Observations placeholder
Damasio, Professor Antonio - Where do perceptions reside?
Identifier
014821
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
We are apt to think of the brain as being the storage medium for perception, but I think we need to be extremely careful about siting a physical location for perceptions of any sort. Perceptions are created by all boundaried organisms and by inanimate objects as well as inanimate objects.
The vast majority of these do not have a ‘brain’.
As such each of these will have stored perceptions somewhere – accessible to that unit/aggregate, but we need to ignore, I believe, the existence of the brain in this.
So much of us dies during our lifetimes. The perceptions of a human being have a greater longevity than any of our individual parts, as such citing one fixed place for perceptions would be incorrect.
A description of the experience
Professor Antonio Damasio – The Feeling of What Happens
We are not merely perishable at the end of our lives. Most parts of us perish during our lifetime only to be substituted by other perishable parts. The cycles of death and birth repeat themselves many times in a life span – some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year; the exceptions are the precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart and the cells of the lens.
Most of our components that do not get substituted – such as the neurons – get changed by learning (In fact nothing being sacred, even some neurons may get substituted). Life makes neurons behave differently by altering, for instance, the way they connect with others.
No component remains the same for very long, and most of the cells and tissues that constitute our bodies today are not the same we owned when we entered college.
What remains the same, in good part, is the construction plan for our organism structure and the set points for the operation of its parts. Call it the spirit of the form and the spirit of the function
The source of the experience
Damasio, Professor AntonioConcepts, symbols and science items
Concepts
FormFunction
Perception
Perceptions
Perceptions - accessing perceptions
Perceptions - what happens to perceptions
Perceptions - what has perceptions
Perceptions and memory
Spirit
Templates