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With this week’s topic on emotions, feelings, dreams, and the way the mind works, I can’t help but think about my second paper topic, the placebo effect. I always wondered why they give placebos, knowing what it was, but I never fully understood what the placebo effect was so that is why I chose that topic. I learned about how one’s mind associates a pill with a specific response, like feeling better, even though the pill has no medicine. I find it interesting how one’s mind believes when in reality there is nothing there. It makes me think more and more about how the brain does what it wants to whether something is present or not. I have been following many questions that lead to other questions over the semester and the conclusion I have found is that the brain dictates what we believe whether it is there or not. In the class, Prof. Grobstein has showed us things that I would never have believed existed: Phantom Limb, seeing yellow is not really seeing yellow, a rose to one is not the same as a rose to another, our brain fills in the blind spot with something that is not there, and most of all believing that a pill, a placebo, has an affect only because it is a pill.

In many of my posts I have questioned reality, thinking, and perspective but what I didn’t question was the brain. All three thinks I have been questioning are all manifestations of the brain. They appear real to me because they are manifested by my brain. And this grueling semester of roundabout questions has brought me to Day 1 of Neurobio and Emily Dickenson’s poem. “The brain is wider than the sky.” It is our imagination and our thought that makes the sky. This brain, our thought, makes our reality and similarly the reality of society. We all are different and therefore possess some type of disability, in that we are different. That is our only disability and everyone has it. We are all different and so is our reality. If we think about emotion, feelings, moods, dreams, we are all characterized by a different summation of all of these aspects that boil down to manifestations of the brain.

The first week of class I accepted that the brain is wider than the sky but I didn’t think about why? I wanted to accept it because I have always been taught to accept what I have learned but never question it. This class has taken me on a journey of questions that lead me to the same starting point and yet it is like a different world. I accept not because I was taught to believe what I want to believe but I have questioned many aspects of this class and yet it brings me back to the same point. We manifest our own reality, something that is never the same for two people because the brain is never the same for those two people.

We have said that society feeds on disability but we manifest society and disability because human differences are our disabilities. Our manifestations/realities make us different and enable us to form societies with our own feelings, moods, auras, emotions, realities, thought processes, astrological signs, personalities, ethnicities, and most of all our brain (CNS).