Day residues, which clearly do not need to be processed by dreams - are swept under the carpet of consciousness (maybe even erased). As an army officer I realised that a piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values. When we are astounded at the brilliance of Kafka while reading 'Metamorphosis' we know that it isnt really about a beetle. A necessary and sufficient connection surely exists between man-made things, tangible and intangible, and human minds. 1 Independent Researcher, Berkeley, CA, United States. The uterus contracts and the muscles at the base of the tongue enjoy a relaxation in electrical activity. Such a model can be innate and genetic in very simple forms of life because the amount of information that needs to be incorporated is limited. Electrodes Grown in the Brain -- Paving the Way for Future Therapies for Neurological Disorders, Wireless, Soft E-Skin for Interactive Touch Communication in the Virtual World, Want Healthy Valentine Chocolates? In this age of technology and precision, efficiency and optimization - dreams seem to be a somewhat anachronistically quaint relic of our life in the savannah. A lot of the information that we absorb and process is either "noise" or repetitive. Thus metaphors are more memorable and Attempts to find an overall explanation of how the brain works that flow logically from its structure would be doomed to failure, he argued, because the starting point is almost certainly wrong there is no overall logic. The programmer is unable to tell how the object does what it does, or how does an external, useful function arise from internal, hidden functions or structures. This dismissal of metaphor has recently been taken even further by the French neuroscientist Romain Brette, who has challenged the most fundamental metaphor of brain function: coding. In the early life of the human embryo, instructions (DNA) are also insulated from data (i.e., from amino acids and other life substances). Redundant hardware -different centers to perform similar tasks. It should come as no surprise if it were to be discovered that talk therapy has clear physiological effects upon the brain of the patient (blood volume, electrical activity, discharge and absorption of hormones, etc.). Focusing on sets of sensory and processing neurons without linking these networks to the behaviour of the animal misses the point of all that processing. What is not clear, however, is what would replace it. Whether it's your girlfriend or your wife, this top ten, Rape victim stories can be very difficult to read, frightening and emotionally draining for some but stories of rape show other victims that they are not alone in their struggles. Materials provided by University of Arizona. As we descend into sleep (the hypnagogic state) and as we emerge from it (the hypnopompic state) - we have visual dreams. It must have many levels of excitation (i.e., many modes of representation of information). In case a drug that blocks the actions of this NT is administered to people who are clinically depressed, they feel better. Or new comparative evolutionary studies will show how other animals are conscious and provide insight into the functioning of our own brains. The reason is that knowledge about product "collapses" the set of probabilities and increases our knowledge about the origin. Brains are, so far as we can tell, exactly that. Well researched extracts to amplify metaphorical response of the brains. Imagine for a moment that your closest friend fluently speaks more than one language. Like Gregory, these critics claim that the reliance on emergence to explain complex phenomena suggests that neuroscience is at a key historical juncture, similar to that which saw the slow transformation of alchemy into chemistry. We can expect to find that we can reduce all the activities of the brain to computational, mechanically solvable, recursive functions. The fact that the brain processes literal and metaphorical versions of a concept in the same brain region is used by Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to its advantage. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate werent the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands. Smell the same awful food, and the insula activates as well. But dreams have an unlimited capacity of information processing at their disposal (the brain at night). In short: much closer to reality as described by modern physics. There are many alternative scenarios about how the future of our understanding of the brain could play out: perhaps the various computational projects will come good and theoreticians will crack the functioning of all brains, or the connectomes will reveal principles of brain function that are currently hidden from us. Entrepreneurship involves massive amounts of dreaming and the net is pure entrepreneurship. Learn more in our Cookie Policy. It is the fulfilment of this overriding need that psychological theories set out to cater to. This is one reason why dreaming is discontinuous: time must be given to interpret and to assimilate the new model. Despite vast amounts of effort and ingenuity, we still cannot predict the effect of changing one component in this tiny network that is not even a simple brain. But the ways in which such structures actually process those signals is unknown, and is rarely explicitly hypothesised, even in simple models of neural network function. Shark from Jurassic Period Highly Evolved. Martin Davis 1,2 *. It is not intended to provide medical or other professional advice. This "model modification" is carried out through an intricate, symbol laden, dialogue between the dreamer and himself. It is not a serious scientific work (which does not detract from its awesome penetration and beauty). They remember nothing of their dreams and are rarely, if ever, motivated by insights contained in them. "A picture is worth a thousand words" the saying goes and computer users know that to store images requires more memory than any other type of data. , indeed metaphors carry a great deal of information and are a potent tool for effective communication ! We all seem to possess an intuitive copy of just such a key, uniquely tailored to our needs, to our data and to our circumstances. But this was a mirage. The world around us in inexplicable, baffling in its diversity and myriad forms. As per neuroscience, we store information in our head in a very unique manner. For decades it has been the dominant metaphor in neuroscience. They must be chained to the dreamer's realities, his (daily) problems, people that he knows, situations that he encountered or is likely to encounter, dilemmas that he is facing and conflicts that he would have liked resolved. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. 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. The closer the origin to the product - the more we can learn about the origin from the product. They believe that everything has a reason and a purpose. About 40% - possibly the same dreamers - report that they had a dream in the relevant night. Volunteers were asked to evaluate the resumes of supposed job applicants where, as the critical variable, the resume was attached to a clipboard of one of two different weights. Programming objects, in other words, are "black boxes" (an engineering term). It is likely to be further enhanced should organic or quantum computers transpire. With the exception of this highly dubious role, dreams do seem to have three important functions: All three functions are part of a much larger one: The continuous adjustment of the model one has of one's self and of one's place in the world - to the incessant stream of sensory (external) input and of mental (internal) input. Dreamers in the West should engage in a qualitatively different type of dreaming. Results are, probably, achieved without need for cognitive, conscious processing, in the other, unremembered, or disremembered cases. But this all serves the same purpose: to succeed to finish the Herculean task of refitting the model of the Self and of the World in one night. "How the brain finds meaning in metaphor." For the moment, the brain-as-computer metaphor retains its dominance, although there is disagreement about how strong a metaphor it is. This kind of weak emergence cannot explain the activity of even the simplest nervous systems, never mind the working of your brain, so we fall back on strong emergence, where the phenomenon that emerges cannot be explained by the activity of the individual components. Computers and their programming evolve. External sensory input is interpreted by the dream and represented in its unique language of symbols and disjunction. This is an extremely powerful tool, but a degree of modesty is required when it comes to the claims that are made for such studies, and realism is needed with regard to the difficulties of drawing parallels between brains and artificial systems. This creates the sensation of being erratic, of abruptness, of the absence of spatial or temporal logic, of purposelessness. Scientists are accumulating vast amounts of data about structure and function in a huge array of brains, from the tiniest to our own. The latter happens without any REM cum EEG fanfare. WebAn overview of the basics of metaphorical thought and language from the perspective of Neurocognition, the integrated interdisciplinary study of how conceptual thought and You may recall from earlier chapters that the left hemisphere is associated with language for most people. Suffice it to say, at this stage, that dreams in information-cluttered societies will employ more symbols, will weave them more intricately and the dreams will be much more erratic and discontinuous. It would be an over-simplification to say that the dream carries messages (even if we were to limit it to correspondence with one's self). Innocent Chiluwa is a Professor of English (Discourse Analysis) and Media/Digital Communications in the Department of Languages and General Studies, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria. *** NLP Practitioner Program at Delhi 14-19 Jan, Mumbai 4-9 Feb, Bengaluru 15-20 April and NLP Master Practitioner at Delhi 18-24 March 2017. ', 'How does that make you feel?' Suggestible people dream what they have been instructed to dream in hypnosis - but not what they have been so instructed while (partly) awake and under direct suggestion. WebHumans use metaphors all the time; they're so ingrained in our language we often don't even notice we're doing it. To complete their mission successfully (adaptation to the world using the model of reality modified by them) - dreams must make themselves felt. The result is a major simplification of the processing terminal (the net-PC) and an increase in its cost efficiency. Their conclusion was bleak: Ultimately, the problem is not that neuroscientists could not understand a microprocessor, the problem is that they would not understand it given the approaches they are currently taking.. And the deep structure of our thoughts come out as surface structure (language). Since its inception in the 1920s, the idea of a neural code has come to dominate neuroscientific thinking more than 11,000 papers on the topic have been published in the past 10 years. The proper way to think of the brain is a digital computer. The school of epiphenomenologists (emergent phenomena) regarded the mind as the by product of the brain's "hardware" and "wiring" complexity. 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. This state of affairs is quite the same in the Middle East and Eastern Europe where dreams constitute an integral and important part of institutionalized religion and the subject of serious analyses and contemplation. Nevertheless, people effortlessly switch back and forth between them and sometimes enjoy all three simultaneously. The dreaming brain has, therefore, to attend to and to process only the "semi-private language" elements. Got shot? On the face of it, dreaming is a colossal waste of energy and psychic resources. I have lived in Africa, the Middle East, North America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe. They are concerned mostly with the "patient" and use other figures, settings, locales, situations to cater to his needs, to reconstruct his reality test and to adapt it to the new input from outside and from within. or more than half a century, all those highly diverse panels of patchwork we have been working on have been framed by thinking that brain processes involve something like those carried out in a computer. It surfs this beautiful, white landscape, in suspended disbelief. The collective symbols (Jung's archetypes?) 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