Reaction to the Neurobiology Papers

I found these four papers in Neurobiology very different yet inextricably linked. Although the subjects inevitably varied- from making up the mind to learning languages, to the perception of different cultures to the idea of "I" functions, these papers all dealt with science in some aspect and the conscience and un-conscious part of the human brain. In the paper about making up the mind and not being able to trust one's brain anymore because it creates images of the world as we know it was both enlightening and a tad scary. It reminded me of humans losing th ability to control what they perceive since our brains automatically do this for us. Therefore we do not really have a say, so to speak, in what we see and how we perceive it since this is performed by our un-conscious mind. This was related to the idea of learning languages as the take home message in this paper was that we are most effective at learning a language when we speak this language from our un-conscious self. For example, learning the grammar of a language is often more difficult for us and is not done by native speakers of a language because they are able to resort to their un-conscious minds to speak a language-similar to the Natural Approach described in this post. The third article and fourth articles were also insightful into the ways in which humans perceive both similar and alike people. For example, many Westerners view all Africans as being poor and living in squaller however this idea is not accurate as only four out of 53 countries in Africa actually possess a large number of poor people. At the same time however, the fact also remains that even people within a specific culture look down on members of their own people as many of the successful Africans often forget about their unfortunate peers. Lastly, the idea of minds thinking alike led me to think of the statement, 'Great Minds think Alike'. This notion is that people who think alike actually have brains that are setup similarly thus making me believe that this idea is accurate?