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Who's in charge inside your head?

Anne Dalke's picture

From yesterday's NYTimes: Who's in Charge Inside Your head?
"Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by...the rest of life....Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin? Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants....'Absorbent and ...and porous is he'...are we, too."

Comments

Nan's picture

Sruthi, is this the field

Sruthi, this is the field you mentioned that you are interested in?  Neuroscience?  What in particular interests you?  I do agree that the microcircuitry of the brain and how that brain chatter connects us to the outside world and our own stresses is really fascinating and important to learn about. I love how she asks if we can "choose to step to the right of our left hemisphere". There lies a hope for our planet to redeem ourselves from eternal provincialism and the narrow-mindedness of concrete linear thinking that reinforces our own individual separateness from other sentient creatures on this planet.  I also have a life-long engagement with and interest in how the brain processes experience in the wild as well as in the seclusion of our own indoor inside spaces: historical and present, physical, psychological, neurological,ecological, numinous,spiritual, emotional, mythic, artistic, individual, between individuals, in groups, and extending outward, global and beyond. And projecting forward in linear time, shared and individual imaginings speaking from different experiences of time.  To try to help ourselves and eachother through steady acquisition of knowledge and understanding, and the sharing of experience regarding what is known, and asking questions about the edges of what is still unknown and we are just beginning to find language for.

Thanks for sharing that clip!

Srucara's picture

A Question

Where do we begin and where do we end? I think this question can only be answered to an expansion of awareness, consciousness. In fact, I think this question could have so many different answers, as the author had shared few of his own - influenced by awareness in different levels.

One Neuroscientist who may have quite a few interesting points to share on the matter: Jill Bolte Taylor, and how she one day witnessed "where she began, and where she ended"