The following is a short (500 word) comment; ‘Acknowledging/Employing the ‘Insight’ that comes with a Stroke’.

(A supplementary discussion on the salient points follows in a brief ‘Appendix’)

 

Acknowledging/Employing the ‘Insight’ that comes with a Stroke

A stroke that leaves one with an inability to ‘bring names to mind’ is a stroke that ‘demotes’ the role, in cognition, of the abstract concept of ‘being’.  The ‘insight’ that comes with the stroke is where the cognitive faculty goes directly to ‘relations’ without dependency on ‘being’.  ‘Relations’ are the basis of the real physical world of our experience.  Names signifying ‘being’ are an abstract ‘add on’ that can ‘block’ relational cognition.  For example, relational cognition ‘comes first’ in indigenous aboriginal culture.  E.g. ‘Dances with wolves’ is a relational way of identifying ‘John Dunbar’ that does not impute ‘being’ to the ‘relational life form as occurs in cognition of a particular thing-in-itself connoting ‘name’.

In the fable ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, Rumpelstiltskin is a curious little fellow who has the power to spin straw into gold.  This is an allusion to what a ‘name’ does; i.e. it imputes ‘being’ to a relational form in the flow.  A name can transform a pauper into a prince in our Western culture, although not in the indigenous aboriginal culture.  What a (left-brain) stroke does is remove the concept of ‘being’ (cognition that is triggered by thing-in-itself naming) so that relational understanding ‘rises to the fore’. (more…)