Sleepwalking in Reverse
August 16. Do you hear this sweet song? It’s the sound of Friday. No better day to grab a coffee and get smarter together.
Do you sleepwalk? I do not anymore. There were a few incidents when I was a tween and did boring stuff like tidying up things. But some people get up to quite spectacular stuff which might include driving a car. And isn’t it curious?
People who sleepwalk look like they are awake. And the same is true for their brain. During sleepwalking the motor cortex, which controls movement, the visual cortex, which processes visual information, and the parts of the brain that coordinate behavior like balance and speech can all become active and direct energies. And the result are the most complex activities like walking on two legs. That alone is quite a feat as it requires the precise coordination of muscles throughout our body as well as the integration of visual information, information about the position of several joints, balance and the body chemistry.
What makes it even more astounding to realize that one region of the brain that doesn’t wake up is the prefrontal cortex. This brain region is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals. This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language. Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes).
And this part is just not active, proving that the other areas of the brain can mostly work independent of it.
Now, when we look once more at the list of things the prefrontal cortex is responsible for it screams world generation process in general and the shaping of the self for the next external facing goal in particular. That everything else can mostly work independent of it proves that it’s really just a tool that the cell collective has developed to achieve their twin goals of lowest energy state and equilibrium with the surroundings better. But it’s no essential to it. The cell collective could survive without it and move around. As long as it is capable of moving around, it will run into other energy patterns to interact with them, exchange information and create patterns that are closer to its goals, the goals of all material things in the universe. What the cell collective would not be as well capable of, is not as well capable of during sleepwalking, is selecting from the available patterns those that promise the most fruitful interactions.
And here again the question is, fruitful for whom? And the answer here is not the self, since the payoff is sought even when the self is not involved. So, when we focus our activity towards goals that derive from stories our minds made up, like money and power, we look for the wrong thing. Because the answer is that ultimately the interactions must be fruitful for the material things that make up our bodies, they must take them closer to their goal. And that’s all about energies and exploring to engage and mingle in the real world. Otherwise, you spend all your life sleepwalking in reverse.
Use the tool that the mind is, correctly. Explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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