Whenever you wake up at four in the morning and can’t go back to sleep, you hope that you really were sleeping and the fading impression of watching the clock and tossing and turning all night was just a dream.
But, hey, life itself is a dream after all, innit? It’s either a complete hallucination, or just the dream your mind dreams of the senses your body sends it. In control, yet not really in control if Freud is to be believed.
Freud called it the subconscious. We now understand it’s just the physical configuration of neurons and what-not (6 am innit the time for an in-depth discussion of neurochem and neurophysiology) that shape what we refer to as our subconscious. Expectations and desires, filled or unfilled, shape us. Literally. We’re discoveriong, much to our surprise, that there are specific patterns in the brain for ‘dog’ and ‘left’ – much like the physical laws that shape our world are a consequence of the geometry of spacetime, my thoughts are a consequence of the physical shape of my brain on a micro, nano, or maybe even quantum scale.
Just because we see a cloud in the brain that lights up when we think ‘dog’ doesn’t mean we know what every molecule of H2O is doing. You cannot see what external forces are shaping that cloud either, other than to know it’s ‘wind.’
So much has been explained about the brain, yet so little is truly known yet. We know that the brain can regrow itself, repair itself, at least in part, say where stroke or head injury patients are concerned, but this knowledge is so new that in school I was taught that I was born with every braincell I would every have, that alcohol destroyed brain cells. But now we know this simply isn’t the case – in fact if you drink moderately you improve your chances of not getting dementia and alzheimers later in life. The real damage heavy alcohol imbibation causes? Vitamin b1 deficiency – which leads to what’s commonly known as ‘wet brain.’
However, knowing what is and what may be going on in those pounds of cholesterol in your brainsac doesn’t necessarily help you out any. Freud died impoverished while his nephew used his ideas to destroy American citizens and reduce them to a smoking heap of consumer lust, making himself obscenely wealthy as a byproduct. Just knowing that what the buddha said was true doesn’t necessarily help cope with the truths.
And hey, the buddha said that if you meet him on the path to enlightenment, slay him. After all, what else should one do when one encounters one’s own self claiming to be a several thousand year old historical figure?
The weirdest thing about the brain may be that by one interpretation of the quantum observation principle, the brain (conscious observer) is required for anything to exist at all. No one knows what this means. We’re not sure of conscious observer means the universe, or us. Maybe there isn’t any difference. Einstein claimed the universe happened instantaneously and our relativistic viewing of it makes it look like time is happening when time doesn’t exist at all.
I know one thing for sure though – I should have written hours ago – it always makes me sleepy.