Individual human beings with good brain health have access to three independently functioning brain centers. For the sake of simplicity, these three brain-based dimensions fundamental to modern day human experience will be called “left brain”, “right brain”, and the “reptilian brain”. Our left brain is verbal, analytical and social. Our right-brain is intuitive, holistic, creative. Our reptilian brain is involved with fundamental drives related to thirst, hunger, sexuality and territoriality, as well as habits and procedural memory, like putting your wallet in the same place every day without thinking about it.
Past neurobiology dogma has stated that emotions are controlled by the right side of the brain and logic is controlled by the left side of the brain. It turns out that it’s more complex than that, especially when it comes to emotion in music or other activities where the whole brain is engaged. The conventional and generally used theory about the brain is that the brain is divided into two sides when it comes to controlling different aspects of human behavior. The right side of the brain is the home to emotions, intuition, creativity, art and music whereas the left side of the brain logic, language, reasoning, analysis and math reign supreme. Evolutionary understanding of the brain divides higher brain function in terms of our mammalian natures.
1 The paleomammalian (old mammal) brain, including the hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and cingulate cortex, is the center of our motivation, emotions, and memory, including behavior such as parenting.
2. The neomammalian (new mammal) brain, consisting of the neocortex, enables language, abstraction, reasoning, and planning.
Despite this general assumption of how the brain is laid out, the interrelationships between all of the facets and components of the human brain are variable. Different parts of the brain may overlap and share duties because the brain believes there may be similarities between two different tasks.
The left brain is an immensely important co-creator with the other two functional brain centers. It uses language to formulate a commitment to behavior consistent with the intuitive frameworks that we may entertain. This left brain ability to think and speak in words, combined with a right brain sense of wonder about how things work, enhance our potential for creativity.
The right brain intuitively seeks out integrated patterns of meaning as a framework of understanding that we implicitly relate to. We had to develop a right-brain intuition about how experience is ordered so we could provide for our needs. Our right brain intuition might be the source of humanity’s search for cosmic order, as well. Language made us seek to understand how everything works.
The “third brain” or our old brain, affectionately referred to as the reptilian brain, is anchored to our evolutionary history, and has four hundred million years of evolution behind it. It emotionally fuels our thoughts and behavior on the one hand and it assesses our performance on the other. In so-called healthy people, thoughts and behavior intuitively seek an emotional balance between these higher ordered facets of human neurobiology.
The latest studies in human neuroscience shows that the brain is primarily an organic predictive machine, as well as our commonly known and universally utilized tool for awareness and goal setting and achieving. The brain coexists with and is interdependent with the mind, which reductionistic materialists believe to be only an epiphenomenon of our brain and its biology. However, non-materialistic, spiritually inclined antagonists postulate that the mind, or consciousness, is the primary causative agent, and capable of both transforming and transcending matter and the human brain. The “truth” has not yet been conclusively determined, yet the philosophies of the potential for “free will” orbits around consciousness as a causal agent
It is the brain’s predictive aspect that may be of highest interest to those studying the self and attempting to access the higher levels of consciousness supported by our spiritual nature. By becoming more consciously aware and mindful, and rejecting materialistic belief systems, we can improve our conscious access to greater wisdom and more of our innate spiritual assets than present day neuroscience and genetic history might indicate that is available or possible.
Neuroscience has shown that the old adage “shoot first and ask questions later” literally describes the predictive action of the brain’s attempts at processing and understanding information. The brain is continually engaged in prophecy, anticipating reality and promoting its own predictions, rather than just sitting back and being an idle witness to life and its manifestation. It continuously offers up it’s own theories as facts, and only questions itself when huge cognitive dissonances occur. If we are attempting to avoid suffering and/or death, it certainly makes sense that our brains would anticipate dangers and try to avoid them or reduce their potential negative impacts. But it is also true that if we want to avoid suffering, and/or death, we need to anticipate the cumulative long term impacts of our short-term responses to life.
According to “predictive coding” theory, at each level of a cognitive process, the brain generates models, or beliefs, about what information it should be receiving from the level below it. These beliefs get translated into predictions about what should be experienced in a given situation, providing the best explanation of what’s out there so that the experience will make sense. The predictions then get sent down as feedback to lower-level sensory regions of the brain. The brain compares its predictions with the actual sensory input it receives, “explaining away” whatever differences, or prediction errors, it can by using its internal models to determine likely causes for the discrepancies. For instance, we might think we are looking at a rope hanging from a tree branch, yet as we approach nearer to it, it moves in an unexpected way, revealing it’s TRUE nature as being a snake.
The prediction errors that can’t be explained away get passed up through connections to higher levels as “feedforward” signals, rather than feedback, where they’re considered by our higher intelligence, through the brain’s cortex, as something for the system to pay attention to and deal with accordingly. The internal conceptual game is now about adjusting the internal models, the brain dynamics, so as to eliminate or suppress future prediction errors. If we have become committed to finding the “truth” about any new situation, then we must postpone making conclusions about the “outer world” and all of the “you and they” objects of attention that we may be trying to understand. Every prediction about “you” or “they” can never be one hundred percent accurate in this new moment, for by ascribing static perceptual assessments to a dynamic life expression potentially, the object of perception is held to a past description and imbued with qualities that may not conform to it’s real nature in the present moment (don’t get bit by that misidentified rope hanging from the tree branch!)
It is also imperative that our responses to life do not result in brain subroutines and theories that might protect us in the short-term, while being inhibitive or even self-destructive in nature over the long haul. Taking alcoholic drinks or medications to reduce stress in the short term becomes the source of a greater potential for diseases such as chemical dependency, cancer, and/or liver damage over a longer time period, for example. Modes of religious understanding that our ancestors have passed forward to us may keep us fitting in with and supported by the crowd within the fundamentalist church that we now may be attending, while keeping us relatively more fearful, close minded, spiritually and emotionally inhibited and limited, and/or even imprisoned by an outdated understanding.
Fear is biologically driven by heightened lower brain activity of the amygdala and the hippocampus. The fear response circulating through those functional brain centers can be a programmed response from accessing painful memories from either personal experience or from its training through its educational and social support networks. Fear would steer predictive trends and errors towards the need to maintain self protection and safety, to the detriment and potential exclusion of other, more appropriate intelligent, relevant, and productive approaches to any new situation, such as the practice of inquisitiveness and curiosity. Yet the brain instantly offers up it’s own convincing judgements, and is probably obeying a hard-wired instinctual self-protection and preservation command which promotes it’s own interests above all else. The truth is that the scientific method is a more rational way to approach most new situations, where enhanced interest, uncertainty and non-attachment to outcomes becomes primary guiding principles for observing and learning from life.
Until we examine the full contents of our minds, and the collective mind of mankind, we will be plagued by the multitudes of mental illnesses that parade as our unexamined fears, hatred, shame, lies, ignorance, and aspects of superstitious reasoning. These unhealed drivers will operate behind the scenes, and have dramatic and tragic effects effects upon our perceptions and the course of human events and history. Peace of mind, like love, and God, comes to live within our self, once we refuse to access the historical lies that limits mankind, and sets mankind against itself, by no longer creating or supporting ideological impediments to a more sublime presence. While we continue to make internal assessments that the world is threatening and unsafe, our “predictions” remain our self-fulfilling prophecies, unless and until we set out to prove otherwise. If our brains are ” hard wired” to insist on telling the self what the world is, then our minds must insist on telling the brain what the brain is, and what its limitations are for assessing the world with truth and understanding.
If our predictive models support continuously attacking our self with the effects of stress disorders and poor self-esteem, or defending our self against the perceived attacks, potential or otherwise, from others who we feel may not have our best interests at heart, then our prophecies will co-create conflicts with others and road blocks on the highway of Peace. For some of us, our insecurities drive us to attach our self to a person, place, idea, or thing, in the hope that by clinging to others and/or to their ideas, our own greater good may be assured. To function at the highest level, we all need a sense of safety, or we will constantly be seeking protection from the external “threats”. By the limitation of our life experience to preconceived notions of what fulfillment might be, and just following techniques for how others have been promoting its attainment, we tend to neglect our own unique process for finding truth and internally unwrapping the creative gifts within us, gifts which deliver insights into how to best assess and order reality and continue on a happier, more peaceful life journey.
Biologically, at a cellular level, our bodies are programmed through antibodies generated within the immune system to fight viruses and bacterial invaders. The “us versus them ” antibody dynamic has an evolutionary history that predates human consciousness by hundreds of millions of years, and it has served all of life fairly well, yet provides no real biological “road map for peace”, other than through the destruction of all cells unlike its own. Problems arise when the antibodies fail to recognize a deadly invader, they overreact in the face of the milder ones, or they attack healthy cells. Any of these “failed” immune system responses results in potentially fatal threats to the body.
One cannot help but notice the functional similarities between the “unconscious” action of antibodies within the body, and habitual and/or automatic responses of the mind to perceived threats, when the fear generated “fight or flight” responses to abrasive stimuli inevitably arise. Does the power of a new truth, or a change in perception become the equivalent to a “cognitive antibody” in its conscious impact upon mental viruses such as lies, ignorance, or superstitious reasoning? In any “us versus them” dynamic, the brain works overtime defining the “us” and the “them”, with the expectation that “us” will have priority in safety and security computations. It has been speculated that our consciousness may actually be derived or evolved from our biological and social need to survive in groups and to defend ourselves against attacks, and our brain minds may be the evolutionary leap to a higher level manifestation of our immune systems, which now has an enhanced connection with the nervous system and the brain, and almost miraculously, a connection with other humans through thoughts, language and “prayer”. And yet, even the brain’s evolutionary advancements does not preclude the possibilities for failed responses to life, with self-destructive and/or other-destructive activity in the face of non-threatening or misunderstood environmental interactions..
What we aren’t aware of, we cannot change. Enlightenment is a name that can be used for the ending of the process whereby the immune system of the mind no longer wrongly attacks itself or any other sentient being, or attaches itself to a person, place, or thing in the hope for safety or salvation,. In the recognition that “you can’t be real”, the “you” being an internal assessment projected from my mind and my brain’s expectations into the world that I am fighting or defending myself against, the brain can rest long enough to witness what might really be “out there” as the “you”, or objects of consciousness. In the realization that all that I ever see, or will see, unto eternity is myself, then my perceptual ” antibodies” will no longer be generated in consciousness, and sent out in self-destructive or other-destructive patterns of influence.
Peace is a manifestation of the order created by finally witnessing the unbroken wholeness of life, and finding our unique place within that unbrokenness. Yet, the experience of Peace is neither automatic or natural to mankind, or to be gained by just anyone of sufficient economic means, nation of origin, religious affiliation, or the proper alignment of the stars at our birth. Our planet Earth’s present day ecological collapse and the economic imbalances within society can be traced to outdated and inaccurate political, social, and religious maps of shared reality, and the corrupted predictions that arise from them. The historic internal maps that mankind accesses through collective consciousness tends towards affirming confrontation and conflict, with peace the name given to the gaps between he inevitable expressions of bellicose behavior.
We can witness the unbroken whole, and be a thriving part of it, when we liberate ourselves from fragmented, defensive, and selfish reasoning and desires. We only need to develop insight into ourselves as to how we create and view reality, and the way that we name phenomenon, and how those new names become integrated with our pasts to become part of the fabric of our conscious being. We must see beyond our internal conflicts, those both culturally sanctioned and shared with others and those created through our own limited thinking, to finally find a fundamental ground that supports a greater good where higher orders of truth, love, and peaceful intentions becomes the fundamental nature of our journey through the rest of our life. From this enlightened foundation we can build more accurate, updated models of prediction for our collective brain and mind, which eventuates in better religious, philosophical, political, and economic systems.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
Before I begin discussing the Common Knowledge Game in detail, it is beneficial to provide some information about the physiological similarities and differences in the brain between men and women, and how we process information and express ourselves, as a result of those differences and similarities. I will also post some quotes from the Christian Bible, to show how men have attempted to suppress the nature of the feminine, both within the women in their lives and cultures, and within their own “masculine” minds. Both of these factors have ultimate importance in the Common Knowledge game, because these prejudicial forces form much of the basic foundation for perceptual creation within collective consciousness, and unconsciousness.
It’s no secret that boys and girls, and men and women, are different—very different. The differences between genders, however, extend beyond what the eye can see. Research reveals major distinctions between male and female brains.
Scientists generally study four primary areas of difference in male and female brains: processing, chemistry, structure, and activity. The differences between male and female brains in these areas show up all over the world, but scientists also have discovered exceptions to every so-called gender rule. You may know some boys who are very sensitive, immensely talkative about feelings, and just generally don’t seem to fit the “boy” way of doing things. As with all gender differences, no one way of doing things is better or worse. The differences listed below are simply generalized differences in typical brain functioning, and it is important to remember that all differences have advantages and disadvantages.
For processing of information and sensory input, male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter. Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information and action-processing centers in specific splotches in a specific area of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings. White matter is the networking grid that connects the brain’s gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that girls tend to more quickly transition between tasks than boys do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects.
As far as internal chemistry is concerned, male and female brains process the same neurochemicals but to different degrees and through gender-specific body-brain connections. Some dominant neurochemicals are serotonin, which, among other things, helps us sit still; testosterone, our sex and aggression chemical; estrogen, a female growth and reproductive chemical; and oxytocin, a bonding-relationship chemical. In part, because of differences in processing these chemicals, males on average tend to be less inclined to sit still for as long as females and tend to be more physically impulsive and aggressive. Additionally, males process less of the bonding chemical oxytocin than females. Overall, a major takeaway of chemistry differences is to realize that our boys at times need different strategies for stress release than our girls.
A number of structural elements in the human brain differ between males and females. “Structural” refers to actual parts of the brain and the way they are built, including their size and/or mass. Females often have a larger hippocampus, our human memory center. Females also often have a higher density of neural connections into the hippocampus. As a result, girls and women tend to input or absorb more sensorial and emotive information than males do. By “sensorial” we mean information to and from all five senses. If you note your observations over the next months of boys and girls and women and men, you will find that females tend to sense a lot more of what is going on around them throughout the day, and they retain that sensorial information more than men.
Additionally, before boys or girls are born, their brains developed with different hemispheric divisions of labor. The right and left hemispheres of the male and female brains are not set up exactly the same way. For instance, females tend to have verbal centers on both sides of the brain, while males tend to have verbal centers on only the left hemisphere. This is a significant difference. Girls tend to use more words when discussing or describing incidence, story, person, object, feeling, or place. Males not only have fewer verbal centers in general but also, often, have less connectivity between their word centers and their memories or feelings. When it comes to discussing feelings and emotions and senses together, girls tend to have an advantage, and they tend to have more interest in talking about these things.
Blood Flow and Brain Activity
Blood flow and brain activity are other differences between male and female brains worth looking closely at. . The female brain, in part thanks to far more natural blood flow throughout the brain at any given moment (more white matter processing), and because of a higher degree of blood flow in a concentration part of the brain called the cingulate gyrus, will often ruminate on and revisit emotional memories more than the male brain. Males, in general, are designed a bit differently. Males tend, after reflecting more briefly on an emotive memory, to analyze it somewhat, then move onto the next task. During this process, they may also choose to change course and do something active and unrelated to feelings rather than analyze their feelings at all. Thus, observers may mistakenly believe that boys avoid feelings in comparison to girls or move to problem-solving too quickly.
These four, natural design differences listed above are just a sample of how males and females think differently. Scientists have discovered approximately 100 gender differences in the brain, and the importance of these differences cannot be overstated. Understanding gender differences from a neurological perspective not only opens the door to greater appreciation of the different genders, it also calls into question how we parent, educate, and support our children from a young age. It also brings to the forefront the importance of other activities to rebalance the brain, bring it into a better harmony within itself, and reprogramming it in ways that are more beneficial to the individual, and to the human race.
There are both physiological and cultural reasons for why men and women see life differently from each other. Men and women tend to process information and emotions somewhat differently. Women tend to think globally and network more efficiently with others, and also within all centers of their own brains, than do males. Yet, all aspects and styles of processing are available to both men and women, depending on their own conditioning, internal natures, and intentions. Activities such as insight, meditation, exercise, enhanced community involvement, and journal writing have all shown tremendous results in realigning and reorienting the basic fabric of the brain itself, for both men and women, as well as enhance the capacity to modify the consciousness that dances within, and outside of, the brain’s domain of influence.
Habitual ways of male thinking literally have become collective ruts in fragmented male consciousness through the generations. If these ruts are traveled too frequently and for too many years by the emotionally and spiritually unaware, they become worn down into the depths sufficient to become spiritual grave sites. Men collectively have been drawn to those grave sites through many generations of cultural conditioning, training, and bio-chemical predispositions. The Second Law Of Thermodynamics states that there is a natural tendency of any isolated system to degenerate into a more disordered state. The male brain can tend to be such a closed system, and we have all witnessed the chaotic end result of such a process in our present world mind and experience.
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