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Pastimes : Human Brain, The -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (847)	7/17/2016 11:42:29 AM
From: koan	Respond to of 935

When I think about the brain, I look at it from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is simply the hardwired brain we evolved with. Our animal brain. This can be seen when we contrast the innate ability to speak, but the difficulty with which we have to learn reading, writing and math. Or, the fact that the brain seems programmed for pattern recognition, but has a difficult time learning probability. I call that our animal brain. The next thing has to do with what happens to the brain when it is developed. The power of education and development is easily seen if one looks back at history and sees that when the ancient Greeks invented the modern alphabet, so that we could record information, how quickly we went from barbarians to very sophisticated thinkers discussing things like ethics and republics. Then to take that a step further, the next level of understanding I would argue is the ability to see in the minds eye both existentialism and Zen. In both cases, neither can be taught to an uneducated person. It is impossible, because both are abstract concepts that require a certain amount of information to reach critical mass i.e. see it in their minds eye. In my case, I did not see either until several years after I finished college and then one day it just popped up right in front of my mind's eye. But it was certainly not any sort of lineal experience or I learned it. So we have levels of understanding that few people are really seeing. The animal brain seems to prefer concrete thinking. It is capable of abstract thinking, but that is not its natural inclination and sort of has to be forced to do that. My whole life I've looked around and saw that most people seldom stray into the abstract world, feeling much more comfortable living in the concrete world. And one of the most important things about the brain, is how young children will prune the brain and wrap itself around whatever information/environment it has existed in or been taught, so that once that information is set, it is hard to overcome, or change even with clear scientific facts. The child at a young age seems to imprint/adapt to the environment and whatever dogma they are being taught and they carry that with them for the rest of their lives to one degree or another. So it is very important, in my opinion, that a child get a good liberal arts education free of dogma, and full of logic and facts and complex thinking.