Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Dream - Scott Carney
Election day is a good time to remember that we're living in a dream.
Being awake is just an extension of what happens when we dream. Since consciousness occurs in the brain, the outside world isn't a direct experience of objective reality. Everything we feel and detect passes through our peripheral nervous system as data that our brain re-assembles into a model of the world. The brain has to learn the body, but it will always be just a brain locked inside a case of fat and bone.
As we drift into the delta wave dreamscape, memories shift and untether while our body does cellular physical therapy. At rest, though, our brain is anything but. The visual cortex is as active as during wakefulness to stave off other areas trying to encroach its territory.
The release of noradrenaline is dampened to immunize stressfulness as the hippocampus cuts ties with the visual cortex, giving the fleeting feeling to what went down when we went down. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quiet so the movies that play out seem reasonable. And the pyramidal tract suppresses locomotor activity so none of the signals from the motor cortices make their way to the PNS.
The brain doesn't sense the world directly because it doesn't have any sensory nerves. During brain surgery, you can’t feel a finger poking your brain matter because the brain only experiences its surroundings through signals coming through the PNS. It takes .2 seconds for outside information to be processed and interpreted by the brain. To make up for the lag, the brain speeds up time, making predictions by over-clocking based on its best guess of what'll happen.
If a ball is tossed in our direction, we detect the light reflecting off the ball, which gets translated into electrical signals in the brain, creating a response to move our hand to the right place to catch the ball. This is why conscious awareness during waking life is just another form of dreaming. Pure consciousness happens when the brain experiences itself in dreams, where there is no lag.
As the chaos starts, take solace in the idea that real life picks up where our last dreams left off.