The Mystery and Enchantment of Neuroscience
True to my passion for understanding human behaviour and decision-making, intrigued by the hidden drivers of human choice and action, I decided to immerse myself and initiate a research into the realm of neuroscience. Neuroscience, a field in its infancy, focuses on how the body and brain enable emotion, memory, and sensory experience. It could one day give us a full picture of how we perceive reality and of how emotions - the drivers of our decisions and behaviour - emerge.
A lot of the mechanics is happening below the level of conscious awareness. We find ourselves only with our conscious mind. We do not have access to what is happening in the brain - the brain is doing its own thing and eventually serves something up. We do not know why we have the desires we do, the attractions we do. We have no idea why we are doing what we are doing. When asked why we did what we did, we will try to make up something that makes sense.
Second, what our brain is telling us often times is not what is actually out there. Think about visual illusions. This discrepancy testifies to the inability of the brain to always interpret sensations, transform them into perceptions, and thus construct the outside world inside our heads. The brain cooks up the best story of what it thinks is out there and serves it up to us. We assume that what strikes our eyes (the radiation that strikes our retina or any other stimulus reaching our sensory receptors) is objective reality as opposed to a result of stimuli filtered through our subjective cognitive processes.
What is then reality?
A lot of the mechanics is happening below the level of conscious awareness. We find ourselves only with our conscious mind. We do not have access to what is happening in the brain - the brain is doing its own thing and eventually serves something up. We do not know why we have the desires we do, the attractions we do. We have no idea why we are doing what we are doing. When asked why we did what we did, we will try to make up something that makes sense.
Second, what our brain is telling us often times is not what is actually out there. Think about visual illusions. This discrepancy testifies to the inability of the brain to always interpret sensations, transform them into perceptions, and thus construct the outside world inside our heads. The brain cooks up the best story of what it thinks is out there and serves it up to us. We assume that what strikes our eyes (the radiation that strikes our retina or any other stimulus reaching our sensory receptors) is objective reality as opposed to a result of stimuli filtered through our subjective cognitive processes.
What is then reality?
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