We Spend Our Lives On A Thin

Awareness Of Your Surroundings Occurs Only When Sensory Inputs Violate Expectations. When The World Is Successfully Predicted Away, Awareness Is Not Needed Because The Brain Is Doing Its Job Well.

We Open Our Eyes And We Think We're Seeing The Whole World Out There. But What Has Become Clear—and Really Just In The Last Few Centuries—is That When You Look At The Electro-magnetic Spectrum We Are Seeing Less Than 1/10 Billionth Of The Information That's Riding On There. So We Call That Visible Light. But Everything Else Passing Through Our Bodies Is Completely Invisible To Us. Even Though We Accept The Reality That's Presented To Us, We're Really Only Seeing A Little Window Of What's Happening.

When A Male Vole Repeatedly Mates With A Female, A Hormone Called Vasopressin Is Released In His Brain. The Vasopressin Binds To Receptors In A Part Of The Brain Called The Nucleus Accumbens, And The Binding Mediates A Pleasurable Feeling That Becomes Associated With That Female. This Locks In The Monogamy, Which Is Known As Pair-bonding. If You Block This Hormone, The Pair-bonding Goes Away.

If You Measure Someone's Brain And See Very Little Activity During A Task, It Does Not Necessarily Indicate That They're Not Trying - It More Likely Signifies That They Have Worked Hard In The Past To Burn The Programs Into The Circuitry. Consciousness Is Called In During The First Phase Of Learning And Is Excluded From The Game Playing After It Is Deep In The System.

The Deep Secret Of The Brain Is That Not Only The Spinal Cord But The Entire Central Nervous System Works This Way: Internally Generated Activity Is Modulated By Sensory Input. In This View, The Difference Between Being Awake And Being Asleep Is Merely That The Data Coming In From The Eyes Anchors The Perception.