mind like dirt

Like water eroded cliffs, the forms of neurons that fire together are the forms of unevenly bunched stacks, fluted columns, and cones despite being bent, braided, and tangled. The grouping, connectivity, and sensitivity of those stacks form as a result of repeated signals.

The forms of neural nets are protrusions, hoodoos created by the steady furrowing of electrochemical rivers, the wash and drainage of sensory stimuli such that experience of the outside world and the body will gradually shape the landscape of one brain.

Where a particular stream or signal runs to its limit, that is the place or region of control or perhaps salience for the experience. Any signal reaching its limit there can be said to occur there, and that space or configuration of spaces is the form we give to experience/outside stimulus and phenomenological events.

A great many of these events originate in the body which includes other areas of the brain itself. And lest there be confusion, it must be noted that normal brain development significantly differs among individuals. Experiences which are emotionally salient to one individual may not be insensible to another, either because the frequency of exposure to such stimulus (external or internal) situates that experience in a well worn furrow, or because the areas heightened or elevated by entrenched experiences are too steep to allow breech of passage to novel experiences. This describes the very common notion of a person who has become jaded or inured to life experience, and suggests that a person who is naive or whose emotions are easily excited has a wide dispersal of signals or streams but relatively fewer peaks or notions of rarified experiences, ideals, or perhaps even abstractions. Yet, just as persistent streams may undercut a bank to unexpectedly topple a cliff, towers of experience, especially those made precipitous by a steady erosion of inattention, may tumble suddenly, disasterously, necessarily.

In the case of people with temporal lobe epilepsy, the region attaching to the amygdala which itself acts as a gateway btw cortex and the limbic/involuntary brain regions, suffers electrical storms and arrhythmic synaptic firing that flattens or breaks up the peaks and valleys of the temporal lobes. People with temporal lobe epilepsy often revive to experience overwhelming emotional, resipiscent, and religious consciousness, intense in degree but indiscriminate in their content as if wading in floods of grief or elation. Experiences such as these often remembered and reported in religious and philosophical terms, the subjects occasionally believing themselves to be omnipotent or prophetic.

From the lamentations of Job to the ecstasies of St. Theresa, the relationship of emotion to intellect is familiar to us as the territory of inspiration. In less than epileptic doses, information-rich experiences that trigger our sense of newness, rarity, significance, and identity are often fueled by emotion which sends the mind on high speed missions of illogic and intuition, the details and errors to be sorted out later, the reasons 'why-not' to be completely ignored thus activating our lion-hearted exploratory faculties, our boldest assertions and invoking our self-sacrificing nature.

In these moments the possibilities of the world outside our knowledge, outside our rehearsals of practicable knowledge dips into our consciousness, finds access to our perceptual faculties in rare sync with our emotion, visual, auditory, somatic, and (although such experiences seldom make it through long term potentiation or memory) our reflexive faculties which appears only late in childhoodhood brain development. This is why none of us possess memories prior to our eighteenth and more likely our thirty-sixth month of life, and why drug gobbling psychonauts and artists often report their nonreproducible experiences as returns to childlike states. A less ego-centric perspective might serve to describe the nonreversible chaotic development of the physical world in all its aspects as attempted in recent times through complexity theory, systems thinking, mathematical indeterminacy, fractal geometry, and in less recent times through dramatic, musical, plastic and literary arts.