Tag: Mind

Rome as Metaphor for Mind

The Arch of Constantine, Canalleto

Freud and Rome
Like most cities, Rome has a rich history. From a series of bronze age hill settlements it developed over time into the bustling metropolis of today.

In other words, Rome has many layers of history.

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud suggests a thought experiment. He invites us to imagine Rome as a human mind: “Let us suppose that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long and rich past.”

His next step is to invite us to imagine all its layers of history coexisting, with every layer completely intact. Several buildings from different chapters of its history would share any one spot.

For example, the site of a church would simultaneously be the site of an ancient temple. And, Freud adds: “The observer would perhaps need only to shift his gaze or his position in order to see the one or the other.”

What is Freud trying to show? For Freud, the thought experiment is about trying to visualize a peculiar kind of mind:
* Nothing that forms in the mind (such as an idea or a memory) is ever destroyed
* The past and the present coexist in the same psychical ‘space’
* The layers of our personal history are not neatly differentiated: memories from different periods of life interact with each other.

Freud Museum London

Iain McGilchrist Interview – Hidden Brain

VEDANTAM: Iain argues that the right hemisphere of the brain is supposed to play the role of the wise master of our mental kingdom. The left hemisphere is supposed to be the emissary. Iain says we have grown infatuated with the skills of the emissary. We prize the details but scorn the big picture. He makes an analogy about the relationship between the hemispheres.

MCGILCHRIST: I want to emphasize that I resist very strongly the idea that the brain is a computer. It’s just nothing like a computer, actually. But in this one, limited sense, the left hemisphere is a little bit like a very, very smart computer. So you know what the data you’ve collected mean, but you haven’t yet been able to analyze them. You put them into a machine that is just very clever at carrying out a routine. It doesn’t understand. And then it spews out a result, which it also doesn’t understand. But you then take back into the world where the data come from and go, I see.

So that is the relationship. Your left hemisphere is busy processing things to make sure they’re consistent and unpacked, but your right hemisphere’s seeing everything. I am suggesting that we have arrived at a place, not for the first time in the West, where we have slipped into listening only to what it is that the left hemisphere can tell us and discounting what the right hemisphere could have told us.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/690656459

Spinoza and the False Tag

“More than three centuries ago, Baruch Spinoza pointed out that the human mind cannot suspend disbelief in the truth or falsity of a statement and leave it hanging in logical limbo awaiting a “true” or “false” tag to be hung on it. To hear or read a statement is to believe it, at least for a moment. For us to conclude that something is not the case, we must take the extra cognitive step of pinning the mental tag “false” on a proposition. Any statement that is untagged is treated as if it is true. As a result, when we have a lot on our minds, we can get confused about where the “false” tag belongs, or can forget it entirely. In that case what is merely mentioned can become true. Richard Nixon did not allay suspicions about his character when he declared, “I am not a crook,” nor did Bill Clinton put rumors to rest when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Experiments have shown that when jurors are told to disregard the witness’s remarks, they never do, any more than you can follow the instruction “For the next minute, try not to think about a white bear.””

Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Frequency Illusion / Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, Example of

Welcome to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you’ve just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject — or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you’re not crazy; you are totally seeing it more. But the thing is, of course, that’s because you’re noticing it more

KATE KERSHNER, HowStuffWorks

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When I moved I noticed all the other people moving, such as the people who got this UHaul. Now I’m settled in, either people are moving less or I’m just not noticing as much.

The Extended Mind

Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outside—a pen and paper, a phone—that serve the same function as parts of the brain, enabling it to calculate or remember? You might say that those are obviously not part of the mind, because they aren’t in the head, but that would be to beg the question. So are they or aren’t they?

Consider a woman named Inga, who wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She consults her memory, recalls that the museum is on Fifty-third Street, and off she goes. Now consider Otto, an Alzheimer’s patient. Otto carries a notebook with him everywhere, in which he writes down information that he thinks he’ll need. His memory is quite bad now, so he uses the notebook constantly, looking up facts or jotting down new ones. One day, he, too, decides to go to moma, and, knowing that his notebook contains the address, he looks it up.

Before Inga consulted her memory or Otto his notebook, neither one of them had the address “Fifty-third Street” consciously in mind; but both would have said, if asked, that they knew where the museum was—in the way that if you ask someone if she knows the time she will say yes, and then look at her watch. So what’s the difference? You might say that, whereas Inga always has access to her memory, Otto doesn’t always have access to his notebook. He doesn’t bring it into the shower, and can’t read it in the dark. But Inga doesn’t always have access to her memory, either—she doesn’t when she’s asleep, or drunk.

Andy Clark, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh, believes that there is no important difference between Inga and Otto, memory and notebook. He believes that the mind extends into the world and is regularly entangled with a whole range of devices. But this isn’t really a factual claim; clearly, you can make a case either way. No, it’s more a way of thinking about what sort of creature a human is. Clark rejects the idea that a person is complete in himself, shut in against the outside, in no need of help.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/the-mind-expanding-ideas-of-andy-clark

Andy Clark on the Extended Mind
Does your mind extend beyond your skull? Andy Clark, who developed the theory of the extended mind with David Chalmers thinks it does. He explains the idea here.

https://philosophybites.com/2017/03/andy-clark-on-the-extended-mind.html

Intrusive Thoughts, Handling of

First tip I’m going to give to you is to tell you now what not to do. Right, don’t fight against them don’t try to push them away don’t argue with them because if you do so you’re just gonna make them stronger. It’s like if I told you don’t think of pink elephants what’s the first thing you think of? Pink elephants. Instead it’s better to practice non-resistance like they do in the martial arts and just observe your thoughts without trying to grab on to them or push them away. You can see them as leaves floating down a river or clouds passing overhead…

… “the process of judgment itself was never conscious”

A simple experiment, so simple as to seem trivial, will bring us directly to the heart of the matter. Take any two unequal objects, such as a pen and pencil or two unequally filled glasses of water, and place them on the desk in front of you. Then, partly closing your eyes to increase your attention to the task, pick up each one with the thumb and forefinger and judge which is heavier. Now introspect on everything you are doing. You will find yourself conscious of the feel of the objects against the skin of your fingers, conscious of the slight downward pressure as you feel the weight of each, conscious of any protuberances on the sides of the objects, and so forth. And now the actual judging of which is heavier. Where is that? Lo! the very act of judgment that one object is heavier than the other is not conscious. It is somehow just given to you by your nervous system. If we call that process of judgment thinking, we are finding that such thinking is not conscious at all. A simple experiment, yes, but extremely important. It demolishes at once the entire tradition that such thought processes are the structure of the conscious mind.

This type of experiment came to be studied extensively back at the beginning of this century in what came to be known as the Wurzburg School. It all began with a study by Karl Marbe in 1901, which was very similar to the above, except that small weights were used. The subject was asked to lift two weights in front of him, and place the one that was heavier in front of the experimenter, who was facing him. And it came as a startling discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly trained subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the process of judgment itself was never conscious.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind 

Scientists Identify Neurons That Help the Brain Forget – The New York Times

But S.’s ability to remember was also a hindrance in everyday life. He had a hard time understanding abstract concepts or figurative language, and he was terrible at recognizing faces because he had memorized them at an exact point in time, with specific facial expressions and features. The ability to forget, scientists eventually came to realize, was just as vital as the ability to remember.

“We’re inundated with so much information every day, and much of that information is turned into memories in the brain,” said Ronald Davis, a neurobiologist at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla. “We simply cannot deal with all of it.”

Researchers like Dr. Davis argue that forgetting is an active mechanism that the brain employs to clear out unnecessary pieces of information so we can retain new ones. Others have gone a step further, suggesting that forgetting is required for the mental flexibility inherent in creative thinking and imagination.

A new paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, points to a group of neurons in the brain that may be responsible for helping the brain to forget. Akihiro Yamanaka, a neuroscientist at Nagoya University in Japan, and his team stumbled across the cells, known as melanin-concentrating hormone, or M.C.H., neurons, while studying sleep regulation in mice.

 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/brain-memory-forgetting-mind.html

Dreams – how do they work? Kenneth Tynan ponders

Whenever we solve the problem of dreams, we shall not be far from solving the root problems of human identity and creativity. Has anyone noticed the really inexplicable thing about our nightly narrative tapes? They have suspense. This occurred to me last night, when I was involved in a Hitchcock-type chase dream—in which, I suddenly realized, I did not know what was going to happen next. I did not know who would be lurking behind the next door; and I wanted desperately to know. What part of one’s mind is it that harbours secrets unknown even to the unconscious?  (For in dreams we are surely privy to the unconscious in full flood.) The theory that in dreams we tap a source of energy outside the individual psyche is powerfully reinforced by the presence of suspense.

Diaries, Kenneth Tynan

more Tynan –
Tynan on the true nature of a car wash