Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Brexit

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Brexit UNDERSTANDING YOUR MIND If there's anything that should be 100% comprehensible to you in exquisite detail it's the workings of your mind. I mean you and only you inhabit it 24/7/52. It's a lifelong relationship, one-on-one; at the very least till death us do part. But if you understand even the workings of just your own mind, put yourself down for a Nobel Prize, you've earned it. While different people have slightly different brain chemistries and neural network connections thus explaining different personalities, interests, worldviews and abilities, etc. you have just one normal brain chemistry (unless you deliberately alter it) and one neural network connection to come to terms with. So, we'll (actually will have to) concentrate on the one, since you're a typical representation of the generic whole. Just as an aside, there's another version of subconscious activity that usually deals with body language. How often do you see someone talking on the phone to someone else, neither party can see the other, yet probably both parties are making all sorts of hand gestures and using other kinds of body language as if they were talking face-to-face? Probably quite frequently - it's the norm. Or you see a woman sitting on a bus or in a caf� or some such, and she's preening her hair, running her fingers through it but not even aware she's doing it. When you only have microseconds to act, say when you're standing in the batters box 60 feet, 6 inches away from the pitchers mound and a rapidly rotating baseball is heading towards you at 95 mph, do you stand there and consciously crunch the numbers before your go/no-go swing, or just turn the issue over to your subconscious to go for it, or let the ball pass you by. Ditto that for an outfielder chasing down a fly ball. In such situations your conscious mind is worthless baggage. Instinct, training, practice and all those other facets embedded in your subconscious required come to the fore and takeover. You can do the physics calculations at your leisure after the game. YOU'RE ON AUTOPILOT You don't need to remember to wake up, or to breathe, or how to take one step in front of the other to walk from A to B, or how to digest your breakfast, or if you're sick or injured your body by itself usually manages to put things right. You don't have to remember how to heal a cut or get over the common cold. If nearly all of your body is on autopilot, pre-programmed as it were, perhaps all of your body is pre-programmed, including the mind, regardless how many divisions it has. MIND OVER MATTER: THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING? Try as you will, your mind cannot influence the behaviour of non-living material, otherwise you'd always win playing the slot or poker machines and 18 holes-in-one at the golf course would be, well, par for the course. I say non-living because your mind can influence other living minds, though I don't mean via telepathy or some such or various other technological devices allegedly used for mind-control purposes. The quite ordinary hard stare or the 'evil eye' or the barking voice is all that's required as any raw recruit at the receiving end of the Drill Sergeant's wrath can attest to. Some minds are putty in the 'hands' of other minds. On a gentler note, your thoughts, ideas, words spoken or written can shape the worldviews of other minds. Two lovers gaze into each others eyes - mental communication of a sort transpires each affecting the physiological state of the other. Influencing other odd bods and sods apart, your mind can have some minor influence over your own body. Some people have some control over their heart rate to some extent, and the placebo effect, both positive and negative has been proven beyond all doubt in terms of alleviating minor medical ailments by accenting the positive or aggravating the negative. With respect to the later, if you really think someone's put the whammy on you, and you believe in the power of the whammy, then you can just waste away and curl up and snuff it. It's not surprising that such things are possible since your mind is really matter (biochemistry) and your body is really matter (biochemistry) and biochemistry can flow from one to the other. Now that only works on a relatively minor scale. You might defy the Earth's gravity and arm toss a ball up into the air, but you can't defy it to the extent where you can arm toss the ball all the way to Mars. Likewise, your mind might be able to shorten the duration and severity of a common cold, but it's probably beyond realism to expect it to overcome a case of pneumonia. Science librarian; retired. Article Source: [http://ift.tt/28JXGvF] Never Mind Consciousness, Mind The Subconscious