Stress and the Microbiome – Lifestyle Medicine
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  • Windex007@lemmy.world
    14·
    3 days ago

    I could be wrong, but I don’t think awareness that the brain being “where memories are stored” is innate. I think that’s something we are told. If I’m recalling correctly, a surprising amount of what we perceive as cognition is offloaded to other distributed parts of our nervous system, so it’s maybe not even quite as true as we think it is.

    And even if it were, through informal polling over the years, when pressed, almost everyone I’ve ever talked to conceptualizes the exact center of thier “self” to be around the bridge of thier nose. Nobody I’ve talked to described the pinpoint location as being the position of thier frontal lobe.

    I’m the fucking furthest thing from an authority, though. If you had to pinpoint the exact “point” of your consciousness, where would you describe it to be? I’m curious how far offset it is from your center of vision.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      3·
      2 days ago

      If you’re playing a 1st person game and it’s very immersive, your “self” migrates to the screen point, i.e. right behind the character’s eyes location. So I think your statement is right. A good test would be to ask someone blind from birth (to avoid previous experience with sight) where their sense of being is. Maybe it’s a bit back, between the ears?

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
        6·
        2 days ago

        I haven’t had the chance to ask someone blind from birth (or blind at all), but I strongly suspect you’re right. I’d guess it’d be right between the ears.

        In my bizarre life, I was basically blind in one eye for about a year when I was in my mid 20s. There was a perceptible and jarring difference in my perception of self, towards (but not directly to) my good eye. It didn’t happen right away, happened about a week in. This makes me wonder if even someone blind after birth would actually maintain the same sense of center vs someone blind at birth.

        Blind and deaf at birth for me is the real head scratcher. Part of wonders if it would be somewhere on thier dominant hand, or maybe closer to thier center of mass?

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
          2·
          2 days ago

          Aka Helen Keller universe. That’s mind blowing to think about, I think you may be onto something. Maybe their perspective would be much more open, as they can feel their body and understand its reference points, so the stronger stimuli would shift their POV to the place receiving it briefly?

          • Windex007@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 days ago

            That’s an interesting thought, I hadn’t ever considered that it might become this “wandering” point in space based on context. Maybe having a “fixed” conception at all is just a byproduct of mostly relying on eyes and ears which are pretty fixed. If you’re relying on touch, which is available over a much larger and flexible area, your brain maybe just abandons any notion of you existing at a fixed point in your own body.

            We gotta find a deaf and blind person.