http://www.dericbownds.net/index.php
We are forever barred from recalling the buzzing cacophony that greeted our entry into this world. Our remembering brains had not formed, they had not begun to construct a world for themselves outside the womb. And yet, they had a very ancient kind of knowledge formed over millions of years. They knew to look for a face, they knew to direct muscles of the mouth to draw milk from a mother's breast. From a very rudimentary beginning repertoire they began fashioning a network of sensing and acting to finally generate the extraordinary machines that can read a page like this one.
In both the womb and with the growing baby, the story is a record of sensuality, of kinesthetic, visual, auditory, tasting and smelling histories that form themselves into a predictable order. A sense of past and of anticipation of the predictable future form a base non verbal imaged story line on which the layers of human language begin to build themselves...What we try to spin is a story of the delicate dance between our fragile neuroendocrine configurations - the temperament and mood molecules that can flood our brains - and the cognitive structures, self stories, that brought them to life and which they now support.
http://www.dericbownds.net/I_illusion_web/I_illusion_web.html
In a well known experiment by Benjamin Libet the subject is instructed: "Flex your finger to push the button when you feel like it, and tell us where the hand on the rapidly moving clock is when you decide to do that." The time at which an EEG signal indicating brain activation for movement occurs is set as zero time, the report of awareness of intention to push the button is about 350 msec (0.35 seconds) later, and the actual EKG, the voltage in the finger muscle doing the push, happens about 200 msec later than that. We seem to be 'late for consciousness'. The brain has already started on our acting earlier than our consciousness of it.
http://www.dericbownds.net/I_illusion_web/I_illusion_web.html
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