Introduction

So here we are. You are reading this, I have written this. These occurrences were not at the same time, yet they connect two things. My mind to your mind. Yet, besides your ability to cognitively (by thought process) distinguish characters, words, language and meaning, you will likely also have your emotional luggage stirring up while reading this. Especially the following. But where does neorology and cognitive abilities meet, divert and moved from one to another?

Where animal and mind meet

Ever watched one of those movies, where they had a human person make a connection with an animal? Think Lassie, White Fang, Life of Pi, etc.

How did you watch such story? Did you think it was fiction? Well, likely you did, as of course movies and books are written from the human mind, and as such are always fiction, even recollections of real life events, they are never fully objective representations.

So, lets get back to the story of man and animal. Have you ever looked at such an event, where for instance a person was wounded in the wilderness and the ‘animal’ was suddenly close to their side, comforting them?

Did you ever consider, why this is? Do you think that a dog, wolf, or tiger, thinks: Look, this meat bag looks delicious and I haven’t seen a chicken for a decade, but I will lay with it, because it looks like he has a cellphone, or atleast some money to buy me a McBurger.

Why would it do that? What animal would consider human concepts as its own? How did we come to these concepts?

I hope you will agree with me, that to understand the ‘motives’ of an animal, you will have to investigate to what it’s ‘reference’ is. An animal doesn’t have any words or abstract conceptualization. What does it have? Well, for one it has emotions.

It is very hard for humans to ‘imagine’ how an animal, even one that is so close to us as an Chimpansee or other primate, behaves, without the appearance of a mind.

Ever been angry? Ever been so so…FF’ing mad that you could hit someone? No? Ever been so heartbroken that it physically hurt? That you couldn’t get a straight word out of your mouth, you couldn’t think a straight line of thought? No….jees, though crowd…ever been so scared that the first reaction you had was to jump back? Yes? Aw…finally. Good. Well, I agree, likely you have had all of the three, but now I guess everyone has some reference to connect to.

These things: Anger, hurt (not only pain), fear, etc, are emotions. They are the place where things go when minds stop working, and they are the thing that makes minds stop working. Why is that? Because of the way it creates the mind just the same.

The mind is considered to be a feedback system between the prefrontal cortex and the Claustrum (apologies for the technical terms if they are new to you). How did this come to be?

Well, in other posts I have already explained how our ancestral primate forefathers/mothers were surviving by evading predators. Yes, before several thousands years ago, humans weren’t the primary force on Earth (apologies for the spoiler if you hadn’t seen the episode yet).

Like most mammals, primates had to survive in a landscape that was warming up again after the last ice age

Recurring patterns

Deja vu (as far as I have been able to investigate and incorporate existing research) is the moment the mind recognizes a pattern that has been (at some prior time) ‘considered’. This means that the brain has a response structure for it and at the moment of deja vu, it fills in the blanks. That is why the consciousness feels everything that transpires is predicted. But this only goes for the very basic response to stimulus. 

Survival patterns

Humans are the result of evolution over a long line of organisms that were (for a long time) not the top of the food chain. Our brains is the evolved version of the brain of other primates. However, our line has had the luxury to gain so much overhead in responses, that we could counter possible threats, before they occurred. This means that our system has space and basal response blueprints (instincts) embedded that are not used anymore. These options made us, as species become self aware. The same options caused us to become ‘religious’ (seeking a parent outside, or generally called animism), plan extensive, become verbal in more complex ways and sometimes have been hotwired in the complex structure of neurons.

Reaction Chain

Our brain is behaving primarily to respond to threats. We don’t have those in all levels of society anymore. There are levels where most of these parts of the brain are used for more cognitive options. The structures in which the brain is wired is inherited to extend. The decisions are caused by impulses coming in initially. When we come to a moment of deja vu, some arbitrary part of such a decision tree, is activated and the brain shoots hormones and other neurotoxins into the bloodstream to activate defenses of the organism. Such gives the organism a hastened response (heightened awareness) and the moment the brain sees something. The organism has the idea it has already transpired. We as humans are aware of direction of time and know that we can’t act what has already transpired, so our consciousness tries to make the event fit and you get the ‘idea’ that it was a repetition of an earlier event (but as we KNOW we haven’t been in that specific situation, we tell ourselves it must have been a dream).

Ever wondered, how the brain learns to contain information? Ever wondered how we, as humans ‘learn’ empathy and use emotions to respond to our environment? And what does fear has to do with that?

Nothing to fear but fear itself?

I will start of with an eye opener: Fear is the first emotion. ALL, without any exception, organisms are embodied with fear. Why? because it is the most basic and primal survival instinct.

Simple deduction: What is your initial choice between life or death? I am guessing over 60% of the people who read this question ‘well, life of course’. There will be about 30% saying: ‘In what situation?’ and approximately 10% or less will say: ‘I guess it would be death’. Why? Because death means end of existence of you. And why would you not want that? Because that is how our brain works. And from that our mind.

Mortal coil

Before animals were able to see, everything it touched could be instant death, or slow death. Imagine you are a single cell. You have no arms, no legs, no eyes, no nose, no ears, no brain. You consume, but not much else. When you have gathered enough proteins and building blocks, your RNA/DNA starts to split, diffusing the amount of ‘weight’. But if something would touch your cell, or start to lower the fluid-level inside the cell, you would start moving away from the place where that started to happen. You would try to find a safe place. You would go heads on. How would you do that? ‘Bore me to death?’

Is fear a good thing, or a bad thing?

Well, lets see, for a single cell organism it is the only thing that will indicate to the core that it is in danger of perishing. What about a larger organism? A snail, or an worm?

Trigger happy

Even as humans are more complex, the response mechanism is still the same. A trigger when something touches the outer skin, which takes away either density or causes dehydration of the cells (salt on the finger of a human will cause the fluids from a snail to compensate for the solution difference within a cell and outside. Also a snail is not used to warmth, so it will ‘shy away’ from it.) In all, the initial response from such organism is still the same. It will ‘fear’ the change in environment. All organisms after come from the same genepool. Some changed their response to how fear influences the internal system. Predators, for instance will get forced by their hormone levels and neuron response to attack, instead of retreat, unless the situation contains signals or causes enough pain (like the dehydration of a single cell) to make it choose the safer route for survival.

So, though the quote in Figure 2, comes from a seemingly very intelligent person, it is not entirely right. What we should fear, is losing touch with our ability to respond to signals that are cause for fear to survive and to fear too much.

Fear of history

Human history has shown what happens when you are cognitively enabled (self aware and can ‘think’) and still have a very strong sense of fear response for survival. It means that in a changing world, with less dangers, more false positives will occur. False positives are ‘detections of danger’, which aren’t really dangers. This is what we now call ‘superstition’. This caused the early man to see dangers in wind waving the grass, or a bush. And as we know, as a child with limited cognitive understanding of processes of nature, we had little way to see anything more in those false positives, than projections of our fears. Of ourselves.

Prey and Predator

Eventually, in different parts of the world, where humans traveled and settled, different social growth and different cultures caused different ways to fill the false positives. The oldest agreed within the community to different ‘animism’ to cause the wind to howl, or the sun to shine or thunder to strike. Eventually humanity grew and and its freedom from fear of predators in nature, gave it the possibility to explore different ways to survive. But all these new emotions and ways to interact with our surrounding, within our groups, with problems, with opportunities, were still based on the very first: fear. Love for others, is often showing its real face: fear of losing. Fear of losing offspring, fear of losing protection, fear of losing the posibility to be empowered by sheer number (social group dynamics). Anger, love, sorrow, all come from fear.

But as Lucas Jonkman said (Figure 3): Fight your fears and you’ll be in battle forever (fears don’t go away, you can’t kill fear, it is a symptom. Most often for the unknown), face your fears and be free forever (accept that your body and mind responds to something with fear, and find out what that thing is, is it really to be feared?)

When Logically inclined, Honesty frames the view of Reason

Dream a little dream

The body is an organism that is build to survive. Thus, input and internal processes are meant to have it live and keep living. We have chemical influences to the brain, making sure that the neural responses stay in favor to survival, but of course we have an abundance of neural input from visual, auditive and haptic stimuli. However, most organisms (and humans are no exceptions to this rule) have instinctive behavior to these stimuli. The crux is, that the more complex the neural network, the more diversion there is in processing the incoming signals.

Fear the dream

Emotions are the level where instincts can be ‘conflicting’. Animals have this, where they are ‘instinctive’ to act one way and eventually are forced by either other instinct or stimuli to divert from this. That is why dogs also are sometimes noticed to be vividly dream. Humans have not only instincts and emotions on top of them. They are even self-aware of their choices from both these two layers. The stimuli are electrical current changes in the nervous system. Neurons are the storage/processing containers of these electrical charges and respond to specific ‘levels’ of charges. When something is processed repeatedly, the neurons/nervous system will ‘etch’ it. It becomes an instinctive behavior. Before it becomes something like that, it requires quite some work. The layer above it, is the emotional processing. We store most memories by emotional hooks (do understand that these are also connected to strongest stimuli during these emotions: smell, sound, visuals).

These emotional hooks decide how we will respond to these kinds of stimuli the next time. But before such emotional hook is stored, it has to have a unique flow in the nervous system (If you know what an EEPROM is, you might get some analogy here).

The Alpha and the Omega

When we receive new stimuli, that cause (and they always do, don’t kid yourself) emotional feedback on the nervous system, it doesn’t mean the brain will automatically process it. Often we are cognitively so busy that the default electrical charge on the brain the ‘signals’ to be bouncing through the matter, without having any effect. But you can understand (I guess) that this just adds to the already existing charge in the brain (consider it the Beta, Alpha and Gamma wavelengths, where the level of stimuli adds to the lowest, causing it to move to a higher frequency). When we go to sleep, the average charge is lowered, because we are not actively influencing our own awareness anymore. Visual cortex is ‘shutdown’, Auditive cortex is shutdown. etc. So, the brains ‘instinctive’ and ‘emotional’ responses are shutdown. But what is left is the residual charges that bounce through the brain. This residual charge will fire parts of the cortexes, that will result in dreams. The same is also why especially as a child, our dreams seems so random and often have no limit in weirdness. Because as a child we are learning about our instincts, emotions and cognitive abilities (often most apparent in our social behavior), we dream more during our younger years. Our brain needs more answers to ‘unknown’ emotions etc.

Dream Ja Vu

When we sleep enough (and dream enough in REM level), our brain has time to process all the ‘overhead’ charge. It has time to settle in the sediments and etch or sink down the new behavioral patterns.

When we don’t sleep enough, we tend to feel restless, because these additional charges cause a discrepancy in our instinct/emotional and cognitive responses. Consider the following:

• We have experienced something.
• We have responded, but are unaware if this is the right way.
• We sleep but the emotional charge is not dispersed into the brain.
  
  We experience the same situation, but we are aware we do, but we are also aware we ‘haven’t made up our minds yet’ on how our response will be.

This is a short example on the neuro-biological behavior.

Why does THC influence dreaming?

Because the neurological impulses are held back (basically THC causes the nerve endings to slowdown and stimuli to not reach the brain the same moment for instance visual input does. Unless the intake also influences the visual cortex, in which case, the brain will fill in random blanks with very weird stuff), and therefore there is a disassociation between the different signals (besides the signals being weakened. When you finally stop the THC feed, the nerve endings will discharge and even the slightly lower levels of charge will hit the brains neurons full on, with the extra. Consider it a hose, where you left water in it, because the tap was not closed correctly, and you open the tap and the hose will burst water (including that which was already there).

Basically, neuron charge is like water. Yes.