Reply to comment

In Thursday’s class, I guess most of us felt excited, curious but confused. We can not figure out how our brains work to construct such a wonderful optical world, but we enjoy it. Optical illusion pictures intrigued and confused me. I first got to know that those optical illusions are originated from people’s creative perception. The point of view (or to say fact) that we handle informed guesses and have “smart unconsciousness” really interests me. Also, I really appreciate the capability we obtained from hundreds of millions of years evolution.

I watched a video named The Secret Life of the Brain this weekend. I found this interesting too. It mainly talks about some emotional diseases of people and therefore conducts the importance of unconscious emotion in people’s daily lives and how it functions. Our brain can be divided into two parts, not by right hemisphere and left hemisphere, but by cortex and the part beneath cortex. The cortex controls our reasoning, understanding and judging. The large part beneath the furrows of cortex is our “unconscious underworld” which controls our appetites, emotion and moods. There is no properly working thinking without properly working emotion. For example, even though happiness is an emotional expression, it delivers useful information to help us make judgment on the things we are going to meet in the future. We tend to more involve in the things give us happiness, which means these are potentially good for us.

Instead of being thinking machines, human beings are actually emotional machines. The world is constructed by our unconscious informed guess and human beings’ daily lives are also dominated by unconscious emotion.