Biology 202 Web Paper 3

 

We often think of the flow of neural impulses as linear, and emphasize its terminal locus – i.e., we classically think of perception, an action, or an utterance as the terminal stage of some process whose locus is somewhere in the cortex. We think of perception as a one-way street, traveling form the outside world inwards, dispatching a linear stream of neural impulses from one relay to ever more complex ones, so that the process is metaphorically like a conveyor belt running through stations in a factory, until a perception rolls off the end as the finished product” (Cytowic, 1995).

 

                                                       The Neurobiology of Down syndrome

We generally think that humans have five senses and that those senses are delegated to a specific organ in our bodies. Anyone would agree that we see with our eyes, taste with our tongues, hear with our ears, feel with our skin and smell with our noses. While this may indeed be the case, it is not the whole story. Our senses are all interconnected. They compliment one another and can even compensate for one another if a sense is weakened or lost (1). However, the interactions between the senses are not uniform from person to person. Synesthesia, the name given to any of a number of conditions involving the experience of a usually unassociated sense in conjunction with the stimulation of another sense, provides insight into the ways our senses can interact.<

In my current reality, my I-function is disempowering.  At this moment, I want nothing to do with myself.  I do not want to be the storyteller.  I do not want my own construction of reality, but rather I desperately want to be free from my own experience of things.  Why do I feel so limited and negative?  Why can I not deal with what is out there?  In my head, destructive pictures are being composed and self-deprecating thoughts are being concocted.  Of course I hate this reality.  Of course I want empowering images of what is out there and empowering ideas infiltrating my head.  In this current state, more than anything, I want to feel like I did those mornings runni

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"All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets IT- everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows its not the tune that counts but IT." -from On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1)