Now things get complicated. In the representational regions of the brain, sort of a hood right over core structures of the brain, your higher brain functions are able to interfere with your default mode network though they are not able to represent their signals and information as reality in the way the default mode network does. Instead, it works in sort of a piecemeal fashion, free associating various bits of information from all over relative reality, and attempting to piece information together into useful rules or heuristics, special cases, be definition limited or focused patterns of examination.
Reality, as you experience it, is the hologram created between the function of your default mode network and your neocortex. Your neocortex performs its function by interfering with the constant stream of signals coming from the default mode network. It creates ripples or colours any sensory impression you get.
Sort of like a supervisor? Yes, that is the neocortex function. It colours your sensory impressions with its own heuristics which are emotionless. Your neocortex does not have direct access to the senses, including emotion, so it ignores it in the formation of its rules, and its interference makes little or no allowance for emotion. So your thinking mind doesn’t know or care how well you are doing, how healthy you are, or anything of the kind.
Supervisors also never care about emotion. The neocortex is deluded. It develops patterns of inertia, borrowing signals from the default mode network, and re-interpreting them as imperatives for continuing with its rules. It tries to interpret the survival imperative, something it isn’t equipped to do, and performs the only function it can, make more rules. The brain comes to believe that your life depends on your thinking, and you begin to make meta-rules about your basic rules, and then rules about your meta-rules. Does this seem to allow us to remain in touch with reality? Where is there room for objectivity?
My bladder has come to think that his life depends on his peeing, but meta-rules enable him to stay in bed all night. Actually, sleep paralysis allows you to stay in bed all night, so really the substance of your experience is interpreted for you. You don’t directly experience it, especially not when you are thinking about it.
So, the brain survives and doesn’t degenerate into a big fragmented mess because you sleep. While you sleep the physical and structural state of the brain changes, literally.
BECAUSE I sleep? Yes. The glial cells in your brain shrink down a bit, and that nice neat order their linear model of thought depends on is softened, spaced out. In fact, they now define consciousness not as neural activity, because they can’t meaningfully distinguish a difference there, but as network connectivity. How much the brain seems to be working together as a whole. And because the brain is as active during sleep as it is during wakefulness. (They would deny that still, but their theory does not back up my experience, or perhaps anyone elses.) But while you sleep your brain cleans out waste material. Any chemicals that haven’t been taken up and retained in other structures in your brain. This is a lot of the material that our synapses use to communicate with each other, yet somehow when we wake and those regions resume normal function, the networks go right back to firing as normal as if nothing changed. Strange, no?
Cleaning up the gunk to help the machine work properly. Supposedly your memory is in that space and would be getting flushed away, but actually, if this flushing doesn’t take place often enough or adequately, you develop Alzheimers, a degeneration of memory, or so they say. I say Alzheimers is just too much dust on the keyboard. I think their model of memory is wrong.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~