yes i am a dork

Today I attended a seminar on cognitive science and religion, with a focus on trauma. It was pretty amazing. The first speaker was a philosopher who got in on the interdisciplinary cognitive science ground floor in the 80s, working with a neuroscientist. As a philosopher, she decided that in order to do her job, she had to tell scientists they were looking for the wrong thing when it came to trying to figure out how we become aware of our world. Instead of the 50 year old hypothesis that the world comes to us in pieces that our brain puts together (which had yet to be proven), she proposed (after 3 years of sitting at home thinking and writing and conversing with a neuroscientist) that the world is a seamless web that our senses break down into parts and our brain tries to reassemble. The theory never caught on (it's hard to tell scientists that they've spent their whole career and a flawed hypothesis), but she succeeded in meeting the Dalai Lama, who told her to study Buddhism. After being a Tibetan Buddhist nun for about 15 or so years, studying the Buddhist concept of emptiness (ca. 500 BCE), she is still promoting her theory and suggesting that meditation techniques allow a person to step back from the constructions of the mind in order to experience that seamless web that our senses lie about. She was followed by a professor who talked about how forgiveness creates neurological changes in the brain, creating habits beyond the fight-or-flight responses to trauma and injury. Then some interesting panel discussions about how sometimes childhood trauma can alter brain chemistry and neurobiology--short-circuiting a person's ability to reflect, stabilize identity, and creating "brain noise." There was a brief discussion about "re-tuning" neural pathways that formerly triggered trauma responses (what I would call PTSD, I think).
What also happened is that there was an audience member who seemed to be upset and little points about the trauma presenter's talk. While I don't know who he was, it seemed that he was a trauma survivor who felt that his trauma wasn't recognized or described in what the speaker said. For me, it brought in the reality that trauma is not abstract, it's not something that "we" (the members of the seminar) treat, but that trauma is something that happens to all of us. This was the background of the nun's talk, as well, though it wasn't explicit. This is a Buddhist concept of interbeing, and she also mentioned that she is a trauma survivor.
The whole thing was rather exciting for me, given the intersections of religion and science, self and reality. It also helped that I'm finishing Proust was a Neuroscientist and reading about Virginia Woolf's understanding of the self as an ephemeral mix of disparate perceptions, memories, thoughts, etc--as shown in her stream-of-consciousness writing style.