Does Your Mind Make Up Stories?

Stimulating “The Mind”

There is a lot of talk in self help and psychology about a “new neuroscience”.  Basically some tests where done that tell us why we make up stories to explain things like the sun and the moon before there was science.

The test is pretty straight forward.  An electrical impulse is sent to the brain and the person reacts, either physically or emotionally.  The emotional responses are simple responses from specific neural pathways being excited.

The interesting part comes in the interview.  When the person is asked why they are smiling, laughing or crying, the left part of the brain goes to work and comes up with a story.  The sensors indicate that the person really didn’t know why.

Much like a child who does things simply to learn and can’t explain why, adults react the same way when pressed for an answer.  They make up a story.

We now that the mind, is there to help us see logic in a world of chaos.  The ocean looks flat so it must be flat for instance. We now know that when you look from space the earth is round.  The difference in the point of view is what gives us a different perspective.

Some people are treating this like a ground breaking change in the understanding of how the mind works.  The most extreme say that everything we do happens first, and we build the explanation later.  I don’t buy this at all, and my experience with several different systems of mind work agree there is much, much more.

Outside Stimulus.

In the case of outside stimulus, much of what I just discussed is true.  The first time people heard a sonic boom. They had no idea what it was and made up stories to close the gap of understanding.  If you go back to Greek Mythology, you can see how a lot of things are “explained” by the mind that we know to be outright false today.

That said, we still don’t know everything about everything and never will.  Every time we have a new experience or discovery, we naturally want to create an explanation.  That is the job of the mind, making order out of chaos.

I don’t know why this is called “new neuroscience” when I think we call can accept the premise simply by looking at the history of science, and how many discoveries lead to a better understanding of earlier discoveries.  

I guess what is new is we have a new understanding of how to make it happen?  

I'll come back to this from time to time, and I think it will make a new chapter in the update to So, Now What?