)f Soul,Brains, Neuroscience,Consciousness....You (are your brain).

drawing /collage by marguerita

The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted.
You are your brain.
Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,”
because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves.
But what is really astonishing about this
supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not!
The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels.
What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life.
We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment.
We also need the presence and availability of other people
if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious.
But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide.
It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/art-and-the-limits-of-neuroscience/

Status contest with a twist:Messages in indirect ways

collage by marguerita
The language of teasing is intimately linked to the language of social behavior.
Because teasing allows us to send messages in indirect, masked ways, it is an essential means of navigating our often-fraught social environments.
In teasing, we become actors, taking on playful identities to manage the inevitable conflicts of living in social groups.
Given the perils of negotiating rank, many species have evolved dramatized status contests, relying on symbolic displays of physical size and force to peacefully sort out who’s on top. Stags roar. Frogs croak. Chimps throw branches around. Hippos open their jaws as wide as possible to impress competitors.

Thanks to the scientific study of laughter, we know that when friends laugh, they laugh in unison, their fight-flight response (e.g., increased blood pressure) is calmed and mirror neurons fire; shared laughter becomes a collective experience, one of coordinated action, cooperative physiology and the establishing of common ground.Long-term partners develop their own teasing idiom that weaves its way into their quotidian rhythms. This teasing typically focuses on sexual proclivities, bodily functions, sleep habits, eating habits and anachronistic fashion choices.
We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding. In Defense of Teasing - NYTimes.com
Yes we can......strip-tease