• they/them

a cloud between the sky

and the earth

avatar by @SweetSidhe


neocities, my main home
oriananonexistent.neocities.org/
the cohost forum test project, and wherever it goes after
eggbugstestplace.jcink.net/index.php?showuser=2
the website league once it's ready. i'll be exactly who you think i am
websiteleague.org/

oriananonexistent
@oriananonexistent

it's weird that aristotle thought the brain was for cooling blood or whatever. and the ancient egyptians threw the brain out instead of sealing it somewhere special.

was it not obvious that the brain was important? if they could dissect this well, wouldn't they notice the spine, and all the myriad nerves running through the body?

would they not notice the optic nerves? wouldn't they think 'hey our eyes are connected to this big gray thing maybe that means something'

wouldn't they naturally notice that the seat of their thoughts is their head? don't they hear things in their skulls?

did they feel their thoughts in their chests instead?

am i weird for feeling my thoughts as taking up a physical location inside my skull even though that feels like the most natural and reasonable way to experience a thought?

have we been prompted by the past 500 or so years of medical science teaching us the power of the brain to associate head with thoughts?

is it just me that's weird on this and most people don't physically feel their thoughts bouncing around at all?

...could i teach myself to experience my thoughts in a space outside my head? could i make thoughts live in my entire body? outside of my body?


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

Ok but they also saw all the blood vessels converging in the heart. And they new if your blood leaks out, you die. Nothing leaks out of the nerves (as far as they knew)

But you do raise an interesting point. I also "feel" like my thoughts occupy a physical space inside my head. I wonder how much of that is conditioning?

Because I feel some emotions in my chest, but the brain is the one that's in charge of those, too


amydentata
@amydentata

I feel like "everything emanates from the brain" is an easy trap to fall into, if the rest of your body is working just fine. After a few decades experiencing weird stuff like "rotating my arm a certain way makes muscles in my foot spasm" and "my mood changes dramatically based on what's going on in my damaged GI tract" I've arrived at a much more full-body perspective.

AFAIK recent medical science knows this too. Your brain sends signals to other parts of your body, but your body also sends signals back to the brain, and parts of your body send signals to each other. Those signals aren't all of the same kind, but there is communication happening in every direction, via multiple means. I'd say your conscious experience isn't so much centered in the brain as it arises from that back-and-forth communication between all the different parts of you. If you were literally a brain in a vat, without your body's signals being simulated in that vat, you'd feel very different, and after long enough your brain would become dramatically different. Your sense of self isn't just the presence of a brain, it's the structure of that brain, and the structure of any brain is shaped by inputs.

I'm pretty sure that, like a lot of common misconceptions, the 100% brain-centric view is from a previous era and culture hasn't internalized contemporary findings of how the body works. Kind of like how people still learn about electrons orbiting the nucleus like little planets. Sometimes it's a useful fiction, other times not useful at all. (And medical/scientific professionals are also brought up with culture formed around old ideas; if you've had to deal with doctors a lot because of a poorly-understood chronic illness you probably know this all too well)


panicattheopticon
@panicattheopticon

they also saw a lot of head injuries or formations back then. watch a guy be missing through birth or accident half his thinking bits and seem functional then see what you think about human biology

it’s probably linguistics too, we know linguistic concepts can have very real material impact on us. you could argue language itself is a life form that lives atop us like so much abstracted software. our ability to do and perceive things literally limited by something that, regardless of being an otherwise modern human, you’d need to be taught (“nurture”)

not that you can’t overcome that later, but you’re definitely working overtime to rewrite those patterns and it’s still gonna shape ideas and thoughts

so maybe we feel this way because we have a very brain driven culture, memetically rn


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in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

I think my thoughts location kinda vary between being behind my eyes or in my throat? Even if you don't know about the brain it makes sense for thoughts to be around the area where you input and output information, so eyes, mouth and ears.

Which makes me wonder if deaf-blind people who take a lot of information through other places like touch would feel their thoughts coming from somewhere else, too.

in reply to @amydentata's post:

in reply to @panicattheopticon's post:

the self is spirit/fire/water -> the self is machine -> the self is chemicals -> the self is electrical wiring -> the self is computer... there's always some sort of (fundamentally wrong) cultural shorthand based on the latest technological change

in about fifty years we are about to take a really weird turn and be convinced that the self is a brain, but the body is made up of a bunch of homunculi. a tiny pituitary gland in your pituitary gland making sure your pituitary gland does pituitary gland things

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