THE BRAIN CHANGES ITSELF
We learn to live without the one we love, but the reason this lesson is so hard is that we first must unlearn the idea that the person exists and can still be relied on.
Merzenich has described a number of "brain traps" that occur when two brain maps, meant to be separate, merge. As we have seen, he found that if a monkey's fingers were sewn together and so forced to move at the same time, the maps for them would fuse, because their neurons fired together and hence wired together. But he also discovered that maps fuse in everyday life. When a musician uses two fingers together frequently enough while playing an instrument, the maps for the two fingers sometimes fuse, and when the musician tries to move only one finger, the other moves too. The maps for the two different fingers are now "dedifferentiated."
The more intensely the musician tries to produce a single movement, the more he will move both fingers, strengthening the merged map. The harder the person tries to get out of the brain trap, the deeper he gets into it, developing a condition called "focal dystonia." A similar brain trap occurs in Japanese people who, when speaking English, can't hear the difference between r and l because the two sounds are not differentiated in their brain maps. Each time they try to say the sounds properly, they say them incorrectly, reinforcing the problem.
Further experiments by Nisbett's team confirm that when people change cultures, they learn to perceive in a new way. After several years in America the Japanese begin to perceive in a way indistinguishable from Americans, so clearly the perceptual differences are not based on genetics. The children of Asian-American immigrants perceive in a way that reflects both cultures. Because they are subject to Eastern influences at home and Western influences at school and elsewhere, they sometimes process scenes holistically, and sometimes they focus on prominent objects. Other studies show that people raised in a bicultural situation actually alternate between Western and Eastern perception.
Culture can influence the development of perceptual learning because perception is not (as many assume) a passive, "bottom up" process that begins when energy in the outside world strikes the sense receptors, then passes signals to the "higher" perceptual centers in the brain. The perceiving brain is active and always adjusting itself. Seeing is as active as touching, when we run our fingers over an
object to discover its texture and shape. Indeed, the stationary eye is virtually incapable of perceiving a complex object. Both our sensory and our motor cortices are always involved in perceiving.
How the Media Reorganize Our Brain Into A Vulnerable Brain
The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans
can spend millions of ''practice" events at, that the average human
a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains
are massively remodeled by this exposure — but so, too, by reading,
by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by
contemporary music, by contemporary "tools," etc.
Most people think that the dangers created by the media are a result of content. But Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian who founded media studies in the 1950s and predicted the Internet twenty years before it was invented, was the first to intuit that the media change our brains irrespective of content, and he famously said, "The medium is the message." McLuhan was arguing that each medium reorganizes our mind and brain in its own unique way and that the consequences of these reorganizations are far more significant than the effects of the content or "message."
Each medium leads to a change in the balance of our individual senses, increasing some at the expense of others. Scientists now know that the brain has an amazing ability to change and heal itself in response to mental experience. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, is considered to be one of the most important developments in modern science for our understanding of the brain.
Conclusion: The Sum-up Of All Of The Above:
Each and every information passes inside our brain by 3 modes -- Seeing, Listening, And Speaking, the more you see good, hear good and speak good, the more you will be into the perfect attainment of building and constructing yourself and around yourself.
Any change in how we understand the brain ultimately affects how we understand human nature from Perfectibility to the Idea of Progress.
