Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: thedoc on 26/10/2015 10:50:01
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"Mind filter" asked the Naked Scientists:
There is a thing that I call a "mind filter".
Since a mind works like a computer it makes "copies" of life, like when you see a rose for the first time in your life it's awesome and when you see it for the second time it's not so awesome.
That means that our mind made a copy of rose, it can also make copies of everything we perceive such as life. What I find useful for removing the mind filter is to attain a peace of mind by fixing my mind complexes and let the filter move aside to that the true life could come in and not some mind made copy of it.
That's why people like drugs because it removes the "mind filter" for a short amount of time. What are your thought about that because I have proven for myself that it works because month by month life for me gets newer and newer, I am starting to perceive life as I perceived it like when I was a child (fulfilling and without any mind complexes I had as a child).
What do you think?
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Don't take it too far!
A rose gets a "wow" reaction because your vision has been previously trained by exposure to many flowers.
If you wipe away that prior exposure to flower, you won't truly recognize a rose, or appreciate its beauty.
If you wipe away your training in biology, physics and chemistry, you won't truly recognize the wonder of genetics, reproduction, relationship between plant and bee, or color selective chemicals.
A mind filter has a more technical description: dementia.
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Two things come to mind - habituation and learned associations.
We've all had the experience of writing something and putting it away for a few hours or days and finding that the spelling mistakes, repeated or omitted words suddenly pop right out, when we look at it with fresh eyes.
Sometimes when I'm painting, and I want to judge the overall composition of a picture as a whole, I'll turn it upside down. It seems to make the individual objects in the pictures less recognizable and distracting.
The other thing as a painter that intrigues me are optical illusions involving color. like this: https://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/contrastcolor/ Because as a painter, you have to learn when to reach for the yellow paint, and when to use brown, and not be fooled by the color you think you see or expect to see. Painting is itself creating optical illusions, but it's also an attempt to not get sucked in by the ones in your own visual perception. The cube illusion above shows why this is really hard.
I don't know if our responses to optical illusions are hardwired or are associations learned early in life. If there were any way to find out, would an infant see the colors in the cube more accurately than we do, because of our learned associations from years of interacting with 3 dimensional objects and shadows?
I would guess that some of the sensory enhancement or distortions from drugs might have to do with diminished associative input from various parts of the brain, or suppression of processes that normally screen out or efficiently ignore extraneous information, making mundane objects appear weird or complex.
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Hallucinogenic compounds like psilocin, the active component of "magic mushrooms," or the pharmaceutical zolpidem (Ambien) can "trick" the user's mind into misidentifying even the most mundane objects and situations as "highly novel." User's may be "with it" enough to know that they know what they're looking at, but still find themselves amazed and analyzing it as if they had never been exposed to it before. They can also be so "out of it" that they really cannot recognize everyday objects!
I don't recommend using substances to alleviate boredom, but I do think it would be worthwhile to study these effects to better understand how we process information. It is truly a pity that it is more difficult to obtain the permission required to study psychedelics than it is to study nerve gas...
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I would say undoubtedly yes.
a responder said; If you wipe away that prior exposure to flower, you won't truly recognize a rose, or appreciate its beauty.
I would say that the thing that recognises beauty is not the mind, but something more fundamental and pure, and it will always recognise that.
A baby does not smile and laugh because it is imagining a humourous situation, or imagining sarcasm or a joke for example.. It laughs because of an integral and deeply internal response to life and thus it experiences happiness and expresses it, beyond and without conditioned and conditioning mind.. It does not think 'that is funny or pleasing and I should respond as adults have been conditioned to respond' in that humourous situation.
All of human experience is 'prior exposure' including driving somewhere new for example, where every sight is new, sound etc.. because mind 'joins us' and unless silenced, overlays its sense impressions and endless needs and comments on us, and does so on all new experiences, wherever we are.
Stopping endless mind does not wipe anything.. It just stops the endless chatter and involuntary playback of those things you call 'copies'.. When I turn off my laptop, it does not wipe the memory. All is still there for later but selective recall, if required. That is the difference.
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When the brain writes memory to the cerebral matter, aspects of the limbic system in the core of the brain, will add an emotional valence. When we see the flower for the first time, the strong emotion is connected, in part, to the needs of the writing process. Once the memory has been stored, the second exposure to the flower is are more connected to recall.
Alzheimers patients will sometimes behave like they are seeing the same things for the first time, day after day. This disease impacts the short term memory. I would guess the short term memory is not writing properly. The result is the memory can't be recalled the next day. This void triggers the cycle of new memory writing; excitement of discovery.
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"Mind filter" asked the Naked Scientists:
There is a thing that I call a "mind filter".
Since a mind works like a computer it makes "copies" of life, like when you see a rose for the first time in your life it's awesome and when you see it for the second time it's not so awesome.
That means that our mind made a copy of rose, it can also make copies of everything we perceive such as life. What I find useful for removing the mind filter is to attain a peace of mind by fixing my mind complexes and let the filter move aside to that the true life could come in and not some mind made copy of it.
That's why people like drugs because it removes the "mind filter" for a short amount of time. What are your thought about that because I have proven for myself that it works because month by month life for me gets newer and newer, I am starting to perceive life as I perceived it like when I was a child (fulfilling and without any mind complexes I had as a child).
What do you think?
I will just agree with you to save on a complex post.
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Seeing everything around us as if it were the first time, is one of the potential goals of meditation. In some of the training I have taken it's called mindfulness. I'm very new to it, but so far I think it accomplishes what you have indicated in your post.
My one concern, and probably relevant to this topic, is the sheer volume of information that could now be assimilated. Is there a limit to the amount of information we can store and retrieve later, or can our brains be trained to access all of this data on an as needed basis. I don't know the answer to this question, but I'm hopeful that it has a net beneficial affect.