Spirituality and the Brain (Identity)

by George Jelliss ⌂ @, Crewe, Sunday, March 14, 2010, 21:27 (5367 days ago) @ George Jelliss

Here is another article on how our brains work. -http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/21-0-It's nothing particularly to do with spirituality, I just didn't want to open up a new thread unnecessarily.-It seems we think in metaphors.-This may also be relevant to the thread on mathematics:
QUOTE: "And in doing arithmetic, students who used their hands to group numbers together had an easier time doing problems that required conceptual grouping. This is predicted by the analysis of mathematics in Where Mathematics Comes From by myself and Rafael Núñez where we show how mathematics from the simple to the advanced is based on embodied metaphorical cognition"-QUOTE: "My Berkeley colleague, Srini Narayanan has shown what computational properties such circuits must have. In still unpublished work, he has shown that the relative timing of first spikes across a synapse predicts the directionality of elementary metaphors in all known cases. The very idea that such low-level phenomena at the level of neurons can result in the vast range our metaphorical thought is truly remarkable."-QUOTE: "Primary metaphorical thought arises when a neural circuit is formed linking two brain areas activated when experiences occur together repeatedly. Typically, one of the experiences is physical. In each experiment, each subject has the physical experience activating one of the brain regions and another experience (e.g., emotional or temporal) activating the other brain region for the given metaphor. The activation of both regions activates the metaphorical link."-I'm sure I've read about this research before, some time ago, but have not seen it expressed so clearly as here.

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GPJ


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