On The Memorial Daze - 4

Memorial Circuitry

The more difficult it is to memorialize, to remember, to look back ... the more difficult it is to look forward.

I mean in terms of accuracy.

Especially when we have to deal with the two Xmas packaging departments of our personal and cultural cognition.

By that I mean the amygdala, which is the part of our brain that receives all the sensory input.

That is, all the sensory input from our ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and skin, before any other part of our brain receives the data, which it then processes with the additional help of our cultural amygdala.

The 98% of our cognition, which takes place in our subconscious, gets to our 2% conscious cognition only after "the bridge to everywhere" has packaged it.

Let's review the evidence for that before moving on in this post:

Probably 98 percent of your reasoning is unconscious - what your brain is doing behind the scenes. Reason is inherently emotional. You can't even choose a goal, much less form a plan and carry it out, without a sense that it will satisfy you, not dis­gust you. Fear and anxiety will affect your plans and your ac­tions. You act differently, and plan differently, out of hope and joy than out of fear and anxiety.

Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change: Receptors for neurotransmitters change at the synapses, which changes neural circuitry. Since thinking is the activation of such circuitry, somewhat different thinking re­quires a somewhat different brain. Brains change as you use them-even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.
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the amygdala gets sensory information directly from the various sensory systems that process the external world. So the visual system, the auditory system, olfactory, touch, pain, and so forth. All of these kind of come together, or converge, in the amygdala.

(The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere). The data, upon being put in a neural package, is forwarded to our culturally grown circuitry for further processing:

We found that amygdala volume correlates with the size and complexity of social networks in adult humans. An exploratory analysis of subcortical structures did not find strong evidence for similar relationships with any other structure, but there were associations between social network variables and cortical thickness in three cortical areas, two of them with amygdala connectivity. These findings indicate that the amygdala is important in social behavior.
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A group of US marketing researchers claim that brand owners can make their customers believe they had a better experience of a product or service than they really did by bombarding them with positive messages after the event. Advocates of the technique, known as "memory morphing", claim it can be used to improve customers' perceptions of products and encourage them to repeat their purchases and recommend brands to friends.

"When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products – not advertising – in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter what consumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours," he writes in his book, How Customers Think. He says that memories are malleable, changing every time they come to mind, and that brands can use this to their advantage. "What consumers recall about prior product or shopping experiences will differ from their actual experiences if marketers refer to those past experiences in positive ways," he continues.

(Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala). What we sense and what we remember is not controlled primarily by our consciousness, it is controlled primarily by our personal subconscious and also by what circuits our culture builds in and adds to our subconscious cognitive system:

THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Edward L. Bernays

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty [now 320] million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
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It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.

(A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 4, quoting "The Father of Spin"). This means that if we know who influences our culture, we know who influences the structure of the cognitive circuity in our brains.

On memorial day those powers that be (see e.g. Epigovernment: The New Model - 5, MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 5) want you to remember, to memorialise in their way of control.

But as we have learned to remember in the past (Viva Egypt - 2) and yesterday (Viva Egypt - 3), that is a memorial daze (On The Memorial Daze).

We can't see the future extinction coming at us because we fail to acknowledge the extinctions of 200 species a day we are doing now.

Take the critical bees for example:

Honeybees are dying off at too high a rate to guarantee their long-term survival, even though fewer were lost last winter, a US government report said on Thursday.

The total losses among hive honeybees across the country was 23.2% over the 2013-14 winter, the annual report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) found.

The extinction of wisdom

That is better than the 30.5% loss over the 2012-13 winter, but the report said the death rate among honeybees over the last eight years was still too high for the bees' long-term survival.

“While we are glad to see improvement this year, losses are still too high, and there is still much more work to be done to stabilise bee populations,” the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, said in a statement.

(Guardian, RE:USDA Report). This is caused by pesticides & insecticides made from civilization's toxic drug oil, prepared by the minions of Oil-Qaeda (Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization - 2, cf. here, here).

Don't forget it, memorialise the good Earth and Peace, but "forget" war --if you have the circuits (Comparing a Meme Complex to a Cultural Amygdala).

The previous post in this series is here.