Embracing Mind: The Common Ground of Science and Spirituality by Wallace B. Alan & Hodel Brian

Author:Wallace, B. Alan & Hodel, Brian [Wallace, B. Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2011-05-03T03:00:00+00:00

We touched previously on research into the relationship between perception and the imagination. Studies of the brain and nervous system have revealed that in many cases the same neural systems and activities are involved in both perception and the imagination. For example, both high-level visual perception and the ability to manipulate imagery (imagination)—using memory, language, anticipation, and movement—share the same neural bases. Although the way this happens is subtle and complex and not perfectly understood, vision and imagination mobilize many of the same brain systems.

One important implication here is that our mental life, the weight of personal experience, influences the physical makeup and functioning of the brain. Recent discoveries of the brain’s plasticity—its ability to be reconfigured by experience—support this conclusion. In a complementary fashion, brain systems, which are constantly being modified by experience, contribute to how we perceive. Thus, the qualitative, nonphysical aspects of life experience are intimately connected with the physical brain. Whether the mind is illusory or not, it has a close, interactive relationship with the gray matter, just as the screen and keyboard do with the computer’s processor. Try as it might, neuroscience has failed to reduce the mind to a purely biological mechanism.

BY PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

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