1.
Boy in a gray flannel robe he sits comfortably on a table, in front of a black box with no form. She is wearing a gauze-shaped cap. A bundle of wires protrudes from the snake, coming out from the back of its head. She’s expecting something.
A researcher wearing a white lab coat he walks up to the table and stands quietly. The man is looking at the box. For a while, nothing happens. Then the man blinked and looked a little embarrassed. The investigator asks what happened.
“For the first second,” he says, “I saw the eye — the eye and the mouth.”
The explorer changes the box with something else. This time it’s orange ball. There is a collision, and again it is clear that something has happened inside the man’s head. “How do I explain this?” He says. “As in the past, I see eye – eye and mouth, sideways.”
Frankly, this person is a cyborg. Its fusiform gyri, the circular lines that run through the brain on all sides, contains electrodes. Her doctors planted them because they thought they would help determine the cause of the man’s seizures. But electrons also provide the opportunity — not just to read brain signals but to record them. A team of neuroscientists, led by NIT’s Nancy Kanwisher, are exploring the fusiform face area, which is more sensitive when one sees a face. Their question is, what if they turn the pumps on? Deliberately open the section —What did the man see?
You do not have to be a cyborg to know that you should not rely on your own false ideas. It hides from you, for example, that all your thoughts are delayed. Transforming photons to alertness, fluctuations in sound, airborne molecules to smell — all of which take time for your imperfect hearing organs to receive signals, put them in the brain language, and deliver them to the nerve-like nerves. cells that count what is coming. The process is not instantaneous, but you are unaware of the millions of synaptic zaps going on, the electrochemical fizz that makes up your mind. The truth is, this game is about you – and you are the leader and the listener.
You see, or think you see, things that are not always there – that are nowhere except in your head. That’s what dreams are all about. That’s what psychedelic medicine does. This is what happens when you think of your aunt’s face, the smell of your first car, the taste of strawberry.
From this perspective, it is not difficult to put the concept of thought – thought – in someone else’s head. I did this for you in the first few paragraphs of this article. I explained how the cyborg was dressed, gave you an idea of what the room looked like, and told you that the ball was orange. You saw it in your mind, or some kind. You heard, in your ears, a research study talking to scientists (even in real life they speak Japanese). That’s both good and bad. But it is better to have a straight path. The brain is a saline glop that converts cognitive information into thoughts; you have to use that skill, to build a whole world in it, a simulation that is different from reality.