Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Introducing attitude and your mind

Attitude is about dealing with the reality of existence. From the commonsense point of view, your mind refers to your inner dialog of self-talk. Attitude is dealing with other people. Your mind can heal by mobilizing your body's innate healing powers. Attitude is about dealing with your emotional states from love and compassion to fear and anger. Attitude is having the fortitude to do what you want to do when you want to do it.

From the common sense point of view, your mind refers to your inner dialog of self-talk. This inner dialog of self-talk takes place parallel to whatever behavior you maybe engaging in. The Aristotelian subdivisions of the mind (perception, attention, imagination, emotion, motivation, memory and volition) or the mentalistic concepts of everyday speech can aid readers in dealing with their inner dialog of self-talk.
Your conscious mind refers to a subjective awareness of what is going on. You should view it as a subjective view of reality that your unconscious mind makes possible. Your conscious mind is a state of self-awareness, which is the net result of many parallel physiological processes. "The mind--a manifest functioning of the brain--and the other body systems interact in ways critical for health, illness, and well-being."
Your unconscious mind refers to the automatic processes controlled by your brain and nervous system that collectively take place without your awareness or conscious control. Any behavior that has become routine and is done without conscious thought is controlled by your unconscious mind, by definition. Emotions and feelings are an integral part of your experience of self-awareness. Yet emotions are a part of your unconscious mind because they operate automatically.
These mentalistic terms are a useful part of everyday speech. Any further hair splitting over terms and pursuit of unanswerable questions is best left to the philosophers. In no way should the reader assume that this mentalistic terminology has any necessary relevance to neuroscience. The main challenge confronting this website is to explain the mind as part of the mind - body connection.