“As for cognition, do we not think, literally here, with hands and eyes?” pg 230

“..there is nothing to fear in the rise to prominence of neurobiological attempts to understand and account for human behavior.” pg 232

Why does something physical

Have more weight than something

Ideological? If it exists physically

We give something more thought, more

Courtesy than if it is an idea.

 

A man does not have himself killed

For a petty distinction

You must speak to his soul.

But how do you do that if

His soul is neurons and clusters

and brain cells? Surely the same way.

With words, ideas. Sounds.

Sounds that are physical, waves

To be interpreted by a brain.

But their meaning will resonate long after

The waves have dissipated.

 

Ideologies have weight. Nazism, communism,

Slavery, sexism, racism, transphobia.

Weight, and

Body counts.

But we cannot see sexism, or touch

Transphobia. If it exists in our neurons

It is most likely because it exists in

Our culture.

So why so much emphasis

On what is physical?

“…your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” page 200

“…the self/nonself distinction provides the basis for consciousness,” page 216.

Who am I when I am not you?

Because I am neurons and fibres different

From you.

But when you leave where do I go?

Am I gone? But I am different.

I feel hollow. I search and I search

To fill this hollow space inside my chest

My head, my heart, but

You are gone and the hole is there

It is what I have.

I am gone. I feel gone. Where do I find myself

When I am alone?

You find me, put me back

Tell me who to be. But now

You are gone and I am alone.

I am gone, gone, gone

Where the goblins go,

Or the cobwebs the lonely

Toys in the attic,

The soul discarded to dust.

Images do not speak for themselves.

But what happens when they do?

It is easy to see criminal acts, we do

Through computers. But what makes

The brain so amazingly different?

Why is the brain immune to this idea

That pictures have meaning?

So much that we can’t see, inside.

Is there social on the inside?

Lives and cultures, language all

Mashed up inside a skull. People, words

Jammed together in three pounds of tissue.

Such a heavy burden to house criminality.

But what if our culture is criminal? What if

We tear it apart and realize that there is nothing

But violence against humanity?

Ironies in Rose

Autism doesn’t feel like

A disorder. It feels  different

An excess of input of empathy,

A lack of theory of mind, not mirror

Neurons. Here psychology shows itself

Why ask an autistic person instead of

Developing conclusions based on theories

Lab rats, brain scans, differences. That input

Should not be separate from the stories of

The brains being scanned, from the ideas.

Different doesn’t mean unable to express ourselves,

Non-verbal doesn’t mean unable to communicate,

Doesn’t mean infantile. Sometimes different just

Means different. So here I am a subject, a disorder.

I lack mirror neurons, have deficiencies in certain chemicals.

But what does that tell you about what I need?