RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 15, 2019 at 7:15 am
(This post was last modified: January 15, 2019 at 7:16 am by Alan V.)
(January 15, 2019 at 12:05 am)bennyboy Wrote: Well, I think in evolutionary terms the idea is we need to take the information which is potentially available, but almost infinite, and symbolize it into something we can act on. You and I would agree on that, I think?
Yes, we agree that waking perceptions are highly selective and often self-serving. In fact, they are selective to be self-serving.
(January 15, 2019 at 12:05 am)bennyboy Wrote: That being said, having been into lucid dreaming, I think you'll agree that the seems-so-is sense we have can by hyper-triggered in dreaming sometimes. I've had dreaming experiences which were orders of magnitude more vivid, and more seemingly significant, than anything I've ever experienced in waking life-- absolute game-changing, over-the-top stunners. That's partly why I declare as agnostic, and why I'm suspicious of attempts to disambiguate reality with simple world views.
Drug use, meditation, religion, and so on can all be like this-- there are some experiences which are so self-evident in certain states that one suspects the mechanism behind them doesn't matter-- you can "get" things that are so transcendent of waking life that you'd (in my opinion) to be a little bit insane to take anything at face value, no matter how it seems.
In ordinary dreaming, since the critical part of our brains are turned off, we typically think what is happening to us is real, however fantastic or bizarre. If we carry over our waking assumptions, dream events can be quite impressive and beautiful.
And yes, one of the primary lessons from examining our dreams closely is that we should not trust waking perceptions at face-value.
How about that -- two for two.
