OUR STUPID BRAIN

Our Stupid Brain quotes from “Technical Foundations of Neurofeedback” by Thomas Collura.

“There is a tendency in Western society to think of human actions in terms of “voluntary”, in the sense that we first create a desire to do something and then instruct our brain to take care of the details. The reality is that this is somewhat backwards. As we have seen in our earlier example of the movement-related potential, the brain activity that leads to a voluntary movement precedes the movement by up to 1 1/2 seconds. That means that the very idea of the desire to perform the movement comes after the brain activity. As would seem necessary, the very desire to perform the action is a brain event, and hence is the result of brain processes. This challenges the idea that the conscious mind is “in charge” of the brain, and puts the cart on quite the other side of the horse……

The driving force for thought and action consists in the dynamic instability of the brain and its proclivity to always seek novelty, fulfillment, stimulation, safety, power, and other goals that it perceives.“

My addition to these thoughts is that this information is support for the argument that our glial/astrocytes hold or instantiate the goals listed above in a distributed manner