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It's a Jungle in There: Our Brains Are Not As Evolved As We Might Think | Personal Health | AlterNet
Thoughts? Opinions?
An interesting point from the article:
"For example, it takes approximately 500 to 600 milliseconds for our cerebral cortex to process an experience and register it in conscious awareness. By contrast, the amygdala, the core of our fear and attachment circuitry, located in the old-mammalian brain, can react to a potential threat in less than 100 milliseconds. This means that by the time we've become consciously aware of an experience, it's already been processed and reprocessed in the brain's more primitive regions, activating memories and triggering neural patterns generated by past learning. When we finally realize there's a need to take action of some kind, we think we're making a conscious choice, but most likely, the choice has already been made for us by our more primitive brain centers. The brain somehow creates the illusion that we're living in the present moment and are acting with free will based on conscious deliberation, but extensive evidence shows that this isn't the case. So, when we think we're directly experiencing what's going on around us, our conscious awareness is primarily the result of what's already occurred within our brains—fully 90 percent of the input to the cerebral cortex comes from internal neural processing."
Thoughts? Opinions?
An interesting point from the article:
"For example, it takes approximately 500 to 600 milliseconds for our cerebral cortex to process an experience and register it in conscious awareness. By contrast, the amygdala, the core of our fear and attachment circuitry, located in the old-mammalian brain, can react to a potential threat in less than 100 milliseconds. This means that by the time we've become consciously aware of an experience, it's already been processed and reprocessed in the brain's more primitive regions, activating memories and triggering neural patterns generated by past learning. When we finally realize there's a need to take action of some kind, we think we're making a conscious choice, but most likely, the choice has already been made for us by our more primitive brain centers. The brain somehow creates the illusion that we're living in the present moment and are acting with free will based on conscious deliberation, but extensive evidence shows that this isn't the case. So, when we think we're directly experiencing what's going on around us, our conscious awareness is primarily the result of what's already occurred within our brains—fully 90 percent of the input to the cerebral cortex comes from internal neural processing."