Control imagination

 

 

The brain receives information from the world (external and internal) through an extensive network of physical-chemical sensors. With the provided data, the ongoing interaction with reality and its impact (in our own flesh and others’) and what the wise and enlightened say about it, the brain builds a theory about the facts of the past, present and future and their relevance.

The available real-time information is partial, fragmentary, wrapped in considerable background noise. The brain has to fill gaps and solve uncertainties with imagination. It dreams, emulates reality, represents it on the blackboard of its circuits. With the individual turned off, with closed eyes and deactivated muscles, the cerebral dream has no moorings, no limits. When opening the eyes and reactivating movement, everything the brain imagined must abide by what the senses dictate.

The brain has books with missing chapters, chapters with missing pages, pages with missing paragraphs, paragraphs with missing words and words with missing letters, some of them somewhat confusing. That is the way it is and, with it, the brain has to draw conclusions about the possible-probable complete book that someone wrote. The remains can’t be deleted. The account must be respected. Controlled and constrained imagination by the demands of the sensory script.

The cerebral imaginative process is inevitable. It flows without a break. Imagining is a physiological neuronal activity as necessary as any other of the body (breathing, renal filtration, digestion...). Not always the imaginative process is connected, subjected to what the senses provide. If we are not focused intently on a task, the imaginative areas are activated and work once again reviewing one’s biography and others’, the future, the "what the others will say". It's the so-called "default mode" or daydreaming. It lets us act automatically while the mind wanders in virtual reality by the uncertain probability, by the turn to the past and the future.

Imagining the outside is relatively safe. Senses protect us from rantings. The interior is another matter. It’s a protected space in which everything must be controlled, regulated within narrow ranges of variation (homeostasis), but the brain is being bombarded by information on possible events and must be applied thoroughly to calculate probabilities of what it’s said to happen actually happening.

Cerebral imagination about the interior is no longer controlled, limited by the sensor data, but fed by the calculation of probabilities, by expectations. The brain rewrites books never written, not respecting the remains of letters, words, paragraphs and chapters but sayings, beliefs, myths, fallacies, theories ... Processing is dedicated to segregate the believable from the unbelievable, with a strong bias to take the feared for granted. The theoretical possibility and the creeds impose their beliefs. Despite that everything inside will follow a sufficient, predictable and controllable course, the brain can be driven by fear and imagines all sorts of terrifying internal events.

The out-of-control cerebral imaginative process, self-fed, can go beyond the limits and cross the threshold of consciousness and appear as reality. A slight push of activity to the imaginative areas is enough to move from being a faint and brief shadow of reality to having perceptive substance, consciousness, appearance of reality.

- My head started aching.

When pain emerges into consciousness, the brain receives the information that it has done so. This gives credibility to the imagined. It hurts, then something (the feared) is happening.

Brain and individual get into a spiral of agreement on the fact that something is going on. The belief System continues to inject more strength to the neural connections that used to build the virtual world and have crossed the limit.

- The pain is increasing ... It’s unbearable.

Something internal must be happening. Something harmful has crept inside. There’s nausea to eliminate it.

- I'm going to vomit.

The individual must be turned off but kept awake, alert, available, with the senses hypersensitive to any external stimulus. With no social interaction.

- I’m going to my room. Don’t talk to me, don’t turn on any lights... I have a migraine.

Control imagination. Be aware of its existence. Control the expectations and beliefs, the calculation of probabilities, its schooling.

Nothing is going on in the head. They are imaginations of the brain. That's why it hurts so badly, with no limit.