A Favor-----Please

Can we spend a little time please talking about our 'most basic' assumptions concerning thought, behavior, memory, motivation- and where these assumptions come from?( I always chuckle when I go back to Hermann Rorschach hunting for the underlying edfice to Rorschach interpretation I can never find!)

You know the 'simple' stuff. The more basic and the more simple you can state these assumption the better. Do we all carry around in us a personal historical account of our lives, and is this deposited in different places in the brain? encoded in affects? in visual, auditory, tactile words and images? in symbols? Does it matter that in a neurochemical or electrical way we have no idea how thoughts are 'made or kept' or how feelings are made or kept or maintained or how memories are madeor kept? (50 years of memory research and where are we?)

And yet in our merry way we go on describing all kinds of imaginings about how our 'psychological, self-conscious' brains work, and our understanding of this incredible structure is 'this' big (showing my thumb and pointer finger 1/4 of an inch apart!!) And never mind that the very instrument we endeavor to describe is the very "thing' that's making it possible for us to reason about 'it' in the first place!!! What are the mind boggling implications of that?! We can never step out of the very brain we are trying to get to know.

Gee, it would be a lot easier just to get really 'religious' about something, so we can keep reassuring ourselves that we're really all that important anyway (whoops- that's a different subject- and I don't want to totally obliterate everything into a nihilistic frenzy!!!). I wouldn't want to upset anyone.

One thing I do know is that we certainly all need a sense of professional purpose and direction. I think the brain likes that- it's healthy- even if what we believe in is only an illusion.

• Black Boxes I by Vic Comello, 12/29/98
• Black Boxes II by Vic Comello, 1/2/99
  • I'm Still Cerebrating!! by Doug W., 1/7/99
  • I'm Back too! by Jessica, 1/8/99
• The Developmental Process I by Vic Comello, 1/9/99
• Kathy's Development I by Vic Comello, 1/10/99
• Kathy's Development II by Vic Comello, 1/16/99
• Kathy's Development III by Vic Comello, 1/17/99
• Kathy's Therapy by Vic Comello, 1/17/99
• Epilogue by Vic Comello, 2/5/99
  • Different Ways to Think About It? by Jessica Broitman, 2/8/99