Phd proposal ideas

Certainly one of the strangest years of my life. Poised with a year to work off followed by a leap in to the unknown. I spend our long walks ruminating over the ideas I've worked on i n the last few years. Issues of self, free will, which still hold water, which relate to making because, much as I'd like to do a PhD on neuroscience I have no history in this. All I've done, all I'm known for on a professional level is furniture making. The last piece of writing I enjoyed on the subject of making was Richard Sennets' The Craftsman'. A brilliant book. Though a lot of my later inspiration came from antonio Damasio, his two great books, 'Descartes myth' particularly placed the body back in to the conversation. The twentieth century saw a drift where cognition was all that was really studied. Emotions were either ignored or deemed too slippery for serious research. Since candace Perts' work and her discoveries regarding opiate receptor sites came the realisation that receptor sites were all over the body. Damasios somatic marker hypothesis revealed a pulse of neurotransmitters marked any new object we encounter enabling our emotional response to our encounters to be far quicker than any cognitive process could ever be. When you step over a venomous snake in the jungle it is your reactions that save you. An over emphasis on the significance of consciousness prevails today. After all, the vast majority of what our brains do is below the surface. Our unconscious processes that keep us breathing and our hearts beating and the countless other bodily processes that keep us alive. Our understanding developes below the surface and the illusion of self that Buddhism has been aware of for centuries has finally found acceptance amongst the neuroscience community. And here I step in to point out that there is no duality. Our consciousness and unconsciousness, our being can not be separated up in to brain, body etc. The commonly heald false dichotomy of working with your hands or working with your head. The crafts councils foolish promotion of objects outside of their sphere and lack of attention to the defence of the maker. Only in the field of sport is pay reflective of the inspiration of out Wayne too eye, the spontaneity of Gascoigne whose brain was developed beyond the rest of humanities for a short time. No where is the balance of physical intellect and intelligence of planning given the respect it is due save for dark corners of our culture from Cheltenham celebration of craftsmanship to displays of customised cars and motor cycles. These areas are considered self involved. Private displays for the initiated.
So from somewhere within this botch pitch of ideas I need to map out some plan of research and submit my proposal to the university for judgement. Try not to slip in to the political as our makers have been so poorly treated. The tradesmen provincial left overs from a by gone age of engineering, subsumed by CNC and cad drawing. The crafts a limp off shoot of the arts.