Thoughts, words and experiences

 

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