Imprint 🧠
Imprints are more or less hard wired programs which the brain is genetically designed to except only at certain points of development by means of synaptic pruning. These points are known as critical periods.
In general, the primordial imprint can always over-rule any subsequent conditioning or learning. An imprint is a species of brain software that has become built in hardware, being impressed on tender neurons when they are open and vulnerable. Imprints are non-negotiable aspects of our personality. Out of the infinity of possible programs existing as potential software, the imprint establishes the limits within which all subsequent conditioning occurs. Each successive imprint complicates the software which programs our experience and which we experience as “reality.”
Before the first imprint, the consciousness of the infant is “formless and void”—like the Universe at the beginning of Genesis, or the descriptions of unconditioned consciousness (Nibbana) in the mystic traditions. As the first imprint is made, structure emerges out of the creative void. The growing mind, alas, becomes trapped within this structure. It identifies with the structure, and in a sense it becomes the structure. Conditioning and learning build further networks onto this bedrock of imprinted software. The total structure of this brain-circuitry makes up our map of the world. It is what our Thinker thinks, and our Prover mechanically fits all incoming signals to the limitations of this map (What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves).
References
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Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 2 Hardware & Software The Brain and Its Programs (Location 392). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
Metadata
Type:🔵 Tags: Ethology / Biology / Neuroscience / Psychology / Neuropsychology Status:⛅️