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awareness Culture Mythology / Religion

Religion is binding

Ever wondered why you didn’t speak up to your dad again after he gave you a smack on the bum?
Because you knew the possible implications.

This is the same way that nature works. If we look at older species or contemporary family species (Monkeys, other mammals), we see the same behavior in ‘discipline’ of the young.

Define the bind

First off, what is religion? Well, according to Wikipedia it means:
a cultural system of behaviors and practices, world views, sacred texts, holy places, ethics, and societal organisation that relate humanity to what an anthropologist has called “an order of existence“.[1]

Culture club

What does that mean, a cultural system, how does it evolve?
Culture is “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.” (Cambridge University)
As a defining aspect of what it means to be human, culture is a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. (Wikipedia)

Since social groups evolved in nature, or groups in general in living entities (plants or animals alike), culture has been a general concept of how certain species create a temporary statis or coherency in way of living within the group. This happens within bacterial cultures, insect cultures and all other species that live in groups.

Smart enough or too dumb?

Religion only exists in species that are able to observe causality (but fail to recognize the actual causality due to missing data and technology to determine). This requires some brain functions that humans have, but are lacking in other species (‘key areas of the brain for intelligence were the left prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead), left temporal cortex (behind the ear) and left parietal cortex (at the top rear of the head) and in the areas that connect them.’ – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2128457/New-brain-study-maps-parts-brain-make-intelligent.html)

Now, how does a smack to the bum relate to religion?

We as children are learning to observe causality. We also learn discipline from our parents in very diverse ways. Some parents address the cognitive abilities of a child directly, some use physical signals, others use both. We learn language, trust, dependency and after that how to conceptualize causal connections. When these are not taught properly, we will fail to recognize connections later in life. Where we can’t recognize connections, we will assume. Often we are a following kind and assume what another person tells you the causality is, you can accept. This is partially laziness, but often depending on the way you were raised: Don’t speak up against authority, accept without questioning. This is exactly what religion is: Accept without questioning. IF you question, you are only allowed to question within the boundaries of what supports the religious base.

Inner circle

Within any religion, most often there is a ‘teaching’ that is comprised of three things: Text, music and ‘guidance’. The text contains the following structure: A story representing why the religion exists and a promise to anyone who will follow the rules of this religion. The text most often will show extensive ways how misinterpretted causality shows that what ever happens to the follower of this religion will be for the better. The second part in the text is based on the way evolution has taught every species to survive: Fear. By getting the individual to consider the intangible danger to be connected to acting against the rules for the promise, the individual itself will cause a ‘causality-loop’ between emotion and rationale.

Example

You will go to a community place, or you will not benefit from the promise (good fortune, eternal life, etc). Being a social species, an individual human will want to be surrounded by others. If one has many friends outside of the religion, it is unlikely this ‘disguised threat’ will influence the specific individual. What happens often? An individual of interest is being approached and ‘loosened’ from its friends and family. ‘If you stay with your friends, you will never learn the real secret’, ‘They don’t understand you, but it is written that those…etc’ (especially in time of emotional crisis, for instance loss of a dear one, this is used).

You choose from the options you are given

But, you will say, there are many who step into the religion on their own choice. Yes, correct, however the same threat is evident. However it is not by influence of ‘guidance’, but simply the lack of friends and family that will cause people to turn to the community of faith. Rationalization happens afterwards. Because religion is build on promise (curiousity and longing), and enforced by punishment (superstition and fear), every iteration of the motions, causes a person to make a habit of the motion.

A different kind of soul music

How about the music? The human brain is only half the work. We are still mere biological species that have evolved from ancestral species. All species respond based on instinct/reflex/emotion. Music is the creative way that religion uses to cause the neuro emotional response to accept cognitive concepts easier. Some sound combinations are simply and without scrupules hijack the instinctive responses to them to influence the emotional parts of the individual to accept binding to these emotional responses of illogical concepts. Of course, it all starts with ‘guidance’ of the religion. These people are (sometimes ignorant themselves, but more often very well in the know of how irrational the concept is.  They will have a very difficult task to influence the individual to accept the parts that are becoming less and less acceptable due to change of time and culture.

Concluding

To be short about it, as the smack on the bum is meant for the child’s pain receptors and fear instincts for pain to cause it to not take certain actions again, the religious promise of pain (bad luck in this life or afterlife) or pleasure (good fortune in this life or afterlife) causes an individual raised with these distinct disciplining actions, to follow even on same fear regarding things they don’t understand.

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awareness Culture Redevelop Society

Human architecture – inventing the ‘wheel’

So, using humanity as a principle, how does that work?

Well, as a person who likes to ‘normalise’ things as much as possible, I see things as entities.

What is the prime entity for care?

You can imagine that from my point of view, this is a human being (or living being if you will, taking the level above just humans). A human is the driving force, the central measurement, main subject and actual linchpin concerning his/her health. A human is even a part of the health of humanity. Like a cell is a part of the health of a body. As is the behavior of a human of influence of the health of his environment. But more important, every human, whether they are living their lives, or living to improve other people’s lives, are looking from themselves as a perspective.

How would that be visualised?

Well, for one: The center element is the life of a person (lets keep it to human health care for now). A person, with history, future, current state, body, mind and environment.

Great, so now you have the base of a human life…so…er…how are we going to incorporate that in a system for health care?

Imagine someone goes to a physician or hospital.

In the above image, you can also identify the ‘group’ identity. An individual hardly ever lives entirely alone (or should never). Such group has the same characteristics as a accumulation of the individuals it is comprised of.

A health institute doesn’t really deals with the individual as such, but rather a part of its sympthoms. Institute is a very broad item here: Local doctor, physician, physiotherapist, psychiater, psychologist, pathologist, etc. Especially if you incorporate the connection the group the individual is part of. Imagine pandemics, epidemics, forensics, etc.

Why would you want to change the setup? Can’t you just adjust the existing systems?

I honestly don’t know whether they can, but I think it is important to have an architecture worked out that takes the honest and right approach towards the ownership and entity base of information.

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Art Writing

Five ways to improve your writing

Without the long intro that will get you yawning, here is a list that definitely will help you improve your writing skills:

Write EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Don’t excuse yourself. Write a minimum of one word, but don’t write nothing with the intend of the writing itself. So, no signing a letter doesn’t count. But ONE word can be a poem, a reference to more. It will help you tomorrow if you write even one day today. What is the effect? If you don’t have too much time, you are able to improve your ‘thought condencing’ abilities. Writing down only a couple of words will almost always fuel the brain to write more. The brain must be given little nudges of cookies to continue. When you sit in the train, bus or waiting on someone, write what you see, what you think or what you hear. It will start you thinking and tomorrow you do this again and suddenly after a couple of days, it becomes natural to write down just a little, then more.

Don’t limit yourself to types of writing.

Especially when you are a beginning writer, you will think you have it all laid out, you don’t need to improve your writing: This is what I want to write about…..but that is not the way your writing will develop itself. The creativity or consistency in writing comes from understanding when to write what in what form. Practice everything. Writing is painting with words. You can be an architect, you can be Rembrandt, you can be Picasso. They all had their style and they all took years to perfect it. Don’t think you should write only poems if you like that. Also write a story, if you have trouble doing so, extend your poem in the amount of lines (Check Shakespeare if you don’t know how), or write the poem and use it to write how you envision the subject of the poem lived or moved.

Rewrite!

Whatever you write at first, is not good. It is bad. You can always improve your writing. Why? Because it is the initial conversion of mind to word. It is always lacking, it is always a bit too much here, too little there. Look at your story, poem or anything after a week and write it again, from that initial writing but what you would change. Don’t hold back, the digital age gives you the possibility to keep every single version.

Write together.

As they say in some of the scenes RP/Roleplay. When you start writing, you often write from one perspective. That is great. A diary kind of story can do marvels, but often after several pages a reader might fall into a feeling that all characters are thinking the same thing….because you wrote it from one mind and will at some point write the story through all characters but from your mind only. Doing a roleplay will help you see things from others perspective. A roleplay generally goes like:
– writer one: Joe walks into a room, gun holstered. At the far end of the damp place he notices the other guy.
– writer two: Greg looks up from his drink. The light falling in from the doorway shows only a silhouette. Was it him? The hairs on the back of his neck rose up. Sweat started to form on his forhead.
…etc.

Let go!

When you finished a story, a poem, even a short or a piece of a scene that you don’t feel will be needed anymore. Put it out there for people to see. Show them what you do. Ask them to respond to it. Let people provide feedback. It will help you. Even the ‘Wow great’, ‘You call that writing?’

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Art awareness Writing

Writing is not just a word

Writing words isn’t just making the characters connect, or making a word of a string of characters. Writing means a process of changing non-tanglible ideas into a concept, into a protocol of signs that are understood by another.

A simple word can have a simple meaning, but a simple word can also have a complex meaning. Worse even, a simple word can even be a complexity in itself and the connected emotions. It can build a world or just a short flick of the eye.

Consider the word Word. It is a concept of everything you have read right here. It is simply the defining combination of symbols that should translate in someone’s mind into: A concept of combined characters that has meaning in or outside a context. Here you see, that the simple word Word, already gave more words as an explanation of itself. And even now, as you read this, you are even wondering whether I am right about it. Whether your definition is the same, or more extensive. Perhaps your mind lingered from this text and you started to think of a poem about the word Word, or you have suddenly seen recollections of texts that resembled this. So much happens when you read a word. So much a word can mean.

So when you write, you aren’t just writing words, you are writing ideas.

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awareness Culture Philosophy Social Media

Discrimination and the genepool

Thin layers of civilization

These are interesting times. Because the US is in this scenario that much of Europe was in 30-40 years ago, we seek to find ourselves in this. Where do we, as individual, as group, as society, as culture, as humanity, where do we stand.

Of Apples and oranges

The thing is, discrimination is human, but it is also instinctive and animal. And yes, no matter how you look at it, humans are yet another species of animals.

As you might have read elsewhere on https://www.metawareness.com, the first emotion, is fear. Fear thrives survival. Without fear, most don’t survive, unless very lucky. Fear causes use to find safe spots, safe havens. As humans, like all other great apes and many mammals, we are a social species. We are born in the safety (most of us) of a community. Our parents initially keep us safe (most of the time), but the fact that they themselves live within the protection of a community, within the rules of a society, keeps us double safe. This causes two things:

  • We are aware that we need to protect our offspring
  • we are aware that we need to protect our community

Danger, Robinson

To make sure that we don’t get into danger, we make sure that the ones in our community, are the ones we know and the ones we know are the ones that think like us. We can identify them, because we can identify ‘as’ them. We immediately recognize (instinctive) their meaning, if they look a certain way.

Them and us

The further an individual differs from our ‘group-general-markup‘, we tend to be more cautious. This is all instinctive, because different means danger. Fear will make sure that you don’t think on it too much. Step back from danger, or die.

Choose to change

Humanity has evolved, but what we don’t accept as part of our genome, we can’t decide to change. Religion and general ‘leaders’ demand that people behave a certain way. The more power a person has, the more money they have. Riches are to be lost and losing creates fear. The more power one has, the more fear one has to lose what is connected.

Everyone is unique, so different

Each individual is different. There is no two humans on earth exactly alike, not even twins. But why do we tend to ‘discriminate’ and fall for the ‘etnicism’ (or called ‘racism’?
Because of our marvelous intelligence. True, the more intelligent a person is, the less he/she will ideally be concerned about arbitrary things like skin color or bone structure, but it is our intelligence that caused use to go from simply protective, to discriminating and do etnic profiling on the go.

It’s just an idea

Here is why: Conceptualisation. When I tell you I went to the store. You don’t ask me what the store looked like. You know the function of what ‘store’ represents and mostly you will ask: ‘What did you get?’. The same happens when I tell you I bought a new car. You will not ask me what kind of wipers it has, you will ask me the max speed, the color, the more obvious traits that don’t require extensive knowledge of either brands or technicalities of cars.

How come we can’t differentiate (most of us) between one Asian person and another, just like you most likely can’t tell one from the other from any etnically different human from your own group?

Clean up, stand up

To keep our brains tidy, we group things: Balls (that can be big, small, blue, red, football, soccer, tennis, etc balls), we don’t think about the type of balls that can fall into the hegemony, we make it a homogenous group of balls in our mind. Same with Houses, with Money, with Feelings, with Cupboards, with Math equations. We group, to preserve space in our brain, and to (IF the need arises) do differentiation later on when it is important. We do the same with people: Brothers, Sisters, Siblings, Fathers, Mothers, Parents, Spouse, In-Laws, Daughers, Sons, Nephews, Nices. Nowhere while reading those words did you pick one specific image and did you think: Oh, this is about this person. Except possibly with Fathers and Mothers.

Doesn’t differ to me

We discriminate because it makes life easier. Circles are circles, squares are squares. However, there are people who are very much aware of this, and they will use it to advantage. Fear is the strongest emotion and therefore the easiest to invoke. ‘Divide and conquer’ is how wars are won. It is how communities are controlled. You know who you CAN trust, so all one has to do, is make sure you don’t trust people that fall outside that scope and you are set for control.

He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

When you see your own kin, you put them in a box, when you see non-relatives, you put them in another box. When you see people that are ‘images of self’, you will allow them in your box. When they differ on visual, auditive or other traits, you will first put them in another box. Why? Safety, quarantaine, ease of mind, conceptualisation for later.

Now is the time, that people can become honest. Move to a new neighborhood and unpack all the boxes. Go to ‘Earth’ and meet your new neighbours. Unpack and bring a cake. If you don’t like your neighbours, dislike them for their actions. That is something that represents their individuality. Not their skin, not their feet, not their smell.

They only divide you, if you let them

We are all human. We should shed the bad concepts like religions. Those are still causing great grief. We should fill our problems with solutions from all trades of life. So everyone can live the same kind of life and enjoy their life on Earth for how long it lasts.

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awareness Neurology Psychology Science

Evolution of the brain: Short Thought 2

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).

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awareness Neurology Science

Evolution of the Brain: a short thought 1


The brain is evolved from millions of years of neural synapses integrating (as said by others much like the processors we create for computers etc), when life was but worms, there were still only a few strands of nerves. A small lump in the ‘seat’. What was the ‘brain’ set to? For food. The worm is one long intestine and basically we are a intestine with vertibrates. Our brain has been evolving ever since life became multiple celltypes with specific functions. When complex animals arose, the brain was already a complex neural box. It was so intrinsic that even mice have basically selfawareness options (who says they aren’t?). But the brain still has the same function over all those millions of years: Making sure the body gains food and survives dangers in doing so. We as mammals have been on lower steps of the food chain for thousands of thousands of years. (imagine that. A life span of about 40 years and so generations every 15 to 20 years….imagine how many ancestral generations have gone before THAT point.). Then the weather changed, climate changed and we got less predators to take care of, but we still needed to find food. We ate what was in trees, bushes, die with failure, live with good food. Those choices are all embedded in the blueprint of our brain. They are the unlearned reflexes. Many of them come to pass each generation, without being triggered. And from that moment on, the brain needs less for certain type of reflexes. Eventually we are in our current era and we are the top of the food chain and we changed the ability of running from danger, to preparing for danger for many hundreds of thousands of years. Now, we don’t have to run anymore, but some of the reflexes don’t die that easily (hence religion and other fear aspects, causing diversion and anger).

We are in a time where the brain evolves on. It might become smaller, but not ‘lighter’ per se. The density changes, but also its functions ‘narrow’. Who of us still know from instinct what to do with babies? With a wild animal attacking us? With how the weather predicts the effects on crops tomorrow? We are all losing parts that are ‘irrelevant’ to the specific ‘bloodline’. Those in cities don’t know about carpenting or farming, while in the suburb there will be those that still know. Life still requires it from them to sometimes build something themselves. The same happens for many things, not just ‘job’ related, but also personal. In the country, people are welcoming to new (new blood, information, etc), but also cautious of differences (dangerous behavior, different unknown bloodlines and physical attributes). In the suburbs where all come together, it is a mediate, while in the city it is the same as in the country, but reversed. They are less welcoming (busy lives, close quarters and thus more shortlived interhuman contacts), but also less cautious. In all, the brain grows smaller, but not around the globe. There are likely locations where it grows. 

It will also still depend on the activities within the bloodlines, whether there is either higher density or loss of reflex/cognitive abilities.

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awareness Neurology Psychology Science

Body works: Fear, the first emotion

Figure 1

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?’

Figure 2

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.

Figure 3

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

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awareness Neurology Psychology Science

Brain works: Dreams 2

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.

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awareness Neurology Science

Brain works: Dreams 3

Because not only humans dream, but other animals, too, we know that dreams are not based on cognitive (thoughts) impulses, but rather emotional ones. This has to do with the fact that our brain works in three layers.

Instinctive behavior

Either by genetic blueprint or attained through learning, any organism will adapt to recurring patterns to prevent it from danger. The genetic part is of course hard to change, but the ‘tree’ of choices (I call it the decision tree), the response mechanism of most mammals is automated. Meaning, if something gives an impulse, especially repeatedly, that causes a positive or negative reaction to the nervous system, it will become an instinctive behavior to move to or from such stimulus.

Emotional behavior

Mammals and especially primates (being very recognizable to us). They differentiate in group sizes and survival mechanisms because of that. They have empathic abilities to survive in social groups. But they also see emotional behavior in strong generational cohesion. Where offspring is heavily dependent on parents, we see the equivalent of our own emotions within such ‘family’. These emotional behaviors have different reasons.

  1. They cause automatic bonding, dependency.
  2. They cause mimicking of behavior (we have seen this behavior between species even, remember the stories of Tarzan, or Romulus and Remus?).
  3. They set a path for pattern recognition within the nervous system.

Certain key values which change with each generation to ensure possible survival. The emotional layer, can be seen as a ‘neural’ filter level.

Cognitive behavior

With awareness comes the growth to conceptualization in communication. Because we are instinctive, emotional beings, but also self aware and sometimes differ in meaning of emotion, we need a way to explain when an emotional behavior is not meant as a threat, etc. You could call it a protocol equivocation behavior. These concepts are starting with leveling of emotional responses between the self and others (independent of species), but evolve through a process of emotional impulses to stimuli and responses within relations and our interactions with the world around us into cognitive structures of words, representations and a general worldview.

Self-awareness

We as humans are in possession of all three layers. When we are young (between age of 3 and 9) we run through many changes in emotional responses. We are first heavily bombarded with positive responses to new abilities we show to parents. At the same time on increasing occasions during that time we are shown that we are also growing within boundaries of the use of such abilities. The brain will process these responses into the emotional layer. That layer starts quite blank and if repeated and found with consistency, will filter into the instinctive layer. If we find ourselves with a conflicting response, it can cause emotional dissonance (not cognitive). When the brain ‘shuts down’ at night, the reflux/feedback of these neural charges will cause the brain to fire memory or general pathways that are perceived as dreams. Because emotional ‘challenges’ are becoming rarer as we grow older (They are more frequent during more active development stages like adolescence), we tend to dream less obvious the older we get.

Keep your dream alive

In general dreams are a process of the nervous system to make emotional conflicts of the day, be adapted into the instinctive layer, so we don’t have to cognitively or emotional deal with them again.

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