[Neurons] 2023 Neurons #14 IF ONLY YOUI COULD SEE YOUR MIND ...

Sun Mar 19 06:44:08 EDT 2023

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #14

March 20, 2023

IF ONLY YOU COULD SEE YOUR MIND... 

An amazing thing in modern science and medicine is that we can now take pictures of your brain.  We can even take pictures of the brain while it is in action.  Amazing!  Sometimes we do that to identify where blood flow may be low or lacking, or the location of a lesion, and sometimes we do it as part of attempting to identify the anatomy of the brain.  It is to identify how the brain works in different situations and with various contexts.

Taking a picture of a living brain is one thing; what about the mind?  Do we have any instruments by which we can learn to see the mind in action?  That’s a very different thing.  So the answer is “no.”  Actually, the situation is worse than that—we cannot even clearly and accurate define what we mean by mind!  We can’t even agree upon what it is that we are referring to when we mentioned mind, let alone see it.

Yet we all know that we have a mind.  We even have developed methods for measuring the intelligence of the mind, or at least there have been attempts at measuring intelligence.  Whether the tests actually measuring the concept of intelligence, that’s another question.  Howard Gardner called that in question with his Multiple Intelligence model as has Robert Sternberg in his models, especially about Practical Intelligence. 

If we go to the field of Psychology, what have those who have studied the mind said or developed  that may help us to see the mind?  What enables us to conceptualize the mind or tools by which we can more intelligently work with mind?   Sadly not much.  Freud picture consciousness as an iceberg with just a bit of it being conscious and most of it being unconscious.  Then he picture emotions as like a steam engine that builds up pressure before it blows.  Philosophers of the mind in the late 20th century started comparing mind to a computer—mind inputs and processes information.  It encodes information, stores it, and transforms it.  Perls viewed mind or personality in terms of top-dog and underdog.  Transactional Analysis pictured it as a set of sub-personalities: parent, child, and adult.  Yet in all of these metaphors or concepts, none give us a clear picture of mind, intelligence, or consciousness.

Further, not only do we all have a sense of mind and consciousness, we all also have a pretty good idea of what is in the mind.  What’s there?  What are you aware of when you think about your mind?  Thoughts, beliefs, values, memories, imaginations, anticipations, understandings, knowledge, rules, intentions, decisions, and on and on.  Now, if only we could see these things.

Yet all of these “things” which are in the mind are not “things” at all, they are processes.  We are thinking, remembering, believing, imagining, etc.  Mind is what you and I do as we encounter the world we live in, represent that world, mentally map out how things work and what’s important.  Korzybski gave us a picture of the mind as a “map” about the things outside, levels of abstraction.  That helps a bit, but it still does not give me a clear picture of the mind.  What does your mind-map look like?

The next development came from NLP when the developers took their clue from Korzybski and said that we have a representational map in our mind of the things we have seen, heard, felt, etc. And with that, we can begin to see the mind as a cinematic representation of the empirical world.  It is as if we all have a theater in our mind and on that theater we can re-present to ourselves whatever we have seen, heard and felt in the world.  In Developmental Psychology, we call this constancy of representation.  This refers to the ability to “hold in mind” what we have seen and heard.  Now we can take our visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences with us wherever we go as a movie or cinema that informs us about things.

This inner cinema of the mind, however, is not actual or real—it is a simulation.  There is no movie theater in your brain!  Rather, it is as if we are looking a sight and hearing sounds.  And while it is not an actual thing—it gives us a way of coding the world.  And not only that, we can as it were edit our movies.  We can make them bigger or smaller, brighter or dimmer, closer or farther, etc.  We can ask, “Is your memory of that event in color or black-and-white?”  “Is the volume coming from your right side or left side?”

Imagining this cinema of the mind now gives us a way to see the mind in action.  Well, at least see what we are doing as we think—we are visualizing, reproducing sounds, sensations, etc.  And as we add words and conversations to this mental movie, we now have a meta-representation system at play.  All of these is giving us a picture of the mind.

But there’s more—a lot more.  We can imagine that above the movie and above the editing and above the languaging— there is believing, valuing, imagining, intending, remembering, etc.  We can imagine these and see them as higher logical levels.  This extends our picture of the mind.  And this is a description of the meta place.

Want more?  See Movie Mind (2002) and The Meta Place (2023).

Attached File

The attached file is a video about words and semantics from a professor.  Dr. Carl Lloyd sent it to me and my thought ---It  needs a wider distribution.  Hope you enjoy it.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director 

Neuro-Semantics 

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

132607 NeuroSemantics Executive Learning Front Cover

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