One Brain, One Human?

At least there’s one thing we can be Certain about, right?

At least we have Our Self.

There’s something inside. It’s definitely there. It’s impossible not to be aware of it.

Lots of people today love the idea that we can capture that Presence inside. Make it into a file. That the inner Presence we associate with Our Self can be fully described in data, which can then be retained in perpetuity. USBs-R-Us!

For a long time into the computer era many cognitive neuro scientists, people trying to understand how the human brain works, saw everything like computers. They conceptualized fixed storage locations and behaviors being ‘hard-wired.’ They imagined human architecture like a main CPU with dumb peripherals.

That isn’t the language of brain research any more — but the digital information processing metaphor still rules popular culture and is still the basis of how many people think about us and our brain.

The whole idea of where and how cognition happens has broadened. The brain is not the complete story. It might not even be the main character. Their might not be a main character.

The brain is in a body, part of a biological system. Are we just a brain, that might some day be just a digital file, or does the whole body have to be part of it?

The brain thinks and decides and directs. That’s all stuff our Self should definitely be doing. Doesn’t the rest of the body just report back to the Self, through the senses?

Probably not. What feels like thinking and deciding and directing goes on in areas outside of the Cortex. The Cortex isn’t even CCed on a lot of the messages from everywhere else. It never gets the most urgent messages first.

Senses have an active relationship with the world that we are mostly unaware of. Senses think and make decisions and direct the body at the neuronal level — at the level of individual dendrites on individual neurons.

Dendrites don’t just filter. They question and probe. They are influenced by their neighbors in the information they exchange. They are social. They are Us.

I am more than my Brain