Thoughts, words and experiences
Lisa feldman barrett in 7.5 lessons about the brain, showed
us how thinking about certain things, could affect how the body responds, in the
same way that the compassion therapy people, ie Paul Gilbert, showed how tests of people drinking milk and
thinking about drinking milk could light up an MRI scan of the brain in the
same way.
How come?
Barrett claims that the centre of the brain for language and
for body control are in the same place, so affect one, affect the other. This
seems dubious as motor control is fine and language is intricate
Gilberts explanation is that we experience what we think
about hence explaining why when we think it can provoke, emotions, bodily
responses, change beliefs and therefore behaviours.
One thing that struck me was that we experience the world in
terms of words. Look around you from
this text and you will see a stack of
words describing your experience “desk”, “computer” etc etc. In fact there wont
be any space in your experience that hasn’t got a word to describe it.
So one way of
connecting the experiential outcome of thought is this.
We think in language, be in sentences of speech, or via the
meaningful aspect of images. We perceive
via words, we were taught to demarcate the world in terms of words, we use
words for our symbols for experiences.
Words are the raw material of experience and whilst we can
use words in a number of ways, as jokes, in poems, talking about them and their
sounds, and different langageus have a number of different words for the same
referent. The basis use of words is to
perceive. Thus when we think, using
words then we get a perceptual and therefore experiential aspect as that is the
nature of words
