Religion Beats the Throw

New Research Says: Trust Your Subconscious Wiring

Humans don't make very good decisions. This is clear from the Nobel-prize winning work of Kahneman and Tversky, or to anyone who's spent any time with any humans (including themselves) ever.Now recent work at the University of Rochester confirms that the only sections of your skull you can trust are subconscious.

It's important to remember that your brain, the embodiment of everything you are and the most amazing computation device ever constructed, is a hot-wired adaptation which makes the average MacGuyver gadget look like ten years of planning with a federal budget. Your skull-meats were intended to help you club things smaller than you to death and eat them, full stop, and the fact we've reconfigured them to do a million other things up to and including building and playing pianos is nothing short of astonishing.

All the original functions work well. Things like "what's going left", "is that a bad thing" and "where do I move to intercept it" have been shown to work far better than the higher functions - someone who couldn't solve parabolic equations with drag can still catch a ball. Humans are very good at recognizing imminent danger (is that a hungry saber-tooth tiger?) but almost catastrophically bad at the abstract (should I take out a huge mortgage that I have no ability to pay?)

Professor Pouget has studied this reliable sub-conscious wiring, by directly observing neurons responsible for identifying motion to the left or right while the subject observed a collection of moving dotes. The firing of these neurons increases until, when it becomes continuous, the person suddenly "realises" the answer - once the brain has finished its processing, it hands the answer to the waking mind fully formed.

This explains an awful lot about modern society - the underbrain can easily identify physically moving left or right, but once the higher brain is asked to deal with things being politically left or right it all gets messed up.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Subconscious study http://www.physorg.com/news149345120.html

My Comment: How many different ways has this been said by how many different cultures? This is an example of one of the classic critiques of western science, that they completely disregarded ancient wisdom as if it never existed. It was possible to simply put ancient axioms to a more rigorous test, to at least keep the questions open. But no, the ancients couldn’t have possibly known anything about life, consciousness, or the world. As a result, those waiting on science to discover essential truths have to wait hundreds of years before the ancient axioms can be said just so by just the right branch of science. I’ve always been partial to the phrasing, learn to trust your heart. This might take another hundred years or so for biologists involved in cardiac research to discover that the heart has “brainlike” qualities.