Do you smoke?

[costa7]

i have never smoked just does not interest me

[grumpyhack]

I've had experiences, some of which are literally indescribable. As soon as I try and describe it, I limit what that experience was.

[Leyser]

Is that a reflection of your experiences or your powers of description?

[worm]

what's so 'wrong' with that?

[feral chile]

that has occurred to me

on a reasonably basic level, I'll see a film, go for walk... whatever, and know how it made me feel. As soon as i put it into words, it will take away from the experience.

It's like watching a film of an experience I've had, be it an event, or a holiday, and it's always different to the experience

[worm]

on a reasonably basic level, I'll see a film, go for walk... whatever, and know how it made me feel. As soon as i put it into words, it will take away from the experience.

[feral chile]

Because it's no longer an experience.

Returning to the point, someone speaking about their experiences is telling you (the therapist) how they see themselves in a life-based narrative, how the world is to them and how they fit into that world.

Indeed. It's because you're now the narrator rather than the experiencer.

Edited March 5, 2011 by feral chile

[worm]

In practice, we're pretty much always the narrator. As the split brain experiments showed.

[feral chile]

We're moving in to internal code with this though. The narrative inside our heads is there prior to experience, as this shows, hence Freud's suggestion that reality is a projection of our minds. However, to figure ourselves as the narrator (let's say agent) is a psychological mechanism deeply immersed in identity. What we feel about the chicken changes how we narrate it.

[worm]

yes, but the way that information is relayed around our brains influences the narrative. obviously, because it becomes the narrative.

[Rufus Gwertigan]

I think the main issue I have with labels is when a person has a label. It encourages one to think that the label encompasses all that they are. And that's not so. We are many different things.

Or, as I prefer to think to avoid the trap, we do many different things.

It's the difference between being a schizophrenic and experiencing recurrent psychotic episodes. Both mean the same thing, and yet...

I feel the second description leaves out identity in a way the first assumes.

[feral chile]

I was great believer in the positive aspects of labels. In mental health I thought that it could give ownership to a person and was a useful tool. But in retrospect that was a shit idea, labels are only useful if everyone is able to read and understand them.

[feral chile]

Not so. It shows that our narrative tries to change our brains to fit the logic. Our brain is failing to make sense, yet the narrative makes the brain adjust to compensate to the narrative. The narrative does not change it's logic due to the brain's new function.

I know. I read it.

?

Edited March 5, 2011 by feral chile

[worm]

I used those as examples because language isn't necessary.

Edited March 5, 2011 by worm

[worm]

Now, as seen in the split brain patients, a stimulus doesn't have to be consciously perceived in order to have an effect. So an event can have an unconscious emotional trigger, for example, that will produce behavioural change. Addiction, phobia, whatever.

[feral chile]

I used those as examples because language isn't necessary.

Edited March 5, 2011 by feral chile

[worm]

how can either perspective treat something when they don't know the trigger?

Edited March 5, 2011 by worm

[feral chile]

They look for sub-conscious problems through language not conforming to the narrative. These are the symptoms we use to denote the various categories of mental illness.

Are you asking for the trigger that is particlar to bio-psychological damage? My Dad has a number as he had a number of strokes, which have left him with a number of side effects related to speech. He speaks some nonsense, but his logic functions as brilliantly as it ever did. The narrative works, though the words are incorrect.

[feral chile]

I'm sorry if I'm appearing obstinate here, but...

how do babies enjoy music before they can speak? Why do they look at leaves on a tree shining in the sun...

Can a baby differentiate?

Edited March 5, 2011 by feral chile

[feral chile]

tony, if you do a search on split brain patients, you'll find that researchers think that the left hemisphere of the brain usually deals with language, logic, reason and interpretation, with the right hemisphere being considered a relic of an earlier stage in our evolution.

I'm not sure I agree wholeheartedly with this, as I think it overestimates logic etc. It may well be possible that aesthetics is experienced mainly by the right hemisphere, but the information travels between both hemispheres in normal circumstances. It's commonly felt that the interpretation of the experience takes place in the left hemisphere.

It's not the experience that requires language, but the interpretation of that experience.

I'd imagine that for a very young baby, the baby is the music. A baby is pure experience at first, I imagine.

[worm]

I'd imagine that for a very young baby, the baby is the music. A baby is pure experience at first, I imagine.

Edited March 5, 2011 by worm

[feral chile]

And that it fits a narrative. It has to fit the pre-existing narrative of a start, middle and end otherwise it can't be experienced. We call this narrative music. It's from the narrative that we create the label music from the experience.

Other narratives consist of stories and art and science and, well, whatever really. These things just exist in our head though. Outside of it there's nothing. That is to say that outside of language there's nothing.

The great thing about music is that we are the experience (the music is us) whereas with art, literature, theatre, film and so on we are participants.

[worm]

yes - for it to be music we have to recognise when the music starts and ends, and separate it out from the continuum of sensory experience. We have to choose it - we have to use selective attention.

You know, when I start thinking of this stuff, it fills me with wonder at what brains accomplish. Not even just what humans accomplish either - the extent to which animals learn, even.

Edited March 5, 2011 by worm

[feral chile]

And as we've just discussed, the brain is subject to the narrative. So that even when it cannot apply the words or make sense of the experience it nevertheless perceives and conveys a narrative - it fills in the blanks according to a narrative. We slowly acquire before slowly losing the words and their meanings, but never the language that holds them.

What is telling the brain to do that? Why must the brain accord to a narrative and if the brain isn't creating it then what is?

Most people would say the psyche, but what is the psyche? Not how does it function as behaviourism and psychoanalysis tries to say, but what is it?

Edited March 6, 2011 by feral chile

[worm]

I don't know. Some of it can be explained by genetics I suppose, but so much of it's a mystery. We know that the brain's not a tabula rasa but it's inpossible to say how much is already there. Or how it got there.