Understanding Us 2: Core Concepts of Neuroscience @ Comprehensivist Wednesdays

Welcome to our series on Neuroscience.

If you've participated in this series of discussions, you may be forming an intuitive understanding that so much of our behavior is automatic, subconscious, and therefore outside of our direct conscious control.

Yet in our daily lives we have the distinct feeling that we are fully in control of ourselves. Our lives are full of complex behaviors, many rooted in social interactions.

We will examine complex behaviors, and how to understand them, perhaps find a better way to manage them. In the simplest sense, a complex behavior is one where the reasons behind the behavior are difficult to see, because they are multi-varied. Some behaviors are so perplexing that they make us act in irrational or contradictory manners. An example is with cognitive dissonance: a strong subconscious fear (hidden to us) drives our conscious mind to avoid it (e.g.: procrastination, or avoiding a doctor's visit). A broader example, not from daily life, is our propensity for war, violence, and territoriality. Of all animals, we seem to be the most warring - and most disturbingly we are the apex species to wage irrational violent & methodical wars.

Why is this, when we also have the most developed & interconnected rational thinking brain?

This discussion will focus on helping us to understand complex behaviors. To do this, we need better models of behavior, especially of what causes complex behavior. We can explain most complex behaviors using a systems-based model we will create, using knowledge from the field of neuroscience. It combines ideas we've learned, and uses comprehensivist methods to explain complexity. We will develop a systemic model of the brain, its composition as "a whole from parts".

This discussion will be participatory. We will examine one/two specific behaviors in break-out sessions, so participants can first-hand consider how our complex behaviors arise.

To better grasp concepts to be discussed, we recommend these (total 17 mins):

• Entertaining look at "Split-Brain Syndrome"
https://youtu.be/RFgtGIL7vEY [10 minute video]

• A woman had half her brain removed to save her life. Few effects. She's thriving!
https://youtu.be/f2fCY_M7Vms [2½ minute video]

• Procrastination - TEDx video (this link starts @9:53. Watch for 4½ mins)
https://youtu.be/52lZmIafep4?t=593 (watch until time 14:24, which is 4½ min)
(optional: same Procrastination video, full 21min): http://youtu.be/52lZmIafep4

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Watch our previous Neuroscience videos here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpF1l8gdXlGkupHx9Z_MdjOa3mRy6xma

Welcome to the series "Comprehensivist Wednesdays". Transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and Polymathy are some of the ways of describing this approach which Buckminster Fuller called Comprehensivity and described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive”.

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