Brainy!

Yesterday, I read the newest edition of Time Magazine. It was captivating really. According to the magazine's front page article involving the human brain and consciousness; what they know, and what will probably take many many more years to figure out. The line that seperates different parts of the brain has become very blurry, and now researchers are starting to ask the "hard questions", like why do we think green when we see green? Or "explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation" (Jan 19 2007, Time).

Now, I'm not like a huge science geek philosopher kind of guy, so I don't really know too much about what I'm talking about, but I think it's interesting as hell trying to understand the thing that allows us to understand. A question that arose from this article was "how does my brain make me, 'me'"? According to researchers, that's actually a relatively simple question; it's because my brain is me. And although people tend to believe that their conscience is like one man in a room in front of dozens of monitors that controlls our thoughts and movements, that is also untrue. In our brain, events compete for attention until one outshoots the others and the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact, giving the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

That's pretty much the only stuff I could vaguely understand from the seven page article, and I just find this stuff highly facinating as hell. It truly takes understanding oneself to the most extreme scientific levels imagineable.