How to Live With an Unknowable Mind
How do you imagine your own mind?
I sometimes picture mine as a difficult and contrary child; the kind that throws a stone at you for no reason and can't explain itself. Or while at the beach it sits silent, looking miserable. But, at a wedding is determined to scream at the top of its lungs through all the quiet bits.
One reason minds can be frustrating is that we only have access to part of them, by definition the conscious part. The rest, the unconscious, lies there mysteriously, doing things we don't understand and often don't seem to have requested.
Except we don't know it's doing things we haven't asked it to, because we can't interrogate it. It turns out that the unconscious is mostly inaccessible (Wilson & Dunn, 2004).
This is quite a different view of the mind than Freud had. He thought you could rummage around and dig things up that would help you understand yourself. Modern theorists, though, see large parts of the mind as being completely closed off. You can't peer in and see what's going on, it's like the proverbial black box.
Read the rest on PsyBlog.
Tags: brain, consciousness, insight, mind, psychology, self-reflection, unconsciousness
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by rich shull on -
Perhaps we can figure out the mind,perhaps we already have and don't know it? I grew up learning by happenstance a different long hand version of human thoughts. While I was confusing everyone around me with my lack of eye contact eye thoughts i discovered I was actually thinking with p icture thoughts converthing converting them (unknowingly) to normal thoughts . Eventally when we learn all the picture thoughts normal thoughts resulted. We BUILD on the work of autistic Temple Grandin and take her thoughts to the threshhold
of normal thoughts .
While our OPTIC vision was OFF our brains were playing images of thoughts in our minds eyre. They told us everything from how to talk- to sort out a thought -to even how an what to transalate into a thought to be spoken. If you will these are long hand versonof normal thoughts. normal human unknowingly use short cut thoughts and IF the long hand versions were known the mind would be solved .
Indeed we are OLD working autism people and missed Rain Man Era autism and inadverantly figured out all the human mind. Autism is mr/dd to Einstein and more importantly the link to man's mind and his connection to his lower roots.More importantly there are 200 more like me a living anthropology from all over the world and we tell the same story, we can be studied as a group. Sadly since we are self taught and self discovered ,traditional science and peer review will never admit to us. What we discovered has never been in a text book before and out of the realm of the traditional human who thinks with a short cut thought process that we eventually come up with. It seems like we really did learn the pre historic version of the human mind. For sure contemporary Autism jumps thre hoops to keep us hidden- admittig to us is autism treason since we do too much of a normal life to suit them. rich shull
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