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Scientists Discover Surprising Similarities Between Freud’s Ideas and Modern Neuroscience

Researchers suggest that old psychoanalytic ideas and modern brain science may be describing the same mental processes from different angles.

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  1. The freudian ideas of the Self, Ego and Super-ego are really based on our memory and how we process memories

    The phenomenon Near-Death Experience (NDE) is explained by me since 2006: In a NDE we can perceive LIVE + CONSCIOUS how a single stimulus, thought, situation is processed by the brain — step-by-step.
    e.g. experiences since the 5th month of fetus-age are reactivated across the complete life-span in the same order as the physical senses develop:
    touch sense > acoustic sense > optical sense > birth(indirect) > early social-/ environmental-experiences > autobiographical experiences since the 5th month of fetus-age up to the actual age.

    The recalled/reactivated memories/experiences fit very good to Sigmund Freuds´ ideas:

    A recall/reactivation in AScending hierarchical order = the episodic memory = the reason for the freudian SELF

    A recall/reactivation of the ´early social-/environmental-experiences = the reason for the freudian SUPER EGO (AND these experiences are SELECTIVELY reactivated when people use psychedelic drugs ! )

    A recall/reactivation of the ´autobiographical experiences since the 2nd year of childhood up to the actual age´ = the autobiographical memory = the freudian EGO

    A complete explanation of NDEs in German language can be found in my book: Kinseher Richard
    “Auflösung grosser Fragen: Was ist Bewusstsein? Was ist Zeit?” (= Answer to big questions: What is consciousness? What ist time?” )

    With NDEs we can understand:
    - That our experiences are STACKED UP in hierarchical order in the memory and are accessible across the complete life-span (This does mean, that the neural structures which are used for these memories must exist across the complete life-span without any change!)

    - The reason for the phenomenon of the ´infantile amnesia´: We learn since the 2nd year of childhood to express our experiences with words/language and to separate us from other persons and from the environment as an individual I-/EGO-person. To do this, we add to our OWN experiences always an ´I-/EGO-/mine-Code´ — to create our OWN autobiographical experiences and memories. When we want to recall/remember/reactivate our OWN autobiographical memories — then we can reactivate only such OWN memories which have an ´I-/EGO-/mine-Code´.
    This is the reason why we can not recall/reactivate OWN memories/experiences which are earlier than the 2nd-4th year of childhood — because we have no OWN memories which are from an earlier age. This does mean: that the ´infantile amnesia´ is not the result of neuronal biology mechanism — the ´infantile amnesia´ is only the result of a processing mechanism!

    A scientific paper described that the threshold of the ´infantile amnesia´ depend very much on the culture and social environment: it is an age of 2,5 years for Maori-people (New Zealand), it is an age of 3,5 years for european persons and it is an age of 6 years with persons from East-Asia

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