Receiver

“The approach the majority of neuroscientists take to the question of how consciousness is generated, it is probably fair to say, is to ignore it.”

Kitchener PD, Hales CG. What Neuroscientists Think, and Don’t Think, About Consciousness. Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Feb 24

Neuroscientists are the first to admit that we still don’t know how the brain generates our thoughts or decisions.

Science tells us there are two types of brain cells:

• Neurons receive and transmit signals.
• Glial cells maintain the physical health of the neurons.

Neither of these cells can generate signals. The “how the brain works” examples focus on the signals received from the five physical senses or generated inside the body.

Example 1: Light hits your eyes, is translated through the eye cells into signals that neurons can receive, those signals are communicated to neurons at the back of the eye and the neurons run those signals back to the brain to process the image.

Example 2: Your muscle cells are depleted, they send a signal to the stomach, which sends a signal to the brain – send food!

But what about our higher order thoughts? Daydreams, decisions, memories, the ideas for this blog post? Science still has no idea where these signals come from.

There is zero physical evidence that the neurons and glial cells in our brain can generate those kinds of thoughts. Science says we just haven’t found it yet. But we know all the components of the brain, and none of the cells in the brain have shown the ability to generate signals. This is why one of the leading theories for how neurons generate thoughts is the “electrical brainstorm” – the idea that a lot of a neuron-firing activity generates a kind of higher order electrical current that adds up to our thoughts. Anyone who has worked with electricity, or basic message-passing, will tell you it how rare it is to increase the quality of a signal by passing it around more.

The absurdity of these physical science theories about the brain has led many neuroscientists to think outside the box. In this site we collect that thinking, and invite you to consider a new paradigm for the brain. What if we accept as true:

• The brain is designed to receive signals, not generate them.
• The signals we receive as humans on Earth come from the physical world, but also from the non-physical world.
• The experience your brain is having in this life, in this body, makes a lot more sense in the context of the larger in game we are playing out in the non-physical world.