conscious star stuff

schwarbage asked: Hey there, I saw your post debunking certain myths about the right/left sides of the brain and wanted to draw your attention to a TED presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
I believe you may be interested in this video as she makes some really fascinating points with regards to function of the mind and how it affects us in daily life. She also speaks at length about a blood vessel that exploded in the left half of her brain, causing a bad stroke, and how this had an impact on her studies/theories as a nueroanatomist.

I also wanted to mention that although you are quite right to state that we humans do tend to use all of our brain at once (Mrs. Palin and others aside), there may be some truth to the notion that certain parties feel more of an affinity for one set of functions or another that are generally associated with that half of the brain. Dr. Taylor refers to our brain as essentially behaving not unlike two seperate 'persnalities' that communicate with each other, negotiating and working in harmony. It's not much of a stretch to suggest that one personality may have prevelance/priority.

At any rate, it's always refreshing to see these sort of discussions come up in the tumblrsphere. And thanks for pointing out the rocking great art!

Hello mate, thanks for your message.  Curiously enough, a friend of mine showed it to me yesterday.  His father suffered a stroke last Tuesday, and he ran across it while doing some research on that.  There’s so many wrong things with it that I don’t know where to begin.  Not only is the science appallingly wrong, she is also giving false hope and misguided conceptions about strokes to people who have loved ones in that unfortunate condition. 

It’s hard to tell whether she’s doing it on purpose or not.  Given her credentials, I can’t help but to think that she’s intentionally distorting the science for her own personal gains (she wrote a book that sold fantastically and there’s a movie in the making that will probably make her a millionaire).  Either way, the science is wrong.  Notice how she talks and talks about how her stroke gave her insight on how the brain actually works, yet she has not done any credible research on it whatsoever.  She’s jumping to conclusions from very unreliable experiences and has no proof for what she says.

I’m making a post about it which I’ll publish soon.  It’s going to be loooooong, though, I fear. :P