(Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)” ![]() Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. “Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)” Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, "Because it's fun." But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. ![]() ![]() “Something as superfluous as "play" is also an essential feature of our consciousness. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). ![]() Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace ): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. “Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L.
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