GETTING INTO SHAPE?

I mentioned awhile back that besides Buddha's Brain, I am reading (albeit quite slowly—I think I have had this book out of the Brooklyn Public Library since June), 101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory.

"...If memories are automatically sculpted, interwoven, and made to fit into prior categories even as they are being encoded, they are likely to be intermingled—sometimes wrongly—when being recalled It would seem to be a de facto molecular explanation for human stereotyping and an insight into the power of narrative on the human imagination. Narrative is a form of categorization, taking a nearly random set of experiences and shaping them into coherence. Such coherence may be true or false; it may also be inevitable. This notion is more postmodern than postmodernism. We automatically try to fit our experiences into the shape of the world we've already built inside our heads."

Gosh, you mean we might automatically make assumptions and not pay attention because we are hard-wired for processing information the same way?

But, because the brain is plastic, and we can learn new things, we don't HAVE to do this. If we try, or THINK about stuff, we can ... gulp ...  re-program.

I extrapolate that out to: we can change.

Maybe we will find the biochemical basis for transcendence and redemption?