Reply to comment

First thought that comes to mind when I ask myself about last week's class: oatmeal. I tapped into my subconscious the way we did at the beginning of the semester by doing the word association/first word that pops into your mind business, and the first word I thought of was oatmeal. My brain felt like oatmeal after all those optical illusions. In fact, I'm pretty sure my brain wasn't sure whether it actually existed enough so that it could drip sadly out my ears like it felt like doing. Our subconscious brains are crazy, scary, wonderful things, and mine was pretty aware of itself after Thursday's class. I even remember feeling a physical sensation about my cranium as if my brain had just run a mile - like a tired muscle. I'm sure there's a lovely psychological explanation for that, because the brain doesn't contain nerve endings. That's another interesting facet of the brain and its consciousness. While the brain is the control and reception center for all of our physical sensations, it cannot feel anything itself. We watched a video in anatomy last year of an awake craniotomy - brain surgery while the patient was awake. The patient's brain was manipulated with electrodes as doctors removed a tumor to determine whether any functioning tissue was being affected. The patient was asked to do things like count on his fingers or other simple tasks, and, depending on where the electrode was placed, he may or may not have been able to complete the task. It was crazy to watch this occur and think about having someone else manipulate my brain, or the fact that surgeons were physically cutting through portions of the patient's brain, and he could not feel a thing.