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  Last week’s discussion about brain let me feel that the most unfamiliar things are usually things that we think we are familiar with. I’ve never carefully thought about my brain before, because everything else that I do is based on my brain and there is nothing more common than let my brain “work” for me. Such a work was so unconscious and usual that I even feel awkward to say “let my brain work for me”. The topic was very interesting because we were trying to use the brain to understand the brain itself. To use our conscious thought to understand unconsciousness that every human has experienced. It’s hard for me to think of anything else that has the same magic power: our mouth can eat while it cannot eat itself; our hands can touch itself and everything else but it can rarely unconsciously do that…

  The other thing I find interesting is “reality” and “self-construction”. I think there is an objective reality existing in the world, but there is also a subjective reality which might be slightly different to everyone based on his/her self experience and interpretation. And again, I want to use something I learnt in psychology called prototype theory to explain this. In prototype theory, a large number of Smith brothers have the same attributes: eyeglasses, moustache, big nose, big ears and white hair… but some brothers may don’t have shared features with others. If we superimpose all their pictures together, distill common features and fade out specific detail, we can get a prototype. People various in certain extant from the prototype, but nobody’s mouth would grow above his/her eyes. I feel the prototype theory also works in the way how two kinds of reality work. There is an objective reality, the undeniable truth, just like the distilled common physical appearance of Smith brothers. But people can have their own reality within certain range, just like the variation among how people look like.