Understanding the brain

as blind Biological Navigation System

 

 

All biological systems operate a navigation system (i.e. a Bio-Nav) of some sort, to wit, an auto-pilot. The bio-navigation system’s job is to determine, decide and then activate a biological system’s physical functions (all ideo-motor responses) so that it can find its way around to acquire food, a mate and to escape from predators. In other words, the Bio-Nav’s job is to compute (for each and every situation or context = ‘world’) the probable next best step (i.e. response readiness state) toward increasing the bio-system’s survival chances.

 

My biological navigation system (i.e. my brain as BIO-Nav) is blind, like an autopilot on a plane or the Sat-Nav in your car or on your mobile. It is blind because it merely responds internally (meaning on its own terms or in its own virtual reality) to presented data. By so responding it acquires virtual (meaning ‘as if’) sight. The Bio-Nav® arranges (i.e. compresses and iconises) stored ‘as if’ stressors as (mental) maps (or models). Those maps represent previous success and failure pathways that served to increase or decrease survival capacity. My brain sees (i.e. responds) only its own self-generated maps. These maps are continuously updated when the Bio-Nav responds to contact with a new external or internal stressor (that’s to say, many millions per second). In short, my (indeed, every) brain is like blind man with a cane (i.e. with an external stressor sensor).

 

My Bio-Nav’s (i.e. brain’s) job is to compute and then activate (actually to transform itself into) a probable next best step/response for the tens of thousands of situations I get myself into every day (indeed, every minute). All 7.500 million humans alive today operate an almost identical basic Bio-Nav. It can only navigate successfully because it is blind (to all but its own maps operating as response models). The BIO-Nav does not actually see (i.e. respond to and relativise) the external world but operates solely within an ‘as if’ reality (i.e. as fictional simulation) created by itself from its previous responses to the stressors/contacts which its sensors encountered and its basic (i.e. genetic) and acquired (i.e. situation related, possibly epigenetic) programming.

 

A Bio-Nav’s default function, i.e. its (generic, hence locally blind) goal, is to ensure system survival. It does that by continuously upgrading its response map and which then directs the physical system (i.e. its survival delivery system).  I self-signal a survival capacity increase (i.e. a survival capacity success, i.e. a ‘win’) with a more or less intense pulse/signal of happiness. I self-signal a survival capacity decrease (i.e. a survival capacity failure, i.e. a ‘loss’) with a more or less intense pulse/signal of unhappiness. Chronic survival capacity decrease is self-signalled as depression (i.e. as response readiness decrease).

 

The brain (i.e. the blind human auto-pilot) takes its instruction from its ‘as if’ map of the world and its immediate ‘as if’ response to an actual datum (i.e. stressor) that has just impacted (hence instructed) it. By integrating (i.e. feeding on and digesting, i.e. to homeostasis) its response it self-transforms as (as it were, becomes) an upgraded model of its world (or map) and which presents (always in the now) as probable next best step/response solution. That solution is then reality tested at contact with the next stressor that impacts. 

 

Now for the Good News. Because the human Bio-Nav is completely blind to external reality and sees, i.e. responds only to its own ‘as if’ maps or models of its own responses (a sort of rear view (i.e. hindsight) distorted mirror image), that lets a smart human deliberately cheat his or her navigation system by deliberately selecting and activating benign (meaning placebo) stressors (both internal and external) and which are then included and, with the help of intense, to wit: ‘flooding’, emotion, highlighted in the navigation map, thus directing (indeed, compelling) the bio-system towards presentation for contact with a benign external or internal stressor that pays off in increased survival capacity (and happiness).

 

Any stressor (physical contact, idea, image, emotion and so on, i.e. any placebo as virtual fact) that is introduced to the Bio-Nav and floods it to the exclusion of all else will determine (i.e. focus) its map and so decide its immediate response readiness directed towards an increase in relative survival capacity (so theorised Emile Coué, one of the most efficient (placebo) ‘healers’ of the 19th century).

 

In the simplest terms: If I flood my Bio-Nav with garbage, for instance, with negative (because chronic) stress, I will feel like garbage and my future will be garbage (i.e. persistent failure) which my Guide & Control System will signal with depression/unhappiness and my bio-system will respond to with declining health. If I’m smart and flood my Bio-Nav with positive stressors (the more so when amplified with intense emotion) I will feel positive and my future will be positive and whose outcome is elation/happiness and good health. I can, for instance, do that by flooding my brain with any benign (personal goal directed) mental misdirection, such as via any one of n meditations, guided imageries, psychotherapies, going on holidays and/ or with real or imagined forest stimuli.

 

For a more detailed analysis of the human Biological Navigation System (sans soul, spirit or animal magnetism) and how it can be manipulated for good or ill see my book: ‘How to make and fake happiness’ (2013)

 

As I imagine, so I become

 

 

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