Re Weick's "How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?"
Let me first introduce Michael Gazzaniga. Prof. Gazzaniga, reknown for
his pioneering work with split-brain patients, is now late in his career
setting up (or has set up) the Psych department for Darthmouth College.
Writes he in the preface to "The Mind's Past":
"Psychology itself is dead. Or to put it another way, psychology is in a
funny situation. My college, Darthmouth, is constructing a magnificent
new building for psychology. Yet its four stories go like this. The
basement is all neuroscience. The first floor is devoted to classrooms
and administration. The second floor houses social psychology, the third
floor cognitive science, and the fourth, cogniive neuroscience. Why is
it called the psychology building?"
I think this paragraph marvelously epitomizes the enormous shift in our
way of getting to know ourselves. And how tough it is to acquire or
maintain a satisfactory sense of the world we live in and life itself.
Prof. Gazzaniga postulates in the brain the presence of an
"interpreter." Its job is to help is maintain our selfassuredness by
making sense of whatever subconscious mentalese goes in. And if in doing
its job it has to falsify things a tad, it won't hesitate to do so. I
quoted from his book in a short report on my Fleabyte site (no, I am not
self-promoting or selling anything; I am reporting):
http://www.fleabyte.org/archives-computing_to_a_purpose-1.html#An
interpreter that knows its priority
It should be an easy read and quite instructive.
One sense I am getting from this is that it is part of a fine
bootstrapping mechanism inside our skull. Information is fed in
continuously through all our senses and from what keeps on
reverberating. The output, DETERMINED BEFORE we are aware of it, also
feeds back while the interpreter helps us maintain our mental sanity in
the face of information that appears ludicrous (if our unconcious knows
that word). So, it would seem that Mr Weick can't be far off the mark.
Henry
Gil Regev wrote (among other things):
>
> From Sensemaking in Organizations (Karl Weick): "How can I
> know what I think until I see what I say?" Weick's argument
> is that sense making starts with the act of putting our
> thoughts into words which we then hear and that makes us
> understand what we've been thinking.Gil
>
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