Your brain is an interesting system. It has only very limited ability to tell the literal from the imagined. As you go through your day you are bombarded with sensation that has little to differentiate it from hypnotic suggestion.

We generally regard ourselves as thinking beings. I won’t deny that we are, or are at least capable of it, but even without your consciousness or participation, your brain would keep functioning, keep doing that thing you consider to be thinking.

Everyone see the first mind to mind communication test online? It was technologically assisted of course. They had a brain-computer interface (BCI) headset, and the other person was hooked up to a carefully targeted trans-cranial magnetic stimulation device. Well, with a moments concentration, and very far away from the other person, they were able to translate the BCI signal into involuntary movement of the other persons arm. What do you think of this?

Freaky. I wouldn’t want someone else to control my movements. That’s not the end result they want. This was just a test scenario. They are not near the point of having an application for it yet.

Could this be a way to do what they did in the Avatar film? They are working toward that, but they want a machine avatar, not an organic host. I guess maybe they are fine tuning the elements of the interface so when surrogates do become available they will feel natural.

Your brain has two signals, two potentially independent messages at any given time so your body and brain do things without your intention or consent, and I am not speaking of autonomic processes, I am talking about actual thought and action. It never feels like it was anything but voluntary though. Your brain is constantly cross checking it’s information (literally cross checking across the corpus callosum), and if, say, your left hemisphere finds something it thinks it can make sense of in your right hemisphere, it will make up a reason why you had that thought or behaved that way. Even though it doesn’t have access to the entire train of ideation of decision making, it will pretend like it does.

Is this why we can dream without constantly wondering ‘How the heck…?’ Yes, the theory of right brained versus left brain personalities is actually myth. The two hemispheres possess most of the same functions. Sometimes virtually all of them are shared. There is only one thing they have been able to say consistently about the difference between them. The left hemisphere is oriented toward small details and the right hemisphere is oriented toward big picture comprehension. They have also not been able to isolate any single sense from the others. They can identify general regions in which they seem to localize, but what you think you see is strongly influenced by what you hear. What you think you taste is heavily influenced by what you saw. All across the senses this strange merger holds true.

And smell. Yes, something can smell bad but taste good, and you not experience it because it will seem to taste to you the way you expected it to.

Would you say we can trust our senses or our sense of self?

Not always.

Not to be literal, no.

It’s as they say “good enough for government work”, but these senses don’t tell us the literal truth.

Now you also have two streams of information flow. Not only information receiving but processing also. They call them the top down and the bottom up channels. They have them roughly mapped out. Your structured thinking would be the top down channel and your actual sensation would be the bottom up channel. Can you guess which is dominant?

Bottom up? Top down. Your brain will literally override any sensation it isn’t prepared or willing to process.

That would explain how we can ‘talk ourselves’ into believing anything? Yes.

Now as for the bottom up sensation channel… You know the saying the eyes don’t lie? That is untrue. They actually do and a great deal. All of your senses do. This is even without interference from your top down thinking process. Your eyes have been selectively sensitized to identify specific patterns, and any pattern that your nervous system isn’t conditioned to readily recognize tends to get filtered out. This happens even before it’s really even made it into the brain. It stops at a space just above the brain stem. What do you think of this?

It explains face blindness. Yes, and change blindness, and blind sight. In the case of blind sight, the persons eyes still work, and the brain is even sensing things from the eyes, but the region of the brain that processes and hold a conscious understanding of what the eyes are seeing, doesn’t work. So they don’t consciously see anything, but they could walk down a crowded hallway and not bump into anything, not trip or fall once. So that would underscore what I said earlier, you don’t have to consciously think for your brain to perform even complex functions.

My point for explaining all this is not to try to convince anyone that they are mindless, far from it. There is more possible to the human mind than many people ever begin to approach in their entire life time.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~