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!

Towards win-win

My Weltanschauung creates a lot of confirmation bias because I do not interact with people who willfully wage war.

I do not have a set of lessons/sermons. But, given that I am no longer a facilitator of other peoples’ learning, this is a good thing. I am no longer obliged to fill the brain buckets of students with COWDUNG (conventional wisdom of the dominant group.)

The media employs the Dimbleby brothers to facilitate “Question Time” and “Any Answers” where ‘personalities’ respond to questions from invited guests. Mouths open, bellies rumble, and applause machines provide an illusion of great audience participation. No issue is given more than five minutes of noisy name calling. To label the puerile processes as discussion or debate is to trivialise the terms.

I don’t understand zealots and suicide bombers. Moronic myth and magic. Propaganda. Demonization of the enemy. And an affiliation to win/lose rather than to win/win. Genocide has been around for a long time. There is a problem with enculturation, with nature, nurture and serendipity. Devoted parents, dangerous politicians, and deluded children with a ‘reality’ to live and die for.

And there is the military/industrial complex. Make extremely expensive bombs and encourage ongoing carpet bombing. Wreck the enemy soldiers and civilians and their hospitals, schools and key infrastructure. And arrange for your pals to win the reconstruction contracts.

I survived a mortar attack in Zambia. Some of the school staff were killed. My souvenir is a razor sharp fragment of an anti-personnel mortar designed to chop people’s legs off. Which human minds designed, manufactured and marketed such things? And now there are smart drones with massive payloads – safe murder gone to scale. And let us not forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is in the minds of men that wars are created and in the minds of men that peace must be won.

Changing Weltanschauung.

Changing minds.

Anti-war.

Politics where we all win.

Yoh.

Stardust gone mental

I have been letting the unconscious churn dictate my knowledge, feelings, moods and actions. Arguably there is no option. Motivation and intention come from the unconscious churn which, amongst other things, creates the illusion of an I, ego, self or me that operates in a socio-cultural environment the details of which are determined by nature, nurture and chance.

So the ‘I’ is part of an ongoing process and this implies before and after.

The before includes all my cultural yesterdays, my nine months in the womb, and the many ancestral generations whose genotypes and phenotypes are in my inherited line. And the line keeps going back eg hominid, primate, mammal, reptile, amphibian, fish, a long range of many celled invertebrates, and a plethora of single celled microorganisms. But that is the story of only living things on planet earth. There is much more before. Think solar system, galaxy, cosmos and the big bang.

It might be said that there have been many afters since the big bang but this is known only in retrospect and by only a few modern scientists. Arguably our foremost intellectuals are at last able to be conscious of consciousness. 2,500 years ago Eastern mystics had sussed that the reality that can be described is mind made and is not the real reality. European intellectuals caused the renaissance, the reformation and the enlightenment which got rid of the earlier myths and magic and paved the way for evidence based thinking.

Most evolution happens because of natural selection which makes no forward plans. The reproductive process creates varieties and some generate more offspring than others - ie there is survival of the fittest.

Some evolution happens because of selection by farmers. Think of dogs and pigeons, potatoes and wheat. There is survival of the closest to some ideal – eg small or enormous dogs with gentle or violent temperaments. The farmer selects which individuals will mate with each other.

Farmers experimented successfully with selection under domestication but their understanding of what was going on was limited. The process is much better understood these day thanks to work in genetics, epigenetics, and neuroscience, and in the implications of the evolutionary perspective when it is focussed on the selection of genes, individuals, groups, cultures, and on the impact of people on the planet.

Before the big bang – nobody knows. Immediately after the big bang there was hydrogen and helium which gradually transformed into the other elements in the Periodic Table and these formed stars and planets.

When planet earth first appeared it was lifeless. But the chemistry evolved into biochemistry and then into single celled organisms. These got together to form many celled organisms with tissues and organs that included nervous systems and brains.

The modern human brain can rise above myth and magic and be conscious of being conscious. There are many possible futures. We can therefore get comfortable with our unconscious churn. We are stardust gone mental.

Bruner’s step ladders

Words will arrive to expand on the thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) recorded in my analogue notebook. In essence I am scunnert of technical ICT issues and there is motivation to get back to the dynamics of non-egoic mentation.

I have a fairly new laptop now running MS Office 365 on Windows 10. I would like to have MS FrontPage 2002 or2003 running on the new laptop. But MS no longer supports FrontPage. So there is need of a workaround.

I want Front Page working so that I can remove malware that has infected the web sites of SRDS, CCSD, and Hakikazi that are hosted on Easyspace, and toonloon and STBF (archive) that are hosted on Bizland. Note that in all cases there are several quite large sub domains.

If I cannot edit the sites using FrontPage I will have to rebuild them from scratch using another web design programme such as Dreamweaver, Coffeecup, Google sites or whatever. That would involve a steep learning curve and a huge amount of time and effort.

I consulted the young lads in the ICT shop in Banff. Further chat might create a work around eg set up one of my old laptops purely as a FrontPage machine.

BUT – there are the dynamics of mentation to consider. I am in a deep hole brimming with ICT issues. There are many interweaving learning curves leading onwards and upwards - enough to occupy attention 24/7 or at least 16/ 7. Obsession!

BUT - Imagine that the learning curve has steps. Focus on one step at a time. Bruner the psychologist reckoned that you could teach anybody anything by dividing it into enough small steps. BUT - this line of thinking assumes the pre-existence of an expert who can ensure appropriate scope (how broad and how deep), sequence (where to begin and where to go next) and pace (how quickly to climb the steps).

BUT - in a self-learning situation it can be difficult figuring an appropriate scope, sequence and pace for a to-do-list for a new-to-you topic. BUT there is the option of logging in to expert how-to presentations even if only as a chat with local experts or as a video on Youtube.

BUT - there is the problem of discipline and focus. While climbing a particular Bruner step ladder I am drawn to endless side steps along which attention glides. That is the monkey mind being driven by the churn in the unconscious. When I become aware of attention having slipped from the original intention I gently draw it back.

BUT – at other times there is non-egoic flow and effortless focus. There is an urge to state that the non-egoic state is pleasant and even blissful. But that is a word trick. Consider the sentence, “I experience non-egoic bliss.” The whole point of being non-egoic is that there is no ‘I’ to do the experiencing. It is the ‘agency’ conundrum. Can there be an experience without an experiencer?

Riding a bicycle, driving a car. ‘I‘ was present to take the Bruner steps that led to mastery and now ‘I’ do not have to be present. The vehicles are controlled by non-egoic parts of my brain.

So we have rambled and returned to the dynamics of mentation, to how the mindbrain works. The ICT issues vanished for a while. Halleluiah.

 

Butterfly monkey

It is more a butterfly mind than a monkey one. The ICT has been having glitches and they have been jumping lightly from one focus of attention to another. I am working with two laptops in two rooms. I often arrive in room B and realise that I have forgotten why I left room A.

There is a list of lightly thought through things to do: some are grand others are trivial. I sometimes aim for the big stuff first and leave the trivial stuff to fill time when I need a break. When relaxed and at ease the situation can be like that. I can be comfy in my skin. But for about a week I have drifted to and fro in a haze of micro busy-ness.

I notice feelings of guilt for listening to the radio before17:00. I am aware of the difference between journalists and academics – the former cover many topics in a shallow way while the latter deal with grand topics in greater depth. Youtube has lots of lectures and debates lasting more than an hour while TED talks are less than 20 minutes. So there is the academic with his prize lecture being delivered many times; the journalist with a different story delivered to a deadline once a week and; the school teacher with her five lessons each day.

I am easily distracted when dealing with websites. This is mainly because I relied so heavily on MS FrontPage in my early web work where I developed a few oases of mastery in a vast desert of ignorance. FP was a user friendly means to an end. I stood in awe before the anonymous programmers for making it so incredibly easy for me to build websites.

But that was yesterday. If my old websites are to become archives they will have to be tweaked now and then to clean out the malware. I am ignorant about the nature of malware and of how to know it is there and how to get rid of it. The service providers (eg bizland) have such systems but they are expensive.

Aha – there are several stories coming to mind and they are not all about websites. Periodic back pain. Cabbage and chickpea soup. Slowness of typing. Some food in the cavity where my filling fell out. Made an appointment with the optician – will have to make one with the dentist. The old laptop is noisy.

This article demonstrates the need to edit the contents of the butterfly and monkey minds if there are to be meaningful and interesting utterances. But it is perhaps worthwhile to pay attention to the churn now and then because it is where ‘reality’ comes from. It is ‘good’ to be familiar with the workings of the mind given that all thoughts, feelings and moods are mind made and totally influenced by nature, nurture and serendipity – especially during your first 22 years on the planet.

Amen.

brain structure - early days

Having recently re-read Daniel Goleman's (2013) “Focus – the hidden driver of excellence”, I am aware of not being focussed at this present moment - the brain state is high level monkey mind with the robot on autopilot.

I have also recently re-read Matthew Lieberman's (2013) “Social. Why our brains are wired to connect”. With his team he has invented social, cognitive neuroscience (SCN).

Both books attempt to graft the new findings of neuroscience to what went before. Given the novel brain scanning machines the notion of the neural correlates of conscientiousness (NCC) are observable facts rather than speculative hypotheses.

There is the inevitable churn of the unconscious as it processes thoughts, feelings and moods (TFMs) which come from both inside and outside.

I have not yet bothered to figure the details of brain structure. There are millions of neurones and billions of synapses making and breaking connections. And it is well to remember that the system evolved ie without forward intention. It is thus functional but higgledy/piggledy. And it is still an infant discipline with new insights appearing all the time.

For the moment I loosely monitor what is going on so as to answer such questions as :-

Why do brains exist?

When did brains begin to evolve?

What makes the human brain so clever?

Who are the main people in neuroscience?

Where do they work?

How are they funded?

AND

What are the neural correlates of my doodles?

What patterns can be identified?

Why does the ability to produce them exist?

Why does doodling give rise to a non-egoic frame of mind (flow?)

turnip jumper

While driving through the countryside the other day I saw sheep eating turnips. Attention was grabbed by a feeling of Interbeing and Oneness. A sheep is a turnip's way of becoming a woolly jumper. The connecting steps include:-

turnip – sheep – shepherd – wool mill – woolly jumper

But each step is part of another set which is part of another set:-

soil – water – seed – farmer – weeding – harvesting – turnip

comet wipes out the dinosaurs – mammals evolve – sheep are domesticated – shepherds ensure that the sheep are well fed, healthy and safe from predators - sheep provide meat and wool

sheep's wool processed – wool spun into thread – thread dyed – thread fed into giant weaving machines – wooly jumpers advertised and distributed

Life is an ongoing process of churn. The energy from sunlight agitates materials (atoms) which for a while are part of living things (biotic phase) and for a while are part of the non-living environment (abiotic phase). “Round and round and round in the circle game.” (Joni Mitchell)

For some fascinating examples Google for [biogeochemical cycles].

See elsewhere on this blog - link 

Cracking paradigms

There can be no end to filling attention with the theories of others. If omniscience (all knowing) was ever an option it is no longer so.

We can imagine a pragmatic minimum of theory. It is based on the knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) that an individual needs to ensure the survival of their self and of their various social groups.

Our ancestors got bye in a simple way as foragers. But with the advent of settled agriculture and then city states etc, division of labour flourished along with associated modules of KSA.

At the bottom of this article I have listed the top level topics which I used in my long and varied professional life as an educator bent on changing minds. Towards the end of my working days I served as a facilitator of lifelong learning rather than as a chalk and talk teacher. The task was to gather, summarise and distribute the KSA in one place to another with a view to informing ongoing discussion and debate so as to crack norms and shift paradigms.

I am now retired and no longer paid to promote the KSA for third party agendas. But old habits hang around. I spend most of my time absorbing the KSA associated with evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and mindfulness. I churn out wee stories about every three days and publish them to this blog which, presently, has 28,182 page views and visitors from all parts of the planet.

anarchy

anthropology

archaeology

astronomy

atheism

biology

botany

chemistry

counselling

curriculum development

development/aid

ecology

economics

editing

education

engineering

ethics

evolution

geography

history

management consultancy

mythology

neurology

philosophy

physics

plain language

politics

psychiatry

psychology

religion

school inspection

science

sociology

teacher training

technology

zoology

remarkable marks

To be comfortable reading non fiction books I need a pencil. I can therefore highlight interesting words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs by drawing a line in the margin. If there are some very interesting parts I put two or three lines in the margin. And, for exceptionally interesting parts, there can be a wiggly line. If a highlight is quotable I put a 'Q' beside the line. If there is a definition I put 'Def' beside the line.

If I want to refer to a highlighted part in the future I write its page number on one of the blank pages near the front of the book - and sometimes write a word or two to indicate the topic.

I very seldom write notes in the margins but I do sometimes write a jargon word or phrase from another discipline.

When I re-read a book I use a different pencil or pen. Some parts might therefore get re-marked – possibly several times.

NOTES:

There is the option of using highlighter pens with an elaborate colour coding system. I find them too gaudy for my taste.

There is also the option of noting the date of reading and of re-reading. You can use the blank page where you give the page number of interesting parts. I have not been systematic in doing this.

When using a Kindle it is easy to highlight parts and to skim through them afterwards – but I prefer skimming real books

No wearisome study

“Of making many books there is no end;

and much study is weariness of the flesh.”

Ecclesiastes 12:12

• UNESCO monitors both the number and type of books published per country per year. In 2013 there was more than 2 million of themⁱ.
• UK publishers released more than 20 new titles every hour over the course of 2014, meaning that the country published more books per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world.ⁱⁱ
• According to a new report from the International Publishers Association (IPA), UK publishers released 184,000 new and revised titles in 2013.
• Using search in books on Amazon.co.uk, the returns were 66,943 for [brain], 21,224 for [neuroscience], 18,187 for [mindfulness] and 276 for [consilience].

The flesh would definitely weary if I tried to address them all. But I have filters based on reputable authors who are positively referenced by pre-existing favourite authors.

Some are tenured academics and scientists - sometimes paired with journalists. Some are credible freelance philosophers. The more user friendly characters appear on youtube lectures and debates.

BUT, at present, there is a realisation that this is a topic on which more work could be done – but I cant be bothered (CBB). SO, to avoid weariness of the flesh, I will switch attention to another mindful activity. Bye for now.

i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year

ii http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/uk-publishes-more-books-per-capita-million-report

Serendipitous blogposts

Many of my blogposts deal with eternal topics and are thus timeproof. The reader can dive in at any point and thus find something possibly apt and useful. There are several diving boards.

The tabs at the top of every page. [Existential soft rock] is a link to the blog that preceded this one. [compilations] contains a link to a separate website where, for free, you can download various collections of blogposts on given themes.

There are two [search] boxes – one on the right column and one in the footer.

Also on the right column is the [blog archive] giving the title of every post, and a machine generated list of [popular posts].

At the bottom of each page there is a box for comments. I greatly appreciate your comments.