The Thought-Provoking Things
- appreciation for the cells that we are composed of: everyday we wake up because our cells (well, actually and sunlight and blue light) correctly take action and wake us up
- we are circuitry--everything we feel is a choice we make. we can choose which circuits we run, whether those are circuits for happiness, jealousy, anger, fear, etc. fundamentally, our bodies respond to stimuli but we choose how much attention we pay to those stimuli and what meaning we extract from it.
- emotional experiencing. one of the paradoxes of emotion that i often struggle with is given the transitory nature of all emotional feeling, how much should we invest in that emotion? when i get angry at people, i don't stay angry for long; which is why if there's legitimate cause for that anger, i have to capitalize on the window of time i can sustain it for in order to bring things up. i'm tempted to say "well in x amount of time i won't care about this anymore so what's the point" but that's ultimately not constructive. anyway, dr. bolte taylor had a unique perspective on emotional experience because when she suffered her stroke, her left hemisphere lost function and she lived entirely in her right hemisphere, which is the portion of the brain that can only experience the moment--she had no cncept of what happened before and what would happen after, and it was a pleasant experience. so coming out of it, she stressed to us that we should embrace all emotions and feel them deeply and fully, but them let them go. it's not exactly like the buddhist concept (or how i understand the buddhist concept) of not immersing yourself in emotion because you should relinquish control to your feelings as far as it's not destructive, but the key thing is to know its impermanence.
so if i were to apply that to my life i would say: when i am angry, if it is justifiable, experience all of that anger and take action based upon it but then after constructively addressing it, move the fuck on.
actually, antonio and i had a nice discussion when we were walking back from the lecture concerning somewhat of the same thing but also involving objectivism. internets, don't hold me to this but objectivism as a personal ethic (and not its mirror political system of libertarianism) is becoming clearer to me and some of its points are not that ludicrous. i've discovered that i hold some of its beliefs with the semantics changed. anyway, objectivism as applied to emotion seems to only say that we should think about the causes of our emotion and if it's petty or ridiculous, try to feel otherwise. i guess that kind of goes against what i just wrote about dr. taylor's perspective. in fact it very definitively does. well, i'll have to think about that more but my instinct is to strike a balance between the two. somehow.
- we are machines. we are made up of vibrating membranes and electrical wiring but emergent properties make us human beings and that is so, so profoundly fundamentally goddamn awesome that i can't get over it. and okay, maybe i'm an odd one out in that i want to spend at least a portion of my day completely aware and appreciative of that thought and thoughts like it but that's who i am.
- when dr. taylor had her stroke, she literally lost her ability to distinguish herself from the rest of the universe. i know, it sounds new age stone chakra i was once a piece of moss-y and she puts it a lot better in her book/lecture/ted talk but what i took away from it was when she said she always felt positively connected to others and since she also couldn't hold onto experiences she'd forget being angry or anything negative, so she existed in a state of warm connectedness. why can't we exist like that without having suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke? i don't know.
there's more but i have to actually look at the pituitary gland diagram i've been "looking at" for the past fifty minutes although what with how dark it is in ehall (why is that?!!) i can't actually see much anyway. overall, i found her talk a little too fervent for me (she said we were made up of fifty trillion little geniuses i.e. cells) but at the same time there were moments where she said such profound things i felt shivers up my back. it was almost as if she'd had the scientific mirror of a religious experience. in no way am i belittling her actual experience of suffering a terrible stroke and regaining, after fifteen years, incredible function. it took her four years to understand math. she was described as a body in a bed the day after her stroke, when the day before she'd been a harvard neuroscientist. it would be really interesting to compare her personality before and after the stroke and see how much she'd changed, although i'm sure that the simple experience of losing herself would change someone's personality even without actual anatomical damage. that's why neuroscience is so interesting: it's the crux between emotional things like personality, behavior, beliefs, ideals, and the concrete anatomy, physiology, circuitry behind those.
all in all that was an amazing, thought-provoking lecture.
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