Our conscious mind gets stuck in computational loops, and keeps handing this information back to our default mode network as if it were an actual evaluation of what it was told. The default mode network gets confused and frightened if it ignores the so called product of experience. It can’t ignore the layer of context that the neocortex programs into its memories, so it has to believe its imagination or become completely disoriented. Ever experience this?
There is a natural reflex that attempts to address the problem, the failure of which tends to create severe neurological problems, heart irregularity and digestive issues being the most obvious if not the first occurring. The default mode network will attempt to ping the imagination, clear noise from the system, like a reflexive leg spasm when it’s otherwise gone to sleep. This normally would create a vision, for lack of a better word, a spontaneous hallucinatory or imaginative episode, which with its vivid array of sensory and emotional signals would serve to realign the neocortex, re-sensitize it to the core functions of the brain. People these days do sometimes still have this happen successfully, but it most often takes a near death experience.
What most often happens is a rigid resistance behaviour from the neocortex, the so called conscious mind. You have a bout of obsessively rigid behaviour, become very invested in the idea that you either are on top of things or need to figure out how to be. You can even become quite anxious as you experience the sense that you are missing something. You are, but insist on looking in the wrong place, in your surrogate perceptions, your learning and experience as you assume it to be.
Every part of your nervous system can actually learn, and does. They are even using this with some success in cases of severe spinal cord injury, as in no movement from the neck down. They rig them up so a machine walks their body, makes it move more or less in the normal way. In time, they begin to recover movement, conscious movement. They can even begin walking again. This isn’t accomplished by thinking or the brain as we commonly experience it. What do you think?
I ponder how once we learn to ride a bike, we never forget it. Well, this is a broad topic. Has it made any coherent sense so far?
Energy pathways get re-established. If you would like, I could do self organizing systems in the brain as a future topic.
I love self-organizing systems and have tried to write computer programs for them. Nature supposedly writes programs for them, successfully.
So neuroplasticity comes about as the neocortex and the default mode network reconcile? Do I have that right? Yes, though that is far from optimal, it is the current state of the brain as most people experience it, and is the basis for most of the drama in spiritual experience.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~