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Brainology for Beginners
We learn all kinds of stuff about our brain, from childhood on, from our parents, teachers and peers, and we have a tendency to believe what we hear, especially repeatedly. It all points to that we believe what we see and if we don’t see anything we believe, nothing is there. I’m sorry, but I have to tell you that your brain lies to you all the time. It’s like a preset computer, so if you look at certain things regularly and you save your regular things in favorites, you’ll have a tendency to go down your list and click on something you know will bring you what you want to check daily, like the weather, the stock market, baby pictures or your favorite blog. Your brain operates in a similar manner. If you look out of your eyes billions of bytes of information are available and if you logged every one of them your brain would freeze up, just like if you overloaded your computer. So your brain literally selects for you what to show to you on hand of what it is the most familiar with from previous sorties and it has a tendency to forget the rest. So if you were an ornithologist you would hear the birds sing in the morning and if you were a race car driver you would probably hear car and motorcycle engines with the brain trying to figure out the manufactures or the horsepower of an engine. There are many samples of this kind of commission or omission by the brain and “scientific tests” have been done to show that when the brain is busy focusing on something like counting people that move around or other single minded focus events, it will not see anything else - even if it is in plain sight. An old test was to have people follow teams and count how many times they would pass a ball, then in the middle of this, a man in a gorilla suit would come upon the stage and beat his chest. Many of the observers would not see him. This selective vision or selective hearing is practiced by most children and thoroughly annoys their parents. According to Sandra Aamodt, Ph.D. & Sam Wang, Ph.D., the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain”, the left brain, which is responsible for problem solving, is also the source of many misremembered and confabulated details and is the home of the “interpreter”. It also seems to have an intense need for logic and order – "so intense that if something does not make sense, it usually responds by inventing some plausible explanation". "As we can see, our memory of the past is unreliable and the perception of the present is highly selective, so we are not surprised that our ability to imagine the future is also worthy of suspicion." So the more familiar we are with the objects, the scenery or events, the more likely we will be able to see them and recognize them. There are several stories of explorers that had to take the natives to their ships because they could not see them, confirming this “blank out” by the brain due to non-familiarity. Naturally there are many myths like: blind people can hear better and people that have been blind all their life can see immediately after an eye transplant, as was reported by a mushy email going around on the internet, when in reality, vision is something that is developed while using it from childhood on. Belief systems developed over long periods of time and repeatedly told are many times taken for real, though no hard evidence is available and in the case of some people like Sigmund Freud, the brain could have been affected by drugs like coke. Nonetheless we are given the information like it was sound and supported by evidence, which leads to the question of the myth of education in general. Most men and women think of men as the initiators of sexual relationships, but observational studies in singles bars showed that men rarely approach a woman unless she has given them a nonverbal signal that it’s ok to proceed. These signals included smiling, primping, laughing, requesting help or making physical contact. Women were approached not for their looks but for this kind of solicitation behavior. The brain is also involved in spiritual experiences and visions during battles, stress or beginnings of violent behavior. The source of this, according to some people, is strictly attributed to malfunctions like seizures or hallucinations, but history and religion is full of them: The conversion of Saul to Paul on the road to Damascus, the vision of Constantine of the cross to put on his soldiers shirts which ultimately won him the roman emperor’s spot in Rome or the confession of many killers of “god told me to kill them” like Charles Manson. The miracle of the sun during the lady of Fatima apparitions in 1917 sound just like the description of a modern day UFO appearance, which is even today debunked by most governments, and probably falls under a hallucination description by official sources including the holographic vision of religious figures in the sky. High altitude also seems to play a role in brain malfunctions possible during oxygen deprivation, possibly causing temporal lobe seizures which could result intense experiences like feeling the presence of “god”, feeling of euphoria or light interpreted as religious experiences, though the source is a fight and flight pattern in the autonomic pathways of the sympathetic efferents. On hand of all this information available, one should consider sight and speech impressions as variable sources of correct and incorrect information for oneself and others and that arguing over what was said or seen could become a source of hilarity instead of bad feelings. Working with possibilities instead of factualities will help with our outlook; bring humor and new ways of seeing ourselves and others with the ability of tolerance kindness and self acceptance. Back to Brain Clearing and Optimization
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