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cheffernan's picture

thursday

Submitted by cheffernan on Mon, 01/28/2008 - 2:57am.
Thinking about Thursday's class, the discussion about the brain and how it perceives the outside world was a rather existentialist, as well as little mind blowing at the time. The conclusion made in class was basically that each individual brain interacted with the world on its own, which means therefore that each individual has its own construct of what the world is. Just thinking about this idea in terms plausibility, it seems impossible. With as many differences as each individual possess, it’s hard to imagine that with every person having individual set of experiences and observations that there is a common description capable of including and meeting everyone's version of specific objects or places, let alone whole world.

 But it is this idea that makes neuroscience so interesting: even with individual differences, it seems as though every person's brain processes sensory information using the same methods, leading to similar results. Since there is no way of knowing the answer to this question, it makes the field all the more interesting and exciting that can lead to many theories attempting to describe how the brain and the environment interact. Whether Emily Dickinson was right that the sky is only a manifestation of the brain and the mind or Descartes was right in his belief that the brain and the mind are distinct entities, the decision may never be known, which will allow the allure of the subject to grow making the field an interesting one to watch.

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