In and out of attention

It has been three days since I blogged. There is no impressive excuse. Several small distractions turned up and I footered with them.

They included working towards archive indexes for the pastandpresent photos; experimenting with close up photos in the garden; and figuring how to make macros in MSWord. There were more than this but the rules of rhetoric suggest limiting lists to the magic number three!

Today I took another step towards qualifying for my middle class wanker badge. The Guardian has a new series explaining what the development jargon means. I made two comments under ‘civil society’; and I have been back several times to see if anybody has commented on my comments … Nope.

There is presently an urge to write a story - but no topic is coming to the attention centre other than that no topic is coming to the attention centre.

Aha … Imagery and metaphor. (For details see HERE)

Topics/thoughts/feelings enter the attention centre, hang around for a while and then disappear.

Stuff moves from the unconscious into consciousness and then returns to the unconscious.

The stuff is in flux. This ensures that new inputs from the sense organs are related to stuff in the memory banks in terms of like, dislike, or neutral. These judgments determine the patterns of reaction/ response.

We tend to understand these cerebral goings on as ethereal and psychological but they are grounded in the wetware as electrical and chemical activity (physiology) within networks of cells.

The visioning can be in terms of the mind or the brain or indeed of these being two sides of the same coin. Two ways of viewing the same reality.

Aha – ‘reality’!

Reality is produced by the whirr and clunk of the mental machinery as it processes a never ending stream of sensory signals about the immediate social and physical environments. And some of the processes are governed by hard wiring (instinct) while others are learned.

• Do you have a mind/brain fit for purpose in the Euroamerican 21st century? 
• Where do you sit on the continuum stretching from parochial xenophobia at one end to Big History at the other? 
• For how much longer will the euroamerican model be the dominant one?

• What do you think? 
• Why do you think this way rather than that? 
• Can you change?