The Thinking Process 3.
As pointed out in the lines at the bottom of these blogs, I’m no expert and haven’t done heaps of research. These are simply my thoughts, in this case, about the major functions of the brain.
Firstly, I don’t believe in the spiritual world, and hence the human soul. It would be nice to again meet my parents, brother, sister, brothers-in-law, nephew, other relations and friends, but surely it would be in a spiritual world, so even if it was true, and it did exist, everything would be different anyway.
Secondly, I don’t believe in ‘intelligence’ as an innate part of the brain. What we call ‘intelligence’ is the skills we have learnt and developed over time. Certainly, these skills are important, and it’s unfortunate that we don’t seem to be able to use them as well as we should.
So, I basically only believe in the physical and the emotional, but, of course, it isn’t quite that simple.
The brain is obviously part of the physical body and helps manage the bodily functions. However, we all know the brain is much more than this, and I’m not sure that even now we appreciate how fantastic it is.
Only when I started thinking about this did it suddenly strike me just how important memory is. To some extent, I regret not having concentrated on the skills of memory more. I simply worried more about my other ‘intellectual’ skills. But the human race would never have developed those skills without memory, and better recall is always useful.
But how much memory is stored in the brain? It’s always amazing when you remember some detail that happened many years before, and you had forgotten until something reminded you. Does the brain remember everything? I wonder if the brain has a recycle bin, or even a trash bin.
But even this isn’t what really hit me. Imagine if we had no memory at all—nothing. How would our body work? Not very well, I would suggest, and that thought made me wonder if even plant cells also possess some basic form of memory.
Perhaps even more importantly than those misfiring bodily functions, our intellectual skills simply wouldn’t exist. How could we develop them, much less use them without any memory?
And how would our emotions work?
Without memory, surely our emotions would have as little chance of functioning as those intellectual skills. How could we love, hate, desire, be curious, or even think without any memory?
I believe that our brain is an ‘emotion machine’, not an ‘intellectual machine’, and thinking is therefore an emotional process, not an intellectual one. Emotions are certainly what drive the human world. We only like to think that our intellectual skills do that.
So, the brain is the machine that enables us to be what we are. But, because of the emotional aspect, it is not a machine that simply works. It requires interpretation. And that, I’m afraid, is something we still don’t do very well.
Yep, Just my thoughts. Nope, not much research.
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