mind – Page 2 – Harmonia Philosophica

Compulsive disorder: We all have it. Forget the sweater.

If you’re pretty sure that it’s going to be cold in the office, you’re likely to throw a sweater in your bag to ward off the chill. It makes sense that those two ideas would be related: if you’re confident about something, it’s natural for your actions to be consistent with what you know.

But for people with obsessive compulsive disorder, that natural relationship isn’t so natural. For them, there’s a disconnect between their understanding of a likely outcome and their eventual action, according to a study published last week in the journal Neuron.

About two percent of adults in the U.S. have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental illness characterized by the inability to control certain actions. Some people experience the stereotypical manifestations of the disorder—cleaning, counting—but it can also include obsession with a particular thought or idea, or rearranging items in a particular order. (1)

We believe that this disorder is for some people only.

But who lives not based on his or her obsessions?

We are all obsessed with life.

And we live as if though there is no death.

Isn’t this “compulsive disorder” on a magnified scale?

And even those people who like to think of them as “spiritual”, live their lives as if there is no body.

Isn’t this “compulsive disorder” as well?

It takes a real man (or woman) to just accept things and live life as it is: A union of matter and the spirit. A place where the opposites become one. A place where man and woman come together and the matter is enlightened with the immaterial spirit. A place where everything is created out of nothing. The cosmos of dasein and meaningfulness. A universe full of meaning and light. A place full of darkness and sorrow, as well as unlimited joy and love.

Yes, it will be cold at work.

Throw a sweater in the bag.

And perhaps you just forget to wear it.

Just to enjoy the morning cold in the office…

Memories. It is not in your brain. It IS your brain.

Your brain’s ability to collect, connect, and create mosaics from these milliseconds-long impressions is the basis of every memory. By extension, it is the basis of you. This isn’t just metaphysical poetics. Every sensory experience triggers changes in the molecules of your neurons, reshaping the way they connect to one another. That means your brain is literally made of memories, and memories constantly remake your brain.

It would be a mistake to believe that those molecules, or even the synapses they control, are memories. “When you dig into molecules, and the states of ion channels, enzymes, transcription programs, cells, synapses, and whole networks of neurons, you come to realize that there is no one place in the brain where memories are stored,” says Kukushkin. This is because of a property called plasticity, the feature of neurons that memorize. The memory is the system itself.

And there’s evidence of memory-making throughout the tree of life, even in creatures with no nervous system—scientists have trained bacteria to anticipate a flash of a light.

Yes, this is very hard for neuroscientists to understand too. Which means it’s going to be a long time before they understand the nuts and bolts of memory formation. (1)

Everything we think is based on memory. Our logic is based on memory. Science is based on memory. Memory of rules, of observations, of prior knowledge, of our very selves.

And yet, we still do not know how memory works. This is the dirty little secret of modern science which Harmonia Philosophica has pointed out over and over again. Behind every fake “triumph” of mind science there lies the simply irritating ignorance on the most fundamental process of our brain.

Masking that ignorance with names or poetic descriptions like the one above does not make things any better.

It is not that science will someday reach its dead ends.

It has reached them already.

It will just not admit it, no matter what.

Somewhere in the very beginning we have taken the wrong turn. And we travel in the wrong path ever since. There, I see a “dark” guy speaking there. Speaking about “war” and “thunder”. And another guy writing poems, saying something about “One” and existence. We must go back there.

At the shores of Ionia.

We used to know.

We just have to recall that memory.

But it is not a memory in our brain.

It is us.

Brain. Memory. Flashes and lights…

A new study from Nathan Rose, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, examined a fundamental problem your brain has to solve, which is keeping information “in mind”, or active, so your brain can act accordingly.

The common theory is that the information is kept in mind by neurons related to the information actively firing throughout a delay period, a theory that has been dominant since at least the 1940s, according to Rose.

However, in a new paper published in Science, Rose and his team give weight to the synaptic theory, a less well-known and tested model. The synaptic theory suggests that information can be retained for short periods of time by specific changes in the links, or weights, between neurons.

And even though a specific memory could seem vanished from the brain (due to total lack of any neuron activity), when researchers reactivated specific regions of the brain which were previously active when the memory was formed, the specific pattern of the phenomenally lost memory reappeared out of the blue. (1)

We do NOT know how and where data is stored into our brain. And yet, we are so certain that it is stored there… Even though evidence suggests something “else” is keeping the information inside “us”, we are so certain that this is based on the brain that no alternative might be considered.

We like seeing flashes and lights. And we believe what we see.

This memory was “not there”. And yet, we believed it was still there. And we managed to find it. Reappearing only after the brain region was stimulated again. But could this memory or any memory be stored in the neurons’ structure of an ever-changing brain? Or is it more logical to assume that it is stored in the ever-lasting structure of an eternal cosmos?

Everything changes. And yet we stay the same.

One self, with memories. Wandering through the cold cosmos.

Pondering. Who are we? What dark dreams have haunted us?

I had forgotten. But now I know again. My memory is back…

Those flashes and lights…

Out of the darkness, light again.

Oh, how much we like seeing flashes and lights…

Speaking English. Speaking Spanish. Speaking… whatever. [Ghosts in the machine, or in the brain instead…]

The family of a 16-year-old Georgia boy is describing how he woke from a coma speaking Spanish instead of English. Reuben Nsemoh was playing goalie for a Gwinnett County team late last month when another player accidentally kicked him in the head while he was diving for the ball, local ABC affiliate WSB-TV reported.

The high school sophomore, who has now suffered three soccer-related concussions, fell into a coma for several days. When he woke up, he could only speak in Spanish instead of English.

Reuben, whose English has since returned, said he knew a little Spanish because his friends and a brother speak the language. But he’d never felt comfortable holding a conversation in Spanish before his injury, he said. “I wasn’t perfect, but my brother is a really fluent Spanish speaker, so he kind of inspired me with that too,” he told WSB. His Spanish gradually slipped away after he woke up, Reuben said. (1)

The brain knows things the mind is not aware of.

All input is somewhere somehow recorded.

And readily available for anyone who can access them.

Now imagine something bigger than the Spanish language you heard once. Imagine that your brain/ mind has interfered with the whole cosmos. Imagine that your brain/ mind interferes with the whole cosmos constantly from ever since you were born. Imagine you being in a universe and constantly learning without ever knowing you learn.

Now imagine you are dumb.

Imagine you know nothing.

How absurd that sounds?

Sick. Healthy. Hallucinations. Truth. [Are you humble enough?]

It’s a local news story that Stephen King could take notes from: Five people fell ill and started hallucinating, one after another, following contact with one woman who started seeing things in the dead of night.

The caretaker of a 78-year-old woman called the police in North Bend, Oregon’s pre-dawn hours to report people vandalizing her vehicle, KVAL news reports. The cops came and went, finding nothing, only to be called back at 5:30 a.m. for a similar complaint. The officers suspected she was hallucinating, and took her to the hospital, where she was given a clean bill of health and discharged.

But as the day wore on, everyone who’d come in contact with her started showing similar symptoms of mental distress: Both deputies, the 78-year-old woman, and a hospital employee all had to be hospitalized for similar symptoms.

That afternoon, a hazmat team descended on Oregon’s Bay Area Hospital, and the home where it all started, decontaminating vehicles and clearing the emergency room. They turned up nothing. “No source of the contamination has been found,” Sgt. Pat Downing told KVAL. “The vehicles, equipment and uniforms have been checked with no contaminates identified or located on or about them.” Not a blip in the patients’ blood samples, either. (1)

We are the others.

The others are us.

Sometimes we believe this holds true at a metaphorical or symbolical level. Only when we truly realize that this is true at the lowest literal level possible (as it is the case with all great philosophical truths), will we be able to let go of our prejudices and see others as they truly are.

Are we healthy?

Or are the sick healthy instead?

Are you humble enough to accept the unacceptable?