The default mind

                                                                   
 Many new ideas are emerging about how and why the brain works. The ideas come mainly from neuroscience and various branches of psychology.

A key idea is that the brain has to ‘make sense’ of a huge amount of information coming in through the sense organs. [Note: there are more than 5 sense organs, and they sample limited ranges of stimuli eg the very small, visible range of the electro magnetic spectrum.]

There are changes to thinking about rationality and consciousness. The pattern is illustrated in the following matrix:

		Location of thinking/feeling
		Conscious	Unconscious
Type of thinking/feeling	Rational	1	3
	Irrational (emotive)	2	4

In the West there was the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. These paved the way for the high value put on individualised, conscious rationality (1) which was understood as the ‘scientific’ mode of thinking.

Also in the West there was Sigmund Freud whose thinking was influential in its time but is now seen as flawed. The idea was that the wild, unconscious id (4) occupied the main parts of the brain and swamped the civilised, rational ego (1).

Modern thinking suggests that the majority of the brain functions are managed by the unconscious (3&4) and that the role of the rational and irrational conscious (1&2) is quite limited. The two parts of the brain are concerned not with ‘truth’ but rather with empirical effectiveness. The heavy thinking is managed by the unconscious and is passed to the conscious after the fact. This raises the issue of the function of self-consciousness – the I, me and mine conundrum.

The unconscious churns sensory inputs and relates them to more or less matching materials from memory banks so as to generate fast reactions and slower responses. This is an enormous and forever ongoing process. It is the work of the default mind – maybe!