Category Archives: 5- SCIENCE THEORIES

WHY DO WE DREAM? ELECTRICAL REBALANCE OF THE BRAIN?

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Standing on the corner in a quiet subdivision a blue Chevrolet from the mid 1960’s passes by.  I try to move my feet and explore my surroundings but I can’t,  I’m not really there.  I am having what is called a “Lucid Dream” where I know I am dreaming while still within the dream.

Back, during a period of my life when I worked night shift and would get home in the morning with just an hour of spare time before I had to go out again is when it happened most.  I would lye on the bed, on top of the covers, with my cloths on.  With diffuse sunlight illuminating the room and knowing I only had just an hour to sleep, I would frequently have a lucid dream.  On rare occasion I would be lucid before the dream started.  When this happened I would see a series of images from my memory and thoughts appearing like flash cards, my brain would pick out one or more that seem to stand out and that would become the subject of the dream.  Like a spectator, I never seemed to have control of anything while in the dream except the ability to wake myself up and know that I was dreaming.

Could dreams be an electrical rebalancing of the brain?

Science has shown that our brains work by electrical pulses between neurons.  If we apply what we know about how electricity works outside our body, as we use our brain it should cause a build up of positively charged areas.  Perhaps one of the reasons for sleep is to rebalance these electrical charges.  As the neurons rebalance these electrical movements could trigger flash card type images during sleep.  As the images flash, a still active part of the brain unaware we are sleeping treats them as reality and try’s to make sense of them.  It is this process that seems to start the dream.

In the diagram of the brain below the green dots represent negatively charged areas and the a red dots show positive charged areas resulting from electrical neuron activity at the end of a busy day.

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After a good nights sleep the brain becomes electrically balanced again. As the red dots representing positively charged areas move back to an equilibrium position through the night (as shown in the diagram below) they trigger images that become the basis of dreams.

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Expanding on this theory it could explain other things such as how after hours of trying to solve a particular problem its sometimes better and easier to figure out if we leave it until morning.  Hours of neurons firing in the same area of the brain could build up such a charge that it makes the thought process more difficult and less effective.  If the brain does rebalance these charges during sleep they should take a path of least resistance to equalize that might not always be the path they took to get there.   This would sometimes cause us to dream about what happened though the day and at times trigger an old or unrelated memory in between charged areas.

Whether necessary for some biological function or just random firing of neurons dreams continue to be an unsolved mystery.

Dave Lister

listerlogic.com

RECIPE FOR CREATIVE THOUGHT

RECIPE FOR CREATIVE THOUGHT

Another long busy week of physical and mental stress has come to an end.  I grab a beer and head to the front porch to just sit and relax before dinner.  The bagel I had for lunch is the only thing I’ve had time to eat since breakfast so I soon start feeling the effects of the alcohol.   Feeling quite relaxed, I grab another beer from the fridge and it begins.

As I become more and more relaxed the view from the porch turns to a sort of visual “white noise” and I end up deep in thought.  I start thinking about things in a whole new way, a more creative way.  I can figure out new innovative solutions to problems I had at work and in life that I have never thought of before.  Don’t get me wrong, I seem to have no end of creative thoughts all the time but this is different, it seems to allow the brain to have more abstract thoughts and not use conventional neuron paths.

Time after time I have been  able to duplicate this state of mind as long as the following conditions are present:

  • a long period (at least 5 days) of mental and physical stress that has suddenly ended and has been fully resolved
  • an empty stomach, if I have a full stomach I don’t feel the alcohol and it doesn’t work if I drink more.
  • by myself
  • some sort of visual “white noise”
  • 1-3 alcoholic drinks, any more and it doesn’t work

I’m not sure why this happens.  Could the long period of physical and mental stress “rev up” the brain and body?  There is already strong evidence that using your mind improves it.  Elderly people that do activities that involve using there mind keep and improve there memory and ability to think longer then those that don’t.   With the brain  “revved up” from all the problems over the last week, and the source of the stress suddenly gone, does a small amount of alcohol impair traditional embedded thought processes just enough to allow new innovated and creative ones?  I’m not sure why the visual “white noise” helps,  but it seems to distract a subconscious part of the brain that interferes with abstract thought processes.

Am I the only one this combination of conditions works for, or does it work for other people?  Are there other conditions that can enhance the creative thought process even more?

Dave Lister

listerlogic.com

DOES SOME TIME FLY? CONCEPTS OF TIME / BIOLOGICAL TIME DILATION

TIMETo a fly, a fly swatter is the size of tennis court and to avoid getting killed it must react, and fly 6 to 10 times it’s body length all in a fraction of a second.  Yet a fly’s brain is smaller then the head of a pin and even with our superior brain, strength, size, and armed with a fly swatter we sometimes miss.  How is this possible?

Could time pass at different speeds for different animals?

What if 1 second of our time passed like a minute for a fly?   If so, the fly would see us as moving in very slow motion and could easily get out of the way of the fly swatter in time. The fly’s seeming short life span of 5 weeks for us, could seem like many years to a fly.

Most of us have herd the term “Dog Years”, meaning that dogs compared to us seem to age 7 years for every 1 of ours, or 7 times faster then us.  What if time for dogs passes 7 times faster then us?   Although not nearly as slowly,  dogs, like flies would see us moving in slow motion.  Dogs may also feel as though they lived as long as us.  It could also explain how fast and quick dogs can be compared to us.  It’s always amazed me how with a dog by your side, you can throw a frisbee and in the 4 seconds it takes to travel 50 meters, the dog can run that distance and catch it before it hits the ground.  If time for the dog is 7 times faster then us and was adjusted to our time, it would be the same for us to run 50 meters in 28 seconds (7 x 4=28), that’s easy to do for most people.

On the other hand most animals that are larger then us, like elephants, seem to move slowly compared to us.  In the wild elephants can live up to 70 of our years. Could time for elephants pass slightly slower then it does for us? Does time pass faster the smaller the animal is and slower the larger it is.

Does the size or mass of an animal effect how fast time passes?

The idea of time passing at different rates is not new.  In the 1800’s, Albert Einstein came up with the ”The Special Theory of Relativity” meaning the faster you travel the more time slows down.  His scale being the speed of light that travels at 186,000 miles per second made it difficult to test back in his day.  If you could travel at the speed of light you would be able to circle the Earth 7 times in one second.  Now with rockets that reach speeds that barely register on this scale there is strong evidence he was right.  Time sensitive  satellites in Earth orbit must continuously have their clocks adjusted.  Even though the adjustment is small, so is the velocity of the satellite compared to the speed of light.  If this theory holds true on a larger scale and if a person on earth could observe someone by video, in a rocket traveling close to the speed of light, they would seem to move in slow motion and have a much longer life span.  The opposite would be true if the person in the rocket could observe someone on earth by video, they would be moving very fast and age quicker.

Obviously different animals on Earth are not flying around at the speed of light but what about their brains?  Like light, the electromagnetic wave from electricity also travels at 186,000 miles per second. Our brains are electrical and work by transmission of small electrochemical transmissions between neurons.  Smaller animals generally have smaller brains so the electrical transmissions would not take as long to get from one side of the brain to the other or from one part of their body to the other.  The human brain being thousands of times larger than a fly’s would  take thousands of times longer for a signal to get from one side to the other.  Could this cause us to think slower,  react slower, move slower.   Could this have a time altering effect?

Einstein did not stop with ” The Special Theory of Relativity” as being the only thing that effects how fast time exists, he also came up with the theory of “Gravitational Time Dilation”.  With this theory the closer someone is to a large mass the more time would slow down for them.  His scale for this is also big as he compared a large mass to be that of a black hole.  A black hole is formed from a massive star in space that has run out of fuel and collapsed to a small point, imagine a million of our suns crushed down so small they would fit in a small house.  The gravity from a black hole is almost unimaginable.  On earth we weigh more then we would on the moon because gravity becomes stronger the bigger the mass.   On a black hole the gravity is so strong that it can bend even light towards it.  This theory of Einstein’s was also difficult to prove years ago but through experiments now using the Earth’s mass and extremely accurate clocks on spacecraft, they do in fact start to run faster the further they get away from the mass of the Earth.  If this theory holds true on a larger scale and a person on Earth could view someone by video near a black hole, they would move in slow motion and live much longer then the person on Earth.  The opposite is true for the person by the black hole watching a person back on earth by video, they would be moving very fast and age much quicker.

Still there are no black holes on earth that could explain how time seems to pass at different speeds for animals of different masses but what if you imagine a person having the mass of a black hole and a fly having a mass of the Earth.  If this was possible and Einstein’s theory is right then the person and the fly would experience time at different rates like the example above.  Would the same time difference continue to hold true as the scale was reduced to our current sizes?  If not at what point would it stop?

For years scientists have been baffled to explain exactly how birds are able to flap their wings fast enough to fly but what if birds also experience time faster then us but the laws of physics remain constant.  If a bird has to flap his wings 8 times in a second our time to fly but  experiences time 16 times faster then us, it would only have to flap its wings once every 2 seconds of its time to fly.

Einstein discovered 2 things that can alter time: mass, and speed.  Could one of these things explain why different animals seem to live at different speeds?  Could there be other unknown influences, maybe a “Biological Time Dilation” with yet to be discovered parameters?  The next time you observe a small animal imagine them in a time altered state?  Would they appear to move and react more like us if you could slow down there movements?

Dave Lister

listerlogic.com