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I have learned a lot throughout the semester, however, I maintain that Emily Dickinson had it right all along.  Everything that we experience is a function of the nervous system.  But, wait, it’s not that simple!  What about the things that we claim to have not experienced?  These things are also generated by the nervous system and they influence our behavior just as the conscious experiences do.  I’m thinking about hemi-field neglect and the study in which subjects consistently chose to live in the house that was not burning down (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v336/n6201/abs/336766a0.html) .  I’m also thinking about the door experiment and a card game experiment presented in the book Blink.  All of these instances suggest that while Dickinson is correct in saying that everything is in our mind, it does necessarily mean that we have access to or can make sense of it all.

At the beginning of the semester I thought that the nervous system received inputs and axons sent the inputs to localized areas of the brain which then allowed us to experience.  I realize that that logic is very fuzzy and fails to explain a lot of behavior.  So, basically what I’m saying is that before I took this class I had no idea what was going... and quite frankly, I kind of liked it that way.  I made it 21 years just accepting that my nervous system was doing its thing, receiving inputs and faithfully and accurately interpreting them so that I could see, hear, feel, taste and smell exactly what everyone else was, so that I could relate to and interact with others.  Now that I know this is not true –that my experience of red is different than my friend’s –I don’t feel as comfortable shopping with her and asking “does this red shirt look good on me?”  I know that sounds silly and shallow, but hey, it’s the truth!

I’m glad that we finally addressed the issue of free will, even though it was only mentioned briefly at the end of class.  I’m still not sure that I completely understand how it works, but I do know that when I opened my eyes and looked at the arrows they were pointed in the direction that I wanted them to point, so there’s hope!  For a while there I was convinced that “free will” was just a story made up by the neocortex.    

I think about things a lot differently now.  Knowing that I am responsible for creating my own reality as well as influencing and changing the reality of those around me, I tend to second guess myself a lot more than I did before taking the class and I am skeptical of …well, everything!  I suppose this is a positive characteristic because it is good to have conflict between the neocortex (story teller) and the rest of the nervous system.