cartoon life

Very funny twist on those “You are here” cartoon clichés.
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Self and Brain

Yes, it’s from BoingBoing and many thanks for discovering it. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight. We all can do it. We don’t need to have a stroke.

First, Richard Dawkins here, is explaining a model of understanding relationship, the scale of things, about why we as human animals exist at the scale we do.

Sunyata is difficult to grasp. It isn’t empty, like a glass with no water, but it is more, rather, like the glass as it moves through time and space, from particles of sand to particles of sand (and that is only a small portion of its presence) containing and not containing, empty and full, and rather like the dune that Dawkins describes at about ten minutes into this video.

Dawkins would probably lambaste me for turning this lecture into a Dharma talk, for reading some kind of spirituality into the examples he gives here, but he also touches so closely on Sunyata, I think it is difficult to not do so.

His story of the Pentagon General trying to walk through the wall - after all they are both made of atoms and are empty, explains the Middle World scale of our existence, but also parodies the deep misunderstanding of emptiness as something physical.

Rather, the story of the dune, a wave of sand blown across the desert asks when, where, and how is this thing actually separate from the world? Only in it’s name. Only in our mind. Just as the dune is made of sand, of compound things, so is Self, piling up, blown over, moving, only a series of moments in relationship with another series of moments.

And he says practically that in his closing comment that we “swim in a social world”, that modelling thinking on a ‘needs driven’ organism is a useful model. Sounds like Dukkha to me.

Some interesting TED talks I’ve found recently; George Dyson talking about Project Orion; Jaime Lerner on Urban Design; Frank Gehry: Ted Gallo on deep sea creatures; Vilayanur Ramachandran.

Ramachandran talks about how brain damage gives clues to how the mind works, in three examples; understanding Imposter syndrome, curing phantom limb pain, and Synesthesia’s high frequency amongst poets and artists - although Synesthesia isn’t strictly brain damage. 

The first example is about broken visual sensory connections, the second about dissolving a false sensory somatic connection with visual retraining, and the third about blended non-differentated sensory brain connections and metaphor.

I find Synesthesia quite magical. I do not have it - but we all have it. We inherit it. The parts of the brain which specialize in number and colour are quite proximate, as are the areas for musical tone and colour. Our brain, as it grows in the womb differentiates the areas. Apparently the whole brain, as it begins, is suffused with connections throughout, connecting everything to everything else. As it grows, these suffused connections drop away and specialize. Sometimes they don’t completely separate from adjacent areas.

This, to a degree, is the state of each of our individualized brains, our ‘each to it’s own’  3 lb. mass of jelly which just is not in any kind of fixed, perfect or finished state, more or less similar to others, more specialized or differentiated here or there, maybe a bit “broken” or knotted in another place.

Now, don’t let me get all mystical and inarticulate on you, but metaphor is - and non-discriminating awareness is what we do before we decide what is and what is not.

 Update: Some great discussion off that TED site and a link to lectures from BBC 

From Spiritual Brain, an essay regarding the enlightenment experience and Dr. M.A Persinger: On magnetism and the brain - YouTube Interview 1 Interview 2 Interview 3. 

I wish the sound was better. The interviews require some very careful listening, or an amplifier, but after the groundwork is done in the first two, the interview goes to some interesting places early in part 3. It’s too bad the videos don’t complete the interview.

From a paper at http://people.uncw.edu/bergh/par325/L09RPersinger.htm 

Mystical and religious experiences are hypothesized to be evoked by transient, electrical microseizures within deep structures of the temporal lobe. Although experiential details are affected by context and reinforcement history, basic themes reflect the inclusion of different amygdaloid-hippocampal structures and adjacent cortices. Whereas the unusual electrical coherence allows access to infantile memories of parents, a source of god expectations, specific stimulation evokes out-of-body experiences, space-time distortions, intense meaningfulness, and dreamy scenes. The species-specific similarities in temporal lobe properties enhance the homogeneity of cross- cultural experiences. They exist along a continuum that ranges from “early morning highs” to recurrent bouts of conversion and dominating religiosity. Predisposing factors include any biochemical or genetic factors that produce temporal lobe lability. A variety of precipitating stimuli provoke these experiences, but personal (life) crises and death bed conditions are optimal. These temporal lobe microseizures can be learned as responses to existential trauma because stimulation is of powerful intrinsic reward regions and reduction of death anxiety occurs. The implications of these transients as potent modifiers of human behavior are considered.

Update: Monday; March 17, 2008: A Wired Magazine article Digged