with PodCasting where I entered the new world of information that you seek, and that which can be absorbed in your own time and space...

I Subscribed To Our ABC's PodCasting And One Of The Feeds Is It's All In The Mind

So I subscribed to Our ABC's Podcasting and one of the feeds is It's All In The Mind, and I heard some great stuff on Old-timers and Brain Scanning used as a lie detector for truth, and how invasive it's all getting, and then they scanned orgasms and revealed some unknowns, well perhaps, but it's going down that road...

I Hear This Cognitive Scientist Guy Claxton Waxing Lyrical About The SubConscious Brain

And then I hear this Cognitive Scientist Guy Claxton waxing lyrical about the subconscious brain...

An intimate history of the unconscious Our minds are wayward beasts... Many of the quirks of our conscious experience go unexplained... Could our conscious mind be but the tip of an iceberg, underpinned by the seething underbelly of the unconscious? Freud famously thought so... The ancients appealed to gods, the gremlins and the underworld to explain our strange ways... Cognitive scientist Guy Claxton has unearthed the unconscious throughout history... Despite the exciting triumphs of neuroscience, he argues that mystical metaphors of the hidden mind still have their place...

 

We Don't Have Roots Into The Earth, We Are Unattached, There Are No Antennae

So I dropped into the imaginative mode too, and I put some things together, like I had realised once how alone we are as Planet Earth, which was so special and so far away from any contact with other living consciousness of the Universe, so the fate of all of us is to be ended with life on earth's fate in some cosmic catastrophe, and then you also have to realise how alone we are as a living single individual entity, we don't have roots into the earth, we are unattached, there are no antennae to pick up external conscious thoughts, there are no gods, we need the air and the water and the food, and I guess we need understanding of how to live in a society, but we are significantly unattached to anything but our genetic history, and once you're dead you're dead completely, lest you had kids living on with your donation of your living DNA...

The Brain With Sight, Hearing, And Feelings And A Consciousness To Tie Them Together

The evolution of our typical animal life included the creation of the awareness of exterior events and how the animals gradually developed senses to decipher what it all was... Like sound vibrations gave birth to the hearing and ears, and light photons excited nerves and resulted in sight and eyes and the brain developed an insight screen to consciously observe and respond to what was seen and heard, like an interior screen and sound lounge, so from this globulus molecular mass of tiny cells developed the brain with sight, hearing, and feelings and a consciousness to tie them together in order to live successfully... You notice when people look at you in conversation but then their eyes look away at nothing while they use their internal sight screen to bring up visual memories, it's amazing... But from where? Aha, the subconscious has it all, there must be a fantastic memory storage and recall system, but what else?

So Easy To Dream Up Satisfactory Explanations And Deify Things

So now the brain was supplied with choices to make of how to deal with information, thoughts had to comprehend all this incoming information, and had to account for it logically, and sensibly, and dependably, and safely, in order to replicate offspring with similar capabilities and survive... So eventually with Man we know the questions were being asked, Who, What, Why, How, When, and answers that satisfied were adopted, so when an idea sprang to mind it could be explained in many ways, they dreamed up explanations to suit, like a dead ancestor had entered your head, or some spirit of nature had spoken, or some god from outside your experience had invaded your mind, it was so easy to dream up satisfactory explanations and deify things... And with young human brains, these explanations are stored on nerve connections and can stay and be reinforced with repetition... So an education is the primary method of wiring up a brain, the language goes in, the morals go in, the religion goes in, and that's where the problems start... Nowadays it's the media that wires up the young brains, and it does a terrifying job...