I noted in my surfing the digital highways this morning that in two sites, http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2011/05/24/red-brain-blue-brain/ here that there is indeed a measurable difference in the way our minds work from one person to the next. The workings of political liberal minds activate different regions of the mind than conservative minds. Hard wired into our bodies are tendencies of cognitive inclinations to see things from the way our particular mind has been wired by our DNA to work. These brain mapping results are just the initial steps being taken by researchers to objectively understand how we arrive at our point of view, how we decide how we feel and think about a particular topic, and what if anything we can do to open our minds to seeing a bigger playing field that is not held captive by our inherent physiological structure. Walk away with me for a moment from the hot button issues of the day and imagine with me a world in which you explore an area of information with a curiosity to see into something you don’t know much about, that you evaluate the subject areas facts independent of your minds tendency to resist them, that you are self aware that the topic is flipping involuntary switches off inside your mind, shutting you down, arousing immediate skepticism, and that your intuitions and instincts suggest none of this can be true. I think it is becoming clear that we all have “a mind”, but it is not necessarily one that is “our mind” to do with as we wish, but rather a rather “independent mind” that we have to keep an eye on, and take care of, manage, and restrain from doing whatever it pleases after an unexamined, unsubstantiated, likely false thought rushes through our mind and before we think twice in some spontaneously bizarre action commit an irreversible action, or say something we will later regret because we confuse the fact that our mind does much of its thinking independent of us. In that sense we have to learn to take care of our mind rather than trusting it is always right and will always take care of us.
Highway Home The Novel
” It was hard to let go, might be an empty
and open country ahead. Riding off the mountain meant he’d be leaving this
experience. Things must come to an end. Time was running out, he’d never be able to explain it, but he had this land
pictured now—the way lakes gleamed like jewels, the crests of glacial-cut rock
ridges, groves of brush and trees mixed and weaving through the mountains, each
community suiting itself to some piece of shade, some advantage of elevation,
some right conditions that sustained them.”
