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Self Comes To Mind #consciousness #damasio

13 May
In Part 1, leading scientist, Antonio Damasio says he had been waiting until he had enough new information on the neurology of conscious--to start over. He is no longer satisfied with some of what he has said in the past.  His newest book is Self comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.   He has a nice You Tube series out on a few aspects.
 
Here is the link to Part 3: What is this thing called Mind? which is quite a bit more meaty in its entirety.  My favorite snippet.
 
"Practically everything that we do, if we are really thinking beings and if we live some kind of life examined, everything we do is filtered through what we have been, what has happened to us--sometimes in the distant past, and even unconsciously sometimes in the few close past. And it is also filtered by what we want to do.  So all that complexity of past and future contributes to this self, which is in fact, as far as I can see, uniquely human."
 
Note the "which is in fact, as far as I can see, uniquely human."
 
He is himself demonstrating an incredible feature of the human mind.  To accept that he knows more today that he used to know and that this current understanding is still less than and could be wrong. 
 
The entire series is worthy perusing.

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The human brain receives over 11 mil bits of info/sec. How many does your conscious mind interpret? #feldenkrais

7 Apr

Why do somatic education approaches such as The Feldenkrais Method or Bones for Life believe they can use movement and sensation to talk to the subconscious brain and make phenomenal changes?  In part it is because the human brain receives over 11 million bits of information per second, but the conscious mind can only interpret 200.

How does this funnel down to 200 bits?  Some scientists believe the brain is making gross associations with prior experience to give quick outcomes for survival. It is precisely because of this capacity for the mind to draw connections to prior experiences that the Feldenkrais Method purposely often evokes the feeling of "that makes no sense" or of "the mysterious."  In Feldenkrais, there is often a circuitous route taken so that the brain cannot easily make a prior association.  When the brain fails to find an easy way to categorize the experience, it becomes available to truly learn something new. 

Because we are only conscious of the conscious mind, we erroneously believe that the work of living and learning is being done with  that rather small aspect of our brain. But in a way that is only the surface output. 

What percentage is 200 bits out of 11 million? It is so small it is hardly worth quantifying.  So using a somatic approach to speak to the brain that is behind the scenes might be quite useful.   

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/4094/Overview#tab-Videos/07395_00
 

Reference
The National Geographic
Inside LSD

 

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