Closed,open, or somewhere between the two?

I figured that if I just keep typing, (much like the millionth monkey) I might eventually say somthing.

Oh, and thank you. I consider it high praise.

It is nothing like you tried to explain, or certainly nothing like you said.

You tried to claim the a mind is either open or closed, and that is patently not true, or if it is then yours must be one of the closed minds because of the evidence you dismiss o0ut of hand.

I have proved many times in my life, and have seen it demonstrated many times also, including on here, that we open and close the door to our mind according to how we decide on the value of what we are reading. Any mind which is not so selective is never going to be able to decide anything, since it will be pulled backwards and forwards by conflicting and contradictory information

Whether our mins is open or closed to information is entirely our choice. We select what information we open the door to our minds to, and also what information we close that door to. That is the entire point I have been making, the simple fact of choice, which is solely under our control.

We even control which information we take seriously enough to consider, or investigate,let alone what we retain. We control which "experts" we listen to and why, and we also dos so according to what motivates us to consider, investigate or ignore information.

To shrug the responsibility for those decisions on to anyone else is, in my view, the worst form of moral cowardice. In fact, tat also applies to our trying to blame others for our actiuons

As a child, I had an open mind and people abused it to fill it with lies. I now have a closed mind about religion and am open minded to everything else in the world. Drugs, sex, weapons. Not really drugs though, that s*** is gross.

Open mind is an idiom meaning receptive to different opinions as opposed to refusing to consider the ideas of others. Having an open mind is regarded by some to be a virtue.

I understand Bike,

Don't believe nothing but the Bible.

Almost, but I would reword it slightly and say, "don't believe anything that doesn't agree with the bible". Only a minor difference but to my mind an important one.

That's alright bro.

This is as good a representation as any, of the diffference between science and faith.

Scientific theory creates a never ending feedback loop, while Religion merely perpetuates ignorance constrained by blind faith.

Go back and reread the definitions for closed and open mindedness. You cannot be both.
Being open minded is a type of personality.

But who is to say that the definitions are correct?

As both observation and experience have taught me no person is completely either, each one selects what they accept or don't accept for their own reasons.

I would far rather accept what I have observed, in both myself and others over the 63 years ort so of my life, and which I have never seen anything to contradict in all that time, than accept a glib definition by someone who obviously has a theory to prove.

I am a Psychology Student, and everything I am learning as part of that just reinforces what I say.

You would possibly be surprised to know how many different theories there are amongst "experts" about how our personalities are formed for a start, even just the "Authoritarian Personality" blamed for the atrocities in WWII are blamed on a great number of different things, so as with all things to do with the human mind it is foolish in the extreme to pick one definition over and above all others when there is likely to be an element of truth in most.

Ask yourself this. Have you never heard anything and either rejected it or accepted it rather than investigate it for yourself. When you do that yop0u are being closed minded. However I am sure there have also been times when something about an idea or a theory, even one with which you originally disagreed, has caused you to look closer and maybe even change your mind. When you have done that you are being open-minded.

We all have a mind which is initially open to all stimulae, but as we grown, or as we make up our minds about things we close our minds to the alternatives, unless something happens to excite our interest and then we open the door to our mind, allow the thought in, consider it, possibly even research it ourselves and according to what we find either harden our previous opinion or change our mind.

If any of us were truly closed minded we would still all be as babies, knowing nothing, learning nothing, still unable to walk, talk, feed ourselves,or any of the myriad other things we learn to do over the decades.

No, we control for ourselves just how and when we open our minds, and just how and when we close them. After all, you have closed your mind to what I am saying, just as experience has closed my mind to what you are saying on this subject and others.

Life and, especially, people, are not that black and white.

Perhaps we should stop using the terms open or closed. Our brains are constantly processing info all the time whether we are conscious of it or not. So in that case no ones mind is closed.

The terms stretched, aware, grown, may be more applicable. Once someone's mind has been stretched beyond it's former limits where it can contemplate new ideas without being biased then that person can be considered to have an open mind. Granted, not many people are unbiased especially concerning religion.

I have to admit I don't use them myself very often, because I believe they are too "black and white", and not something which can be applied with any accuracy.

Now that second paragraph makes much more sense, though I am not saying that I agree with it.

As one who has studied Psychology informally for many decades, including people with learning difficulties, and who is now studying it formally with the aim of getting a degree, two things have become very obvious to me. I am not surprised to find that nothing I am learning on my Open University module is new to me, I have already been told by more than one Psychologist that I have a deep insight into the human mind, possibly because of my own struggles in that direction.

The first of the things that have come to mind is that in fact the human mind has more capacity than any of us is capable of filling, even those with learning difficulties. The only exceptions to that are people with what are really physical problem with their brains which prevent them from learning properly.

The second of those is that most limitations to learning are caused by environmental factors, usually in the home, and often encountered in the first 5 years of life.

That is because the vast majority of learning problems are actually a form of mental block brought on either by too little, or too much confidence, which have been heavily influenced by their home environment in those early years.

What that means in the end is that the reason most people fail to learn is that they don't think they can. That is a form of mental block I myself suffered from until after I left school and only overcame in certain areas, due to a fascination with them. I was later able to expand the number of those areas by learning to find areas of interest in them, though there areas till some areas I am completely unable to learn in, even if I want to. It's not that many years ago that I would never have dreamed of attempting to go for a degree in any area, not even Psychology. It is only thanks to Self Esteem therapy that I have been able to do that.

The truth is that, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we all choose what we learn and who we learn it from, applying criteria which have been set out in those early years by our environment, be that parents other relatives or, less likely at that age, our peer group.

We may close our mind to things because of parental disapproval, whether real or imagined, or any of a thousand other factors that control how we learn. (Incidentally this comes under the heading of Behavioural Psychology). Sometimes we choose not to step out of our comfort zone, which learning almost invariably forces us to do to some degree. These are the two most common reasons.

There are of course also those who are so arrogant that they can't envision being wrong, and those so downtrodden that they can't envision being right and a myriad of shades in between.

You might find anything about Behavioural Psychology interesting to read, though it is not the only school of Psychological thought by any means, and most have at least some truth in them. None, I am convinced, have all of it.

I was fortunate that even early in life pleasing my adoptive father was not a strong goal with me, because I had already learned it was impossible to achieve whichever way I went. Believe it or not I am grateful to him for that, lack of trust in any "expert" has stood me in good stead ever since.