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I think that brain serves as both an empirical inquirer and a story teller that creates many constructions. In studies of child-development and the acquisition of cognitive abilities and creative problem-solving, it is clear that the brain functions both as an empirical scientist and as a constructivist story teller. Our stories undergo changes and develops (broadens to incorporate new information to encompass by the development of new constructions (schema, ways of knowing the world, methods to broader understanding). Children are much like scientists in the sense that they also are able to learn about their surroundings and environment through carrying out experiments (get their information from the environment through their senses and observations of unknowns that their brain processes, stores, puts into memory and can be retrieved at any time with the connections they make (if in LTS). Then analyzing the reactions, responses, behaviors and outcomes of the situation thereby formulating hypotheses that depict their initial observations and inally building on those inputs based on what they learn and start constructing stories. It is these schema and constructions that are constantly evolving which leads to new understandings and ideas.

When thinking about a new born, there mind is almost a blank slate. Sensory info will be organized, accumulated and saved for later use. You have to have information before you make a story. You start to make deductive reasoning from your own experience and exposure before you even know anything about the brain. Certain things are just innate that you learn as you go along and store that information for retrieval later. As you get older (as of a few years old) and you start thinking, you will be able to make associations and deduce things on your own but initially its instinctive, like feeding, survival, bodily functions, evacuating dangerous situations.

Can we train our unconscious outputs so that certain prejudices or stereotypes we have for specific situations that we learn and have made associations with (our preconceived notions whether true or false) don’t occur interfere with our understandings, interactions and contributions in different situations? It makes sense in an evolutionary perspective that unconscious output is more reactive for survival and based on instinct. Can the unconscious be made to parallel deductive reasoning? Under what circumstances would that be advantageous?