Two realities II, part 7 of 8

Two realities II, part 7 of 8

Brooke Gladstone, The trouble with reality, 2017                            [ ]

p.12
   It is a nauseating enterprise, tinkering with your universe.  You could break it. 

pp.12-13
   But what if you have no choice?  You know what happens; you've done it.  We've all done it.  In a 1906 lecture, pragmatist William James described exactly what transpires when suddenly a person's trusty stock of old opinions is imperiled.  The reason can vary; maybe it's because the facts contradict them, or they contradict each other, or they are getting in the way of what he wants.  No matter, the result is always a deep and strange unease, which can be escaped only by modifying one's previous opinion. 

p.14
   You alter only what you must to avoid collateral damage to the code you live by.  To do otherwise would both deny you serenity and defy your biochemistry.  It's behavior bred in the bone, and the blood, and the brain. 

p.16
ME (Gladstone):  You mean once they figured out how best to lie to themselves, they got a blast of oxytocin or something? 

       WESTERN:  [laughs] Very, very close, that's right. So they got this huge blast of dopamine, which is involved in reward. 

ME (Gladstone):  In other word, the same thing you get when you take coke. 

       WESTERN:  That's exactly right. There was no reasoning at all going on. 

p.91
Western, Drew, interview by Brooke Gladstone. “This Is Your Brain on Politics: Interview with Drew Western.”  On the Media, podcast audio, October 12, 2012.  http://www.wnyc.org/story/243320-your-brain-politics/. 

pp.16-17
   That is what you're up against. Who would choose violation over validation?  The very wiring of your mind and body rebels against that choice.  Yet any sincere reckoning with reality demands that you strain, violently, against the natural, lifelong limitations of your  umwelt , or as neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes, at least accept the idea that the  umwelt  exists. 

   (Brooke Gladstone, The trouble with reality: a rumination on moral panic in our time, 306.2097  Gladston, 2017, ) 


David DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite
2011

 p.51
   To understand why, we have to go back to what makes the brain happy. When a well-established schema is called into question by new information, the brain reacts as if threatened. The amygdalae fires up (threat response), and the ventral striatum revs down (reward response). This is not a comfortable place for the brain. The supercharged clay in your head doesn't like being on guard--it likes being stable. Ambiguity, which might result from considering the new information, is a threat. 
 p.51
We can either allow that threat to stand by considering the inconsistent information, or block it by dismissing or ignoring it. Or we might subcategorize the information and store it away as an “outlier” case; something that can't be entirely ignore, but does not challenge or change the existing schema. 
 p.52
Successfully plumbing the depths of religious belief, for example, appears to hinge on understanding the ways our brains seek stability. Indeed, belief in general appears to have much to do with the brain's penchant for homeostasis--defined by renowned physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon as “the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition.”17 
 p.52
the brain wants stability and consistency. 
We seldom realize it, but very nearly everything we do is colored by this drive. 

   (DiSalvo, David, 1970-, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite / by David DiSalvo., 1. happiness., 2. logic., 3. desire., 4. neurosciences., 152.42   DiSalvo, 2011, ) 


V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain           [ ]

p.147
I used this analogy to illustrate that there is a sort of coherence-producing mechanism in the left hemisphere--the general--that prohibits anomalies, allows the emergence of a unified belief system and is largely responsible for the integrity and stability of self. 

   (Ramachandran, V.S., Phantoms in the brain : probing the mysteries of the human mind / V. S. Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee., 1. neurology--popular works., 2. brain--popular works., 3. neurosciences--popular works., 1998, 612.82, ) 


Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch., The embodied mind, 1991 

p.67
Consciousness, as a technical term   vijñana  , always refers to the dualistic sense of experience in which there is an experiencer, an object experienced, and a relation (or relations) binding them together. 

pp.71-72
   At this point the reader will probably become rather irritated and say, “Fine, the self isn't really a lasting and coherent thing; it is just the continuity of the stream of experience. It is a process and not a thing. What's the big deal?”  

   (Varela, Francisco J., 1945-, The embodied mind : cognitive science and human experience / Francisco J. varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch., 1. Cognition.
2. Cognitive science., 3. Experiential learning., 4. Meditations──Buddhism., 
BF311.V26    1991, 153.4──dc20, 1991,  )
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