March 23, 2009
The brain seems to be organized along functional lines
How We Think
Current research would suggest this is not the case. The brain seems to be organized along functional lines rather than site specific lines. Memories appear to be a product of networks of bio-electrical waves that resonate throughout the mind-body, not specific sites.
The second conclusion was that everything we have ever experienced is recorded in our brain-and this is the one to which most of us in NLP allude. This is a useful belief to have, but hard to prove. And in most cases, easier to disprove.
The third conclusion is the least well known and perhaps the most significant: we are more than our memories, our brain and body. During the experiments Penfiéld would ask the patients about their memories and they would describe the experience in full detail. While they were experiencing the memory, they also had a simultaneous awareness of being in the operating room. Here’s the twister. Penfield would ask them if they could be fully in the memory or be fully in the operating room and found that they could easily shift between the two. When he asked them who was doing this, the person in the operating room or the one in memory, they answered that it was neither. It was what some call “the choice maker.” They experienced themselves as a witness or observer, a consciousness that operates through pure intention. In other words, someone one else was playing the instrument!
2. Reality is a construction
This notion gets to the heart of the matter (no pun intended). It all started around the turn of the 20th century when the field of (Newtonian) physics thought it had explained almost everything. Newtonian physics was based on the premise that everything (reality) could be reduced to little particles called atoms which had protons, neutrons and electrons. These were the basic building blocks of reality. It was logical, linear, organized, and it worked very well. This model created the foundation of all modern science, including medicine and psychology. A hundred years ago the only two things which they had to explain before physics would become a closed science was gravity and light. When they studied light, the neat and tidy world of Newtonian physics was rocketed into hyperspace. There was a big problem. When physicists studied light in its most elementary form called photons they discovered that sometimes light behaved as a particle (which they expected) and sometimes it behaved as a wave. To make matters worse, while an electron sometimes behaved as an object, physicists discovered it had no dimension!
More tomorrow!
Love & Light
Gary De Rodriguez