Every Brain Plays Its Own World

All knowledge, all experience could be said to be a neural situation inside the skull, and the brain is not merely a receiver and recorder of input through the senses: it also has output because the way in which it structures its senses and nerve patterns shapes the input in the same way that a harpist, by selective plucking, brings formal melody out of a row of uniformly scaled and otherwise silent strings. Thus the brain evokes the sensible world by sounding the strings of all those vibrati...

 Meditation Strengthens Focus

This practice of meditation itself sharpens your mind and improves your memory, qualities that are certainly useful beyond spiritual practice, whether in business, engineering, raising a family, or being a teacher, doctor, or lawyer. This practice also helps on a daily basis with anger. When you get irritated, you can concentrate on the nature of the anger itself and thereby undermine its force. Another benefit of such mental training emerges from the close connection between body and mind. ...

 The Moral of the Bees

Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great an honest Hive. T’ enjoy the World’s Conveniencies, Be famed in War, yet live in Ease Without great Vices, is a vain Eutopia seated in the Brain. Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live Whilst we the Benefits receive. Hunger’s a dreadful Plague, no doubt, Yet who digests or thrives without? Do we not owe the Growth of Wine To the dry shabby crooked Vine? Which, whilst its Shutes neglected stood, Choak’d other Plants, and ran to Wood;...

 Humans Trained Themselves in Symbolic Thought

From animals to man, the transition is not violent, as good philosophers will admit. What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of tongues? An animal of his species, who, with much less native instinct than the others, whose king he then considered himself to be, could not be distinguished from the ape and from the rest, except as the ape itself differs from the other animals; which means, by a face giving promise of more intelligence. Reduced to the bare “intuitive knowle...

 Three Brain Pathways to Reading

The frontal reading system has been implicated in phonological processing and semantic processing (word analysis). This is also where Broca’s area is found. Broca’s area is involved in language processing, speech production, and comprehension. Neuron activation is increased in this area when words are spoken (Devlin, Matthews, & Rushworth, 2003). The ventral posterior processing system (located in the occipital and temporal lobes) is most associated with orthographic processing (visu...

 Habituation and Novelty

Beginning in infancy and throughout the life span, humans are motivated by newness, change, and excitement. Habituation, the tendency to lose interest in a repeated event and gain interest in a new one, is one of the most fundamental human reflexes. If the thermostat were to suddenly turn the air conditioning on, you would hear the loud humming sound begin, but within minutes you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. Habituation, a fundamental property of the nervous system, provides mechanis...

 A Cerebral Cortex Makes Animals Programmable

As we ascend the scale of cerebral development the possibility of teaching increases. It becomes possible to domesticate and train these higher-brain animals in just the measure that their brains are developed. You can teach very little to a fish or a reptile, but directly you come to the higher cerebral mammals you are confronted by the new possibility of establishing an artificial, taught, motive system to control, supplement or altogether replace natural instinct. You must catch them young...