You Are Who You Are By Default

A recent report (google [Saey You Are Who You Are by Default]) gives some insight on the nature of who we are, particularly here, at the end of the report:

Once people reach adulthood, activity in the network is fairly consistent from person to person, with some slight differences between the sexes and in older versus younger people, Williamson and his colleagues wrote in a 2008 paper in NeuroReport.

This consistency in the network from person to person is remarkable, especially considering what its function is supposed to be. Everyone’s brain is thinking different thoughts while in the default mode, Fair says, and yet all healthy brains in default mode look essentially alike.

Such fundamental issues are among the puzzles of the default network remaining to be solved. “Nobody has really figured out what it is and what it does,” Williamson says. “But somebody will.”

“Nobody has really figured out…”? Well, I have a theory. The perception of difference, the feeling, is rooted in emotion, not the intellect. In other words, the sensation of difference originates deeper down in the amygdale, not in the cerebral cortex where all the action seems to take place. The cortex produces the illusion of difference and in humans assigns names to the differences; the amygdale makes that illusion of the names feel real!

The researchers end up thinking the differences they see between people’s thoughts are more real than they are. If, on the other hand, the apparent differences are really just that, apparent and not real, then one would expect to see everyone’s “default mode” very similar, as is the case.

One example of apparent differences lies in the perception of ‘god’. We all sense this, The gateway of the mysterious female as chapter 6 calls it, but just note all the different words people use to differentiate their experience from other people: God, Yahweh, Allah, Bhrama, Oneness, etc.

Belief in apparent differences is so deep as to cause us to kill one another in the name of our “True Name” for the same default mode emotion. Such is tribal blindness. I assume chapter 56’s This is known as mysterious sameness, is describing an aspect of this default mode.