Losing Myself

[andrewducker]

There was a discussion a while back on my journal which digressed rapidly from the original subject (my distaste at handling my own faeces) to the nature of self-awareness and the use of language therein.  The main topic I recall was a disagreement between myself and thishardenedarm as to whether it was possible to experience things without parsing them through our language filter.  He said no, I said that it was possible to _experience_ them, but you couldn't think about them, which was why when people "lost themselves" in an action they tended to not have any significant memory of what they'd been doing.

Being the kind of smug person who doesn't like leaving an argument open just because they don't have any evidence to hand it was a delight to bump into this today, which says that the prefrontal cortex is pretty much entirely switched off when people are enjoying music/images on a purely emotional level.  The best quote is:

"We propose that the role of self-related cortex is not in enabling perceptual awareness, but rather in allowing the individual to reflect upon sensory experiences, to judge their possible significance to the self, and, not less importantly for consciousness research, to allow the individual to report about the occurrence of his or her sensory experience to the outside world.

To conclude, the picture that emerges from the present results is that, during intense perceptual engagement, all neuronal resources are focused on sensory cortex, and the distracting self-related cortex is inactive. Thus, the term "losing yourself" receives here a clear neuronal correlate. This theme has a tantalizing echoing in Eastern philosophies such as Zen teachings, which emphasize the need to enter into a 'mindless,' selfless mental state to achieve a true sense of reality."

Comments

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

oh, throwdown! if i hadn't spent the night on E in a bacchanalian loss of self, i would be so flooring you right now. once my frontal cortex kicks back in, expect war.

[andrewducker]

I shall marshall my cerebellic forces once I return from Beltane, get a decent night's sleep, go to work and stagger home again :->

[darkoshi]

Hmm. The difference between simply experiencing something, and experiencing it while thinking about how you will describe the experience on your LJ. The latter definitely does distract from the actual experience.

[andrewducker]

And this was _precisely_ the reason I stopped doing film reviews. I spent half the movie thinking up good lines for them...

[drjon.livejournal.com]

*snarfed*

Excellent icon, btw: you win the Intaweb!

[andrewducker]

Cheers!

Sadly, I don't seem to have made a note of where I stole it from...