In a message dated 6/17/00 11:45:36 AM Central Daylight Time,
altamira@ecpi.com writes:
> The quality I'm talking about has to
> do with sensing the unexpected in the ordinary [snip]
>
> I've always thought of this way of seeing as being "childlike," because
> young children often seem to understand it better than older people.
I'm sure there IS a connection to "childlike" mental attributes. When we're
young, our brains need to be very plastic and able to form lots of new
interconnections between concepts and novel perceptions. As we age and
master the basics of the world and culture we grow up in, evolution has
probably selected pretty heavily in favor of "locking in" the connections
that work. Subjectively this is experienced as a dulling of perception and
fewer and fewer "aha" experiences. Much of what people describe as the
psychedelic experience seems to be a recapturing of a childlike openness to
the novelty of individual experiences and the vividness of the moment.
One important goal of a mature psychopharmacology should be to give us tools
to modulate this childlike openness. We ought to be able to "open up" when
we need to, so that we can adapt to novel situations and clear out the
cobwebs of old, set behaviors. At the same time, we need to be able to hold
onto hard-won lessons about basics.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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