March 11, 2023
by language is the software of the brain metaphor
I think Mankind (at least in the rich, industrialized countries) is moonstruck. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. 2 and Table 1).The strongest effect was observed in the left inferior parietal cortex, peaking in the left angular They haul a great amount of information - most of it stored in the recipient's brain and provoked by the symbol. The brain (and, by implication, the mind) have been compared to the latest technological innovation in every generation. Do words such as saudade indicate that different languages produce different patterns of thought in people? Many of the functions tackled by the brain must be recursive. Previous studies have suggested that our understanding of metaphors may be rooted in our bodily experience. One group of researchers who wanted to investigate how language influences thought compared how English speakers and the Dani people of Papua New Guinea think and speak about color. In North America - the most narcissistic culture ever - dreams have been construed as communications WITHIN the dreaming person. Many neuroscientists, if they think about the problem at all, simply consider that progress will inevitably be piecemeal and slow, because there is no grand unified theory of the brain lurking around the corner. In this, they are no different than other collective narratives (myths, for instance). Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We can expect to find that we can reduce all the activities of the brain to computational, mechanically solvable, recursive functions. - the narcissist is unable to regard others as three dimensional beings with their own needs and rights. As we descend into sleep (the hypnagogic state) and as we emerge from it (the hypnopompic state) - we have visual dreams. Some functional MRI, o fMRI, brain imaging studies have indicated, for example, that when you hear a metaphor such as "she had a rough day," regions of the brain associated with tactile experience are activated. Physiology also tells us the differences between dreaming and other hallucinatory states (nightmares, psychoses, sleepwalking, daydreaming, hallucinations, illusions and mere imagination): the REM/EEG patterns are absent and the latter states are much less "real". It implies that our minds are somehow floating about in our brains, and could be transferred into a different head or replaced by another mind. In 2015, the roboticist Rodney Brooks chose the computational metaphor of the brain as his pet hate in his contribution to a collection of essays entitled This Idea Must Die. The relationship is very much like the one that exists between intuition and formalism, aesthetics and scientific discipline, feeling and thinking, mentally creating and committing one's creation to a medium. At the very beginning of the digital age, in 1951, the pioneer neuroscientist Karl Lashley argued against the use of any machine-based metaphor. Got shot? Scientists have demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Moreover, talk therapy involves TALKING - which is the transfer of energy from one brain to another through the air. In reality, the very structures of a brain and a computer are completely different. But metaphors are also rich and allow insight and discovery. Dreams fulfil different societal functions and have distinct cultural roles in each of these civilizations. It probably also has therapeutic side benefits. When I went to school and read the bible, I saw bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. Early databases constituted a sort of substrate, ready to be acted upon. It will represent both reality and the non-dreamer wrongly. This fact is known to the authors of all the file compression applications in the world. I suggest we are more likely to find out about how the brain works by studying the brain itself, and the phenomena of behaviour, than by indulging in far-fetched physical analogies.. Some birds do it, and some reptiles as well. It enters and exits the machine through designated ports but does not affect the machine's structure or functioning. They remember nothing of their dreams and are rarely, if ever, motivated by insights contained in them. Their very existence proves it. ", When participants saw the word "bent" used in both the literal and metaphorical context, a similar response was evoked in the brain, with the sensory-motor region being activated almost immediately -- within 200 milliseconds -- of the verb being presented on the screen. and do more harm to the client, confusing him and setting up obstacles in the process of change. I cover 'How to heal using Metaphors' as part of my NLP Master Practitioner Syllabus. They must interact with the dreamer's real world, with his behaviour in it, with his moods that bring his behaviour about, in short: with his whole mental apparatus. Sudip: That, I bumped into this article, as I dive deeper into Ray Kurzweil's - How to Create a Mind, just helped me understand this piece better. As coaches we need to switch with them and talk to them in the same domain as they do, switching if they switch. It fast deteriorates when dreaming is impossible. It would seem that we are all constantly engaged in maintenance, in preserving that which exists and inventing new strategies for coping. if they have conflicting sexual feelings. Learn more in our Cookie Policy. LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. It provides an astonishingly accurate description of micro-processes and of the Universe without saying much about their "essence". | Oliver Burkeman, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Photograph: Artem Burduk/Getty Images/iStockphoto. They then used the full range of neuroscientific techniques, such as lesions (removing transistors from the simulation), analysing the spiking activity of the virtual transistors and studying their connectivity, observing the effect of various manipulations on the behaviour of the system, as measured by its ability to launch each of the games. The duo Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in computers from the late 70s and early 80s that enabled those machines to run video games such as Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. The world around us in inexplicable, baffling in its diversity and myriad forms. But these are language elements and need not be confused with the plots. Reality must not be present in them not at all. It is the fulfilment of this overriding need that psychological theories set out to cater to. The first is to maintain the model of the world by eliminating "noise" and by realistically incorporating negating data and the second is to pass on the function of modelling and remodelling to a much more flexible structure, to the brain. ", Study participants were shown three different sentences on a computer screen, each presented one word at a time. They argued that a "user's manual" could be composed, replete with engineering and maintenance instructions. Otherwise, the whole edifice might crumble. A session missed will be held the night after. A collapsing bedpost (as in Maury's famous dream) will become a French guillotine, for instance. . A metaphor is also subject to logical and aesthetic rules and to the rigors of the scientific method. There are four reasons to account for this shortcoming: So, what are plots good for? Not only does the insula 'do' sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. But could this idea have been leading us astray all along? The dream mechanisms and/or dream contents of psychotics must be substantially different and distinguished from ours. Instead, due to the plasticity of the brain, the insula just expanded its area of operations. It must possess some structural and functional resemblance. Dreams no longer mediate between the person and his environment. ScienceDaily. Defences are gradually dismantled and a new, more functional, view of the world is established. Probably, there is something in it which requires what sleep has to offer: limitation of external, sensory, inputs (especially visual ones - hence the compensatory strong visual element in dreams). Nelson Mandela was misinformed when he so famously said, 'Dont talk to their minds; talk to their hearts.' Even a gas pump has a "mind-correlate". In the lighter vein 'I am screwed' conveys much more than 'My boss has asked me to prepare a deck in 2 hrs collecting information form 4 verticals and I already have the monthly report compilation going live in 1hr blah blah.!!!!! A neuron is not like a binary switch that can be turned on or off, forming a wiring diagram. This phase was followed by the "relational" organization of data (a primitive example of which is the spreadsheet). That eventually led her to psychology and her work at the UA. I have lived in Africa, the Middle East, North America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Strong emergence has recently been criticised by some neuroscientists as risking metaphysical implausibility, because there is no evident causal mechanism, nor any single explanation, of how emergence occurs. It almost does not react to external sensory stimuli while in operation. Relational databases cannot be integrated with object oriented ones, for instance. Such a linguistic practice may act as a constant reminder of the cultural value, which, in turn, may encourage people to perform the linguistic practice. For a counsellor, it is imperative that he/she understands how symbolic perceptions of the client are organised in their brains if they want to change negative patterns. Unfortunately, this is heavily disguised by the symbol language of the dream and by the disjointed, disjunctive, dissociative manner in which it proceeds. This could imply that the appearance of new and insightful metaphors for the brain and how it functions hinges on future technological breakthroughs, on a par with hydraulic power, the telephone exchange or the computer. This is a painful and frightening process. But that does not mean this metaphor will continue to be useful in the future. F or the moment, the brain-as-computer metaphor retains its dominance, although there is disagreement about how strong a metaphor it is. Imagining that we can repurpose our nervous system to run different programmes, or upload our mind to a server, might sound scientific, but lurking behind this idea is a non-materialist view going back to Descartes and beyond. Deciding between the two camps was and is a crucial matter. Language may indeed influence the way that we think, an idea known as linguistic determinism. This Areiocritica helps us to decipher the true and motivating meaning of the dialogue. But it is important to realize that it does so precisely because There are two types of dreams: visual and "thought-like" (which leave an impression of being awake on the dreamer). They have no emotional correlate, they are transient, undeveloped, abstract and expressly deal with the day residues. Narcissism IS a dream state. Thus, a coherent picture is obtained which yields predictions and allows to manipulate the environment effectively. It is not necessarily connected to higher functions like speech but it is connected to reproduction and to the biochemistry of the brain. The same principle is applied in speed reading - skimming the unnecessary bits, getting straight to the point. When you read in the newspaper about a 5 year old kid being raped by a drunk uncle and you sit there thinking that he should beand your insula activates. The language used is polyvalent, rich, effusive, and fuzzy - in short, metaphorical. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. That response differed when "bent" was replaced with "altered.". In this sense, dreams are an inseparable part of reality. The latter (psychology) implicitly assumes that something exists (the "mind", the "psyche") which cannot be reduced to hardware or to wiring diagrams. To complete their mission successfully (adaptation to the world using the model of reality modified by them) - dreams must make themselves felt. In 1989, Crick recognised its attractiveness, but felt it would fail, because of the brains complex and messy evolutionary history he dramatically claimed it would be like trying to reverse engineer a piece of alien technology. Coming up with those new metaphors is challenging most of those used in the past with regard to the brain have been related to new kinds of technology. It turned out that people living in those countries where pronoun drop languages are spoken tend to have more collectivistic values (e.g., employees having greater loyalty toward their employers) than those who use nonpronoun drop languages such as English (Kashima & Kashima, 1998). It is also associated with changes in the pattern of electrical activity of the brain (EEG). ScienceDaily, 2 April 2019. Our brains know the difference, but would we be able to understand the latter without the former? As a result, dreamers in information-rich societies will never mistake a dream for reality. We are living through one of the greatest of scientific endeavours the attempt to understand the most complex object in the universe, the brain. Or a new framework will emerge from cybernetics, control theory, complexity and dynamical systems theory, semantics and semiotics. For decades centuries to come, the singularity will be the stuff of science fiction, not science. As observed by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, the brain is an integrated, evolved structure with different bits of it appearing at different moments in evolution and adapted to solve different problems. A recent review of research aimed at determining how language might affect something like color perception suggests that language can influence perceptual phenomena, especially in the left hemisphere of the brain. This influences the meaning and importance of the experience, the way it fits with other experiences, and actions taken as a result. Use of metaphors and other figures of speech illuminates the language.insular minds have something cynical stored in their brains, perhaps based on some past event.beyond the basic NLP courses, people should be made aware of its usefulness to communication in day to day life as well as behavior..It should not be restricted to practitioners , trainees or executives.organisational and public behavior should be taught at grass root levelsbut the article as such is inspiring. For example, the Portuguese word saudade originated during the 15th century, when Portuguese sailors left home to explore the seas and travel to Africa or Asia. The symbols generated by the user's computer (using the Java programming language) "provoke" them to surface. Despite deploying this powerful analytical armoury, and despite the fact that there is a clear explanation for how the chip works (it has ground truth, in technospeak), the study failed to detect the hierarchy of information processing that occurs inside the chip. You jog your big left toe on a sidewalk. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. The brain's very hardware must disassemble, reassemble, reorganize, restructure, reroute, reconnect, disconnect, and, in general, alter itself in response to data. No experiment could be designed to test the statements within the plot, to establish their truth-value and, thus, to convert them to theorems. Another was a metaphor using the same verb: "The church bent the rules." All mammals exhibit the same REM/EEG patterns and may, therefore, be dreaming as well. Well researched extracts to amplify metaphorical response of the brains. They are fables and myths, narratives, stories, hypotheses, conjunctures. The collective symbols (Jung's archetypes?) Or unimagined new technology will change all our views by providing a radical new metaphor for the brain. Will Future Computers Run on Human Brain Cells? In some respects, though, there are striking differences: Psychology is desperately trying to link up to reality and to scientific discipline by employing observation and measurement and by organizing the results and presenting them using the language of mathematics. In dealing with gigantic amounts of information, the natural preference (when processing power is not constrained) would be to use visuals. Research has shown this to be a rare event, independent of the timing of the stimuli: during sleep or immediately prior to it. They employ visuals because this is the most efficient way of packing and transferring information. It holds it breath. The relationship proposed is metaphorical, and it is ordering us to do something, not trying to tell us the truth.. The language-processing parts of volunteers' brains became active regardless of whether the volunteers listened to the literal sentences or the metaphors. Still, when it does happen, it seems that even when the interpretation is dead wrong - the substantial information is preserved. However, in other languages such as Japanese, pronouns can be, and in fact often are, dropped from sentences. It, thus, induces relaxation and acceptance and a better functioning of the "client". The dissonance between how we regard ourselves, and what we really are and between our model of the world and reality - this dissonance is so enormous that it calls for a (continuous) routine of evaluation, mending and re-invention. John Grinder in his New Code NLP book Whispering in the Wind (which he co authored with Carmen Bostic St Clair) talks about 'Belief System Intervention' using Metaphors. The computer is a "thinking machine" (however limited, simulated, recursive and mechanical). Put more succinctly: it seems that the famous "reality test" (used in psychology to set apart the "functioning, normal" individuals from those who are not) is maintained by dreaming. WebHumans use metaphors all the time; they're so ingrained in our language we often don't even notice we're doing it. To computational, mechanically solvable, recursive functions mammals exhibit the same verb: `` the church bent the.... A new, more functional, view of the world is established,. Plots good for each presented one word at a time, forming a wiring diagram of search options will. Crucial matter gigantic amounts of information, the singularity will be held the after... Up obstacles in the future do n't even notice we 're doing.. 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