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Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre  There are fields which combine neuroscience and psychology to study exactly that, how brain activity relates to thoughts, attitudes, behaviour, etc. Keep in mind (ha!) that it's a relatively 'young' field. Compared to something like physics or philosophy, neuroscience hasn't been around for long. So naturally there are still a lot of gaps which it hasn't got to, yet. |
It is interesting, for sure! There is a lot of the brain activity that is learned behaviours and kind of weighted decisions that can be observered with that new functional MRI stuff. I saw this last night on TV, on the NGC
National Geographic Channel TV Schedule - Explorer: Explorer: Science of Evil [TV-14 DSLV Ratings N/A] Explorer: Science of Evil. In one part, they had subjects in the fMRI machine and put them through a scenario and the the fMRI would show parts of the brain firing, the frontal lobes and the more emotional parts of the brain going off. Logic versus emotion, kind of, and some subjects would "decide" emotionally (that part would overide the logic) and then others would have a stronger logic and have a different statement of what they would do in the scenario. The scenario was "if you were hiding in a village under seige with your infant that was crying, would you kill the infant to save the village?" I know, dreadfull scenario, but I think that has happened in history a lot.
Anyway, the brain is a mechanism that responds to the environment, right? And I do start to wonder what is the response? Is it all learned reflexes? Even out purist thoughts or, what I saw exist, our divine or non-habitual thoughts - are they also just leaned reflexes in thoughts?
I still like to think (where do I think?) there's a part of us that is not of the brain matter, that the brain matter is more like a result of the part of us (spiritual part) that is aware. I wonder how the psychologists see how we decide or have original thoughts? Our mind, or reasoning or evaluating or choices come from somewhere. But is it all just a bunch of learned behaviour, stimulus/response? But then, what made the weighted decision making go a certain way? That's were our will to reinforce something or not is our awareness or spirit kind of directing our brain, molding it to go a certain way.
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On the topic of spirit, when people began studying the brain scientifically, they thought that 'animal spirits' traveled up and down nerves in the body and throughout the brain. They believed that these spirits were what carried instructions from brain to muscles, for example. These day we call them electrical and chemical signals, but the principle is similar.
So our evolving understanding is in part due to the kind of analogies we have available to us. I think the same applies to the spiritual perspective. Since it is not a scientific perspective, the available analogies are not required to agree with observations. This means that spiritual ideas may be valid, but there's no way to be sure.
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They also though the heart was the seat of our soul or consciousness for a long time, that the brain was almost not needed. That the brian was what tempered or kept the soul from being too wild.
All this is questioning if the brain, the matter and all those nerouns connected to each other, is what initiates experience or maybe just a medium for experience.