I read an article yesterday that mentioned they’re studying the effects of product labels on people’s brains using fMRI. I’ve been wondering why so many labels are changing lately and that explains it. Yes, they are trying to brain hack you that way, like the pet toy my wife bought our cat. It has been scientifically designed to get his attention and provoke a reaction, and he is really into it.

Eek… I’m the cat in the supermarket. You are, but you can be the code breaker. Just realize what your brain wants to do with what it sees and give it an alternative. Train it to broaden its range of interpretations. Like for me a cake is not a cake, it’s a really poorly designed easy chair that I refuse to sit in. Stop signs are neurons in my brain warning me that there could be pain, injury. It sounds strange but does it put me out of touch with reality? My brain is the planet, and taking a walk is just imaginative thinking where I remember to do things as I arrive at the locations I could do them at. This strange fantasy improves my memory. Science even advises it now, something like it, for both improving memory and self-control. See how it could do that? If you make an active effort to remember something, do you tend to remember it very well? In my experience, no, and people often say they tried to remember, even wrote it down, and still they forget.

So to revisit my “fanstasy”… If I see the world around me as being my brain, and associate travel with my train of thought, then arriving at a store reflexively reminds me that I needed to get eggs and margarine. Does my weird fantasy make me lose touch with reality?

Do you make these associations before you set out for the store? Oh, indeed, well before. It’s a running fantasy. I often ask myself what something would be if it were something I was imagining in my head, and the range of things it could possibly be helps me to make sense of what it is with really no “effort” as such. I just let my mind integrate whatever it is I am focusing my attention on. What harm would this do me? Would it make me crazy? If I described it to another, how would they take it?

Oh, even I see some of what you imagine as weird. Yes, and we have a good chuckle. I deliberately add humour to free up room for myself to relax in.

Now I do have preferred themes just as experimental artists will over time settle into colors, mediums and themes that they feel strongly about, my own natural inclinations do arise in this process, and knowing this stuff for what it is gives me peace. Because of how my nervous system works, images being all patchwork and overstated, continuity always being experientially disjointed, my “default” imagery is … well, I will ask you. What do you imagine it would be like?

Spatial, geographic, the locations of objects in space.

Like a collage?

Faces looking sort of like the imagery of Picasso or Escher? Or the painting known by its English title as “The Scream”? It would be fair to describe as nightmarish, maybe?

I have trained my brain to overlay perceptions I pick up from my proprioceptive sense, my sense of touch and body language. So my wife’s appearance is now soft and gentle to me, where as someone whose body language is threatening retains the nightmarish quality. Sounding out of touch with reality yet?

It makes analysis and memorization / systematization easy. People’s features all lodge in my awareness with very obvious associations, even if I don’t get what they are “supposed” to mean. I can’t read between the lines as they say, but that’s just me.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~