Ask Lemmy

"It's all in your head."

well like most of the wellness programs i've seen. they only admit to like general "you'll feel better" but otherwise it's like they demonize it when someone's brain doesn't let them do some thing and somehow they're just supposed to power through that.

I once read that the Romans didn't really understand what the brain was for, and believed that thoughts and emotions emanated from the heart. They certainly saw enough warfare and bloodshed to know that a massive head wound/ brain injury was fatal, but didn't really understand its purpose.

I have a tumor in my thalamus. I've also survived a TBI with subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I have bone spurs compressing my spinal cord. I get random spells where I get super dizzy, dripping sweat, my heart rate skyrockets, my vision starts going dark around the edges, and I feel like I need to sit down before I fall down.

I'm struggling to find work from home because driving with presyncope is dangerous. My inlaws think it's just an excuse to be lazy and siphon money off my partner.

https://i.imgflip.com/5dznyy.jpg

who is the me the brain told that to tho lol

True, and nondual traditions like tantric Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Kashmir Shivism really have a leg up in that regard, but Descartes really cemented it as the supposed “objective” fact (lol) that it is today.

The root problem though is the felt sense of separation the mind creates but that mystical experiences can dissolve.

But if we cut the bridge between the two brain hemispheres that allows them to communicate with eachother - the corpus callosum - it still feels subjectively like “you” remain unchanged. Yet there are ways to communicate with each hemisphere independently, as shown in the so-called split-brain experiments. The findings show that the two hemispheres often give different answers to the same questions. They also show that if you tell the left hemisphere to perform an action and then ask the right hemisphere why it did it, the right side will invent an excuse. So the question is - which hemisphere are you?

My answer to that is that it’s neither - there is no “you.” The sense of there being a center to consciousness is an illusion. There’s only consciousness and its contents. If we could perfectly copy your brain, that copy would also subjectively feel like you.

Are you talking about consciousness? As this is separate from the mind. It would disappear from being encased within the body without a mind just as it would without a heart being that the body without these elements is not capable of reaching consciousness because it’s not capable of sustained living.

Note: it has not been scientifically proven yet that the consciousness resides in an exact spot in the brain hence they speak of consciousness and mind as separate.

Note also that there have been people who lived their entire life missing about 80% of their brain (or more https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-his-brain-is-challenging-our-understanding-of-consciousness ) without even realizing it

One case where the brain was only a crust within the scull bone and still had an operating consciousness.

That's even more complicated. Not only do some people struggle with the brain being connected to the body, there's lots of people who think that you consciousness is disconnected from your brain.

Now it's true that we cannot exactly trace thoughts traveling through their respective neurons, but we definitely know that that's all that thoughts are. Tiny electric impulses rushing through the brain and creating associative ideas and concepts. And then we call them thoughts.

So yeah people get weird about it,I think they won't stop unless we manage to map out all neurons, which I don't think will happen anytime soon.

Most people don't know the blood-brain barrier exists.

who are they then? are they the brain?

but how is the mind different from the whole??