I found the lecture today very interesting and it got me thinking a lot
about the possibility that I do things without thinking about them, but
then justify the action if asked about it later or if I happen to be
thinking about it later. It also makes me wonder what kinds of cues we see
in the real world that cause us to make a choice one way or another. I can
think of a lot of things where I probably had different motives than the
ones I thought I had, whether it was picking out classes at school, where I
decided to get food for lunch, what way I walked home on a particular day,
deciding to read outside for the day, etc etc. I'm not saying that
everything I do is for some reason besides the one I give, but when I look
back on a lot of choices I've made many of the reasons I can give for why I
did them make perfect sense, but they also probably don't address the
entire reason. In a youtube video I found, there is a guy with his corpus
callosum severed. The two halves of the brain aren't connected, so he isn't
able to communicate what his right brain sees (our speech is in the left
brain), so he is asked to point to a picture instead. He points to the
picture his right brain saw, but since his left brain didn't see it, he
makes up a reason for why he chose it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9u6cQYcOHw&feature=related
Unconscious thought
The video is very interesting. It is astonishing to know how each region of the brain is sophisticatedly specialized serving different role. The students learned during lecture on biological psychology that visual stimuli are divided into basic segments and sent through the ventral pathway to the temporal lobe. People, who have damage on their temporal lobe, have difficulty recognizing faces. The video points out that ability to recognize faces is located specifically in the right hemisphere and an interesting experiment show the fact.
The researcher in the video mentions the development of face recognizing ability as a revolutionary consequence. It would be an interesting research to study why various abilities are exclusively located in one side of a brain from the revolutionary perspective.
Learning about the man with his corpus callosum severed made clear that the brain is at work even when we are not consciously aware of it. It is surprising and interesting that large parts of our personalities or decision making processes derive from the communication between the sides of the brain, or the processing of sensory intake that we do not consciously/actively think about. Things that go "unnoticed" are still are critical part of the brain's processing. The example of the man with no communication between the sides of the brain makes evident that a lot happens in the span of seconds, and the brain controls much more than simply spitting out information.
Its kind of like philosophy and psychology mixed together. After this lecture, I also found myself thinking if I actually know why I do the things I do. Maybe I'm not being the person I want to be, but I'm being a person that my brain is designed to be.
In the video, when he picks bell and then comes up with a completely random answer as to why he chose it, that kind of stuff baffles me. Our brain has the capacity to make anything up that makes sense, and fool us into thinking that its the truth. Makes me wonder what else our brains fool us into thinking that isn't really true.