Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Sam Beebout's picture

reflections

I liked the metaphors we used in these class because although they are very broad they make the brain make sense, and they make sense. While I leave this class with about as limited a knowledge on the anatomy of the brain and the functions of its various regions, I am affirmed by a realization that learning everything there is to know about the brain would not give me a much better understanding of how it works. Thinking about the brain as a storyteller actually does make a big, potentially revolutionary hypothesis about the brain. It makes the assumption that ultimately everything we do, and therefore everything the brain does, operates in the same process, by filling in the space between the edges and telling a story. This seems to take us a lot further than an exploration of what each part is purported to do. 

While I liked the storyteller metaphor and the way it led us to an understanding of the brain as an dynamic system and a constant construction, I wanted to apply this to more examples. I wish that this concept had been introduced earlier in the course as our lens as opposed to be presented as the course's conclusion. 

I came into the course wanting to know more about the relationship between our body and our sense of self, and I began to explore this in my web paper about conjoined twinning. I am still very interested in this idea that we should reevaluate thinking of ourselves as a fixed boundary. We are much more adaptable. Throughout everyone's life their body changes and they adapt with it, and throughout everyone's life their sense of self changes and they adpat with it. 

I would have liked to go deeper, though, into the relationship between memory and this dynamic sense of self. We are unaware of so many of our adaptations, and our sense of self is a filling in of details. We remember, evolutionarily speaking, to survive, not to be self-reflective. So then, why are we self-reflective? Is it just a fluke, a side effect of an evolved memory function? 

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
3 + 2 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.