In the fascinating journey of getting to know your brain, it’s crucial to remember that you don’t think with your heart or head but with the most complex structure known to humanity: your brain, residing in your head. This information-processing organ, composed of around 100 billion neurons and trillions of connections, is the epicenter of your perceptions, emotions, and thoughts.
Your senses, as loyal messengers, continually send information to your brain, allowing you to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste the world around you. But how does this marvelous organ think?
Thinking and Cognitive Frameworks: Thinking, a primarily unconscious activity, is the key to understanding relationships between things. More than just experiencing elements, thinking gives meaning by presenting these elements in relationships like similarity, causality, and sequentiality. We use cognitive frameworks, mental structures shaping our ideas and concepts, defining our common sense. Each word comes with a conceptual framework, deeply rooted in our brain.
Take the example of a hospital cognitive framework: defined roles, specific places, and conventional actions. This framework structures our perception and understanding of the hospital environment, being an essential tool to make sense of the world.
Predictions and Past Learning: According to neuroscience, our brain unconsciously predicts what is most likely to happen. These predictions, based on past learning, prepare us to react quickly to future events. However, these predictions can lead us to bias reality, seeing and hearing what we expect. This phenomenon explains why prior expectations affect our perception and present experience.
Despite the efficiency of predictions, errors sometimes occur. Consciousness, evolving to monitor and correct these errors, plays a crucial role. The interplay between predictions and consciousness shapes our current experience, and learning from the past guides our future expectations.
In summary, getting to know your brain is unraveling the mysteries of cognition, where cognitive frameworks and predictions shape your reality. Learning to understand and utilize these processes not only enriches your understanding of the world but also empowers you to navigate the complexity of the human mind.
