Everything We Dont Know About the Mind

Consciousness, it's our awareness, our understanding, our ignorance, our daily Consciousness.

Consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and due to this, it leaves out important things; things that would help relieve us if we knew them. If we had a higher awareness, a better Consciousness, we would feel better; we would be more at peace with things. The deep down truth of things is screened by our Consciousness. Our sensory organs will pick things out; our eyes can only see certain things, our ears can only hear certain things. We have to create instruments and other tools to see things we, as humans, cannot to expand our understanding and thus our ego or Consciousness.

Humans evolved and became the dominant species on Earth by a long shot. It's due to our innate ability to network with each other. If humanity was wiped out and restarted like loading an old save file, communities would still form. Structures within society are inevitable due to the variety of brains. Some are good at critical thinking, others are more artistic. However, we are all wired with some innate features. Just as humans form societies that evolve, other creatures do as well, but we're different. We are customizable characters, basically. We can kind of mold ourselves into whatever kind of person we want to be.

We can't know for certain that animals or any other life on Earth is conscious or can even function in the same way that we do. Let's put it this way: I know that I have my own thoughts and feelings and emotions, but how can I know for certain that you or anyone else does? There's no way I can go into your head and see things 100% from your perspective. I can't know what you're thinking or if you can even think in the first place. To truly understand the universe, to understand and actually experience life, you have to give yourself up. There's no point in sustaining Bliss and being permanently at an all-time high. The life you're living is what you have put yourself into, what ego you've formed; only you don’t want to admit it.

You want to believe it happened to you. Day to day you play non-Bliss in order to be able to experience Bliss. You put yourself in bad situations, you let in the negative experiences in life just to feel some kind of satisfaction when it goes the other way. Self implies other; white implies black; death implies life. You can feel your existence as fundamental, not as an accident. One thing we do know about the mind, however, is that just like the body needs regular checkups to maintain optimal health, the mind does as well. The best way to get this checkup is through a credentialed therapist. I know therapy can be difficult to access for most people, but not anymore, thanks to the paid partner of today's episode: BetterHelp.

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Back to our story. At the basic level, at the lowest level imaginable, you are the fundamentals of existence. The same thing that makes you is the same thing that makes up everything else. If you can step back from what you believe, if you can step back from what your sensory organs have turned you into, you start to see things for what they actually are. Do you define yourself as a victim of the world or as the world? Love is only possible due to the lack of self. You give up all your secrets; the walls you've built to keep people at arm's distance slowly lower one by one until you're a completely open book; until all your pages have been read and the rest of the pages are blank, waiting to be filled with this new-found love.

In basketball, or soccer, or football, you're constantly giving the ball to someone else. The point of the game is to have the ball in your hand for the least amount of time—to constantly be passing it to someone else, to shoot it, to get it out of your hands. It keeps the game going, and life is the same way. If you define yourself as only being what your ego is, as the things you do voluntarily, then you're the victim. It's because of some higher power that you were put here when you didn't ask for it. But what about the things you do involuntarily? Do you beat your heart or does it just happen to you? You do those things even though you don't know how.

Words don't work here. As Alan Watts said, everyone is fundamentally the alternate reality—not God in a traditional sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep down basic whatever there is, and you're all that. Only you’re pretending you’re not. A mind that hasn’t gone deep enough to find where those questions come from, because the same place those questions come from is the same place those answers lie.

The brain controls everything. In order to go to the extremes of the universe, to places we can only dream of going, we must first dive deep into something that is all inside of us. Take the Big Bang, for example. Now, there are hundreds, thousands of theories as to how we came into existence, but let's go with this one: you believe that you are strictly you. Your human body is all that you are and all that you have ever been. You're simply a small speck of dust in a vast sea of galaxies, stars, planets; you're irrelevant. But rolling back the clock, things get smaller. The universe was more compact. The atoms that make you up are the building blocks of the universe, of the hot gas clouds that form stars, that allowed solar systems to form, that allowed planets like Earth to form.

If you keep rolling back this clock, you were around at the very instant everything came into existence. That is you too. When everything was infinitesimally small, you were there. But we define ourselves as being only us mere humans walking on a planet that we didn't ask to get put on; but frankly, every one of us somehow made this happen. We just go on and pretend we didn't. It's because of how we define ourselves. Are you the victim, or are you the world?

As cringy as it may sound, everyone you meet is just a small packet of the universe, a present. Whether they're a pleasant one or not, that was packaged together from billions of years of engineering and architecture on a universal scale. But instead, we define ourselves as something completely separate from it, something not connected whatsoever, which is a foolish view. We tend to search for how the universe came into being, but we're just the universe trying to understand itself. In order to get to that conclusion, we have to reframe our mindset.

We're not as different as we all think. Your name is given to you at birth; your ideas and personality are collected from the world—scraps, bits, and pieces here and there cling to you like a magnet—so what part of you is you? We are all different manifestations of Consciousness, but we are all fundamentally the same thing. We all may have different egos, different personalities, but when you step back, drop the ego, we are all connected.

View the universe as a forest. Every one of us is a twig, a leaf, a branch, but together we form life. Our origin, our roots, are connected together just as the roots of trees form a vast network which brings these massive forces to life. Humanity's roots all come from the same place. Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred from one form of energy to another. But many of us have this fear that it's all going to come to an end. And while yes, your life will end, your energy will not. It will continue onward forever.

What our Consciousness has convinced us otherwise. We form this thought process almost like we've been hypnotized to think that we are all there is and all there ever will be and that it's all going to come to an end. This leaves us unsatisfied and unhappy, but the universe is continuous and you are technically the universe, so you will continue on as well. Your death is not the end of you; it's the death of your ego. Many people experience the same exact thing while living ego death. It tends to be induced through psychedelic drugs—LSD, shrooms, the list goes on.

While working on this video, I actually experienced it myself and although not intentional, it provided clarity in a way I've never before experienced. It's not the ego in the vernacular sense of describing a person's self-worth; it's the philosophical ego. It's the complete loss of subjective self-identity. Everything that you believe you are will disappear; you're void of emotion, of connection to anything around you; of connection to what makes you you. The idea of being a person doesn't make any sense.

The words I, me, and myself have zero meaning whatsoever. The world can normally be put into two categories: myself and not myself. While experiencing ego death, this line is blurred. I am completely gone; there's only the awareness of existence. The lifetime accumulation of your thoughts and emotions is put on pause. It's as if you're on a cliff approaching an infinite void beneath you. Your life is continuous and exists all the way up the mountain until you reach the edge; beneath you, though, is the unknown.

Ego death is jumping into that void, leaving behind everything you've ever known. It's as if you’ve stepped out of your body into a separate entity. You start to see things for what they actually are. But things don't actually exist; 'things' is just a noun; it’s a fragment of speech, and speech is just another instrument we've created to try and understand the world around us. Our senses allow us to go about our daily lives and traverse the world, but they don't really offer any explanations, so we have to make them up ourselves.

While experiencing ego death, you disconnect from all of that. You have a heightened awareness. It's truly as if you're experiencing a higher level of Consciousness that no person can understand. You reach this level that words can't explain. The instruments we made to try and understand our place in the universe shatter completely. Explaining it in terms of "I saw" or "I felt" don't seem reasonable. Our languages are instruments created to explain things that someone experiences; but while undergoing ego death, there is no 'someone'; there is no 'me'.

So how do you describe it? It's as if your slate was wiped clean; your character save file was corrupted, but you're still in the game. Because of this, ego death can be scary, but it can also be a very enlightening experience. It's both constricting and freeing; it's white and black. It's like you're defining what life is like through experiencing death. We cannot be more sensitive and welcoming to pleasure without being more sensitive and accepting of pain.

You're flying and sinking at the same time, being pulled from below and above, in every direction at once. While going through it, I ended up reaching a moment of acceptance. Ego death, while often extremely anxiety-inducing, offers a glimpse into a reality free of that; a life free of your personal flaws, your daily thoughts, your responsibilities. It personally feels as if time is frozen and wherever your mind wanders is free to judge things as they truly are. You are the observer and the observable.

Surprisingly, the conclusion I came to is the same conclusion I came to while making a previous video of mine, and it is that nothing in life really matters. Fear, in general, tends to come from us not being able to make peace with the chaos that is the universe, not being able to cope with the idea of entropy, that everything is tending towards disorder. Forming an ego is disorderly. In the same way, you go further and further down your own tunnel and stray further from everyone else.

Experiencing ego death is breaking out of that tunnel, pulling back, and understanding that the network of these tunnels that encompass every human on Earth all eventually return back to the same place. When I die, when my ego is completely gone forever, when my physical body breaks down and no longer resembles the form it’s in today, I’ll still somehow be here. Right now, I’m an hourglass; the sand is slowly leaking its way to the bottom, and eventually, it'll all be there. It’s the end of the line for me, but when that day comes, the universe will stop by, take the hourglass, flip it over, and whatever made me me will then become something entirely different.

We're all just a temporary collection of atoms, and whatever you and I subjectively believe we are won't last forever, but objectively, we will. For now, just enjoy the ride. Imagine you're flying, feeling the cold air on your skin flooded by light. You look down and see a sandy beach peppered with palm trees, and you decide to go there. Suddenly, you're on the beach, drinking a piña colada. But you're alone. Wouldn't it be nice if somebody was there with you?

And then suddenly, your best friend appears. It's comforting and warm, a feeling you know you've been craving because you've been struggling at work recently. You're grateful for their encouragement and for the piña colada. It’s your favorite drink, after all. You take a deep breath and enjoy the beauty of the moment. But it isn't a vacation; it isn't a game or a VR headset; it's a dream—a dream that you know you're in, a dream that you can control.

The beach, the dream, the friend—you made it all happen because you're lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming occurs when a sleeper is aware they're in a dream and can exercise some control over the environment of the dream. In a regular dream, we're aware of objects and events within the dream itself, but we're not aware that we're dreaming. We can't distinguish between being asleep and being awake.

Lucid dreaming isn't anything new; it's a phenomenon that's been reported throughout history but only scientifically documented since 1975. And a lot is still so unknown about it—why it happens, how to induce it, and what effects it might have on us individually and as a species. Some scientists believe that lucid dreaming comes from increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, and unlike non-lucid dreams that can take place any time while we're sleeping, lucid dreaming happens during our rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep cycle—our fourth and final deepest stage of normal sleep.

But the biggest thing that those of us who haven't had the pleasure of lucid dreaming are wondering is: what's it like? Lucid dreamers have described feeling like they're playing a virtual reality game, where they have some control over aspects of their scene and setting. These dreams can also leave lasting impressions that might be stronger than those we experience when we're awake. Most of us have had the experience of waking up from a dream, even one we can't fully remember, and feeling somehow changed from it.

With lucid dreaming, that change or impact we might feel is much more visceral. Some lucid dreamers have talked about their dreams in religious terms, like an out-of-body experience. Some even say it feels like being temporarily abducted by aliens and transported to a different planet, like you're in your own personal video game.

But one of the most interesting aspects of lucid dreaming is the emotional revelations that can happen in them. In a lucid dream, you might be introduced to elements of yourself you might not see otherwise. You might see yourself more sympathetically, kinder, braver, or more sensitive than you'd like to admit or take credit for in reality. In this sense, lucid dreams might offer some introspection that many of us hesitate to ponder in our waking lives.

Now, it all might sound pretty amazing and you might be envious if you've never experienced a lucid dream because I know I am, and we're not alone in that envy. There's a subreddit with more than 400,000 members dedicated to the subject of lucid dreaming. However, only 23% of the population experience lucid dreams on a monthly basis, and less than 1% of people are what scientists call proficient lucid dreamers—people who can easily sink into and manipulate their lucid dreams.

But the good news is that a majority of adults, 55%, claim to have experienced at least one lucid dream in their lifetime. So if you haven't had one yet, the odds are in your favor. And if you want to up the odds, here are some things you can do to pave the way to your lucid dream journey.

First is to optimize your bedroom for sleeping. Good sleep hygiene is key to lucid dreams. 65° F or 18° C is considered the ideal sleep temperature and it's important to keep your room relatively quiet and dark. Invest in some blackout curtains, sleep masks, or other accessories to reduce light, and consider using earplugs or a sound machine to block out disruptive noise.

Another critical element to lucid dreaming is what researchers call “reality testing.” This consists of checking in with your environment and confirming whether you’re asleep or awake. We all know that our dream environments can look familiar to our waking reality, but there's always some minor inconsistencies compared to reality. Performing these reality checks while we're awake can give us the skills to determine when we're in a dream.

Reality testing is specifically helpful when something odd happens in your waking life. If you see a strange animal cross the street in front of your car, take a moment to think about the fact that you're awake and that the animal is real and that this odd moment is happening in your life. Developing that critical frame of mind when you're awake will ideally carry over into your dream state.

Reality checks can also be quite simple, like pressing your fingers against your palm and feeling the resistance of your hand. In a dream, you might notice that your fingers go through your hand, and at that point, you'll know you're not in reality, where scientific laws apply. Or take note of being in your waking reality when you're reading because in dreams, written words often appear jumbled.

It can also be helpful to wake yourself up after 5 hours of sleeping and simply tell yourself to remember your dreaming when you go back to sleep. Research has found that this technique is most effective if you can stay awake for 30 to 120 minutes before sleeping again. Another tactic you may already be doing is keeping a dream journal. Recording our dreams helps us recognize dreams more easily since many of our dreams, or elements of them, repeat.

You might want to write down what you remember the moment you wake up or even record a voice note on your phone to rattle off bits and pieces that come to mind. As interest in lucid dreaming has grown and these kinds of tips have proliferated on the internet, a whole industry has grown around the goal of lucid dreaming. There are now sleep masks and headbands you can buy that produce noises, flash lights, or vibrate to inject stimulation into your dreams. These are methods used by researchers on lucid dreaming subjects.

There are online tutorials—some helpful and some from people simply looking to capitalize on the craze around lucid dreaming. And there are even supplements that have been shown to induce lucid dreaming. The drug alkaloid gallamine has been used in research and home settings to encourage lucid dreams. One study showed that participants who took the drug after being woken up and practicing visualization were more likely to lucid dream than participants who received a placebo. Gallamine is already available over the counter as a supplement, and many lucid dreamers say that it helps them stay in the dream longer and have more control over elements of their dreams.

Of course, some view using drugs as cheating, just as you would with any performance-enhancing substance in sports, but proficient lucid dreamers rightly stress that whether you use a supplement or not, you need to practice lucid dreaming using other methods; simply popping pills won’t get you there. But if you do manage to get there, into a lucid dream, what do you do?

Once you're lucid dreaming, we want to use that moment to control where the dream goes and try to assert influence over what happens. This works better if instead of willing something to happen, we simply expect it to. Imagine you're back on the beach with your friend and you want a beautiful sea turtle to come climbing out of the water. Instead of insisting that the turtle will show up, expect it to be there.

Once you do, a sea turtle or something close to it will probably appear. That expected effect can help things appear in our dreams. If we say, “I'll find the dog behind the couch,” when we look behind the couch, the dog will be there. Experienced lucid dreamers can also open doors in their dreams and envision what they want to be on the other side of the door. Perhaps you can open a door and transport yourself from the sunny beach into the middle of outer space.

Most of what we know about lucid dreams comes from the early stages of research into the topic and from those who can have the dreams. We still don’t have a great understanding of the neural underpinnings of lucid dreams or the brain processes that make them happen, and at this point, we don’t have a reliable way to induce them. But even with so much unknown, we do know that there are benefits to lucid dreaming.

At the very least, a lucid dream can act as a sort of wish fulfillment, taking us to places or putting us in situations we've always wished we could experience. Lucid dreaming can also help us shed the stress of daily life. It's been clinically shown to be a potential treatment for pervasive nightmares, and data shows that lucid dreaming can foster creativity. Even athletes will employ lucid dreams to work on and refine motor skills. Most of all, lucid dreams allow us to interact and explore parts of our unconscious that we can't when we're in our regular dreams or even while we're awake.

Of course, this level of awareness in our unconscious state can present its own problems. Skeptics worry that lucid dreaming can have a negative impact on mental health, not only because it can disturb sleep, but also because it can blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Remember the reality testing tactic to induce lucid dreams? While it might help some distinguish between waking and dreaming, it might also make others question whether they’re awake or asleep. This would be disorienting; it could lead to a feeling of dissociation, where they feel disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and sense of identity.

Still, the curiosity around lucid dreaming is impossible to resist—not just for you or me, but for researchers in an effort to answer the question of what exactly is happening when we have lucid dreams and how to better understand how to trigger them. Researchers have invited proficient lucid dreamers into their labs. Once the participants are asleep, researchers measure activity levels in the prefrontal cortex and other areas. The participants are told to use left and right eye movement once they're in a lucid dream and aware that they're dreaming. This way, researchers can see what brain activity is happening in the brain at that very moment.

Studies also tell us that the events we experience in our dreams produce effects on our brains that are similar to what would happen if we experienced them during our waking hours. And if that’s true, then it would mean that dreaming of doing something is the equivalent of actually doing it. There might be a stretch if we're talking about like going to Mars or breathing underwater, but if it's a meaningful conversation with someone or tasting a new delicious food, maybe we could take the feeling and carry it with us into our reality.

Because lucid dreaming might not just be about experiencing our dreams differently; it might be the key to understanding our own Consciousness. English aristocrat and writer Mary Arnold Foster wrote one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of lucid dreaming in her book "Studies in Dreams." She described her attempts to fly and proposed that humans have dual Consciousness: one is our primary self, which analyzes our circumstances and applies logic to our experiences. For most of us, this Consciousness is typically enacted during sleep but, according to Foster, this primary self wakes up in lucid dreams and brings memories, knowledge, and reasoning from our waking life along with the awareness that we’re asleep.

This idea of dual Consciousness may not be scientific enough today, but researchers would agree that lucid dreams involve increased self-awareness and reflection. They give us the ability to think more deeply about our lives because we get to actively live outside of them. When we sleep, we still are who we are; our brains are the same, but they're unconscious. So lucid dreams can provide a point of comparison to isolate the regions of the brain that are involved in the state of heightened self-awareness and agency.

As much as many of us simply want to have cool dreams, lucid dreams aren’t just about experiencing the feeling of flying or traveling to mystical places; they can have real scientific implications. If we're able to understand what's happening in the brain when it appears to be unconscious but is really aware, we can better treat brain injury patients who are unconscious. Doctors could establish these patients' levels of consciousness and treat them accordingly. If scientists can establish a neural signature of self-awareness by studying lucid dreamers, they can make more accurate diagnosis and prognosis.

And what these ideas tell us is that lucid dreams are really about self-awareness. So even if you can't manage to get yourself into a lucid dream, you can still learn from them. Try to be more connected to your unconscious self—maybe not through a lucid dream, but through something more accessible like meditation or other therapies in your waking life. Like all things, lucid dreaming takes practice. We have to approach the desire to lucid dream with a sense of calm. When we try to force it into existence, we lose the potential to find it altogether.

So maybe we should start with a sense of curiosity—not just about what it would feel like to fly, but about what might be lurking in our own brain that we just haven't found yet. Recently, I was scrolling through old pictures and I found a picture from when I was a little kid. I took the picture and held it up to my face in front of a mirror, and I realized, wow, I look nothing like that kid in the picture. We don’t have the same physical properties; our thoughts, ideas, and beliefs are different, and we certainly don’t have the same memories.

But still, I know it’s me. My brain sees the picture and creates a storyline that I was there, I am here, and I’ll be somewhere else in the future looking back doing the same exact thing. This is the idea of self—the idea that there’s something deep within us that remains fundamentally the same even when everything else changes. It’s the idea that we can grow bigger, create new memories, lose old memories, change our thoughts and beliefs, but deep down there’s still something that remains fundamentally unchanged.

The idea of self is one that has baffled pretty much everyone—scientists and philosophers alike—for centuries, because as easy as it is to describe, understanding why or how it works sits on the opposite end of the spectrum. As humans, we experience a lot of different senses. We feel things, we see things, and we hear things. We have thoughts, we have feelings, and we have the ability to learn new things. But all of these things are separate experiences. So at what point do all of these sentient properties become you?

As I continued scrolling through the photos, I came across pictures from elementary, middle school, high school, and everything after. All of these photos looked completely different. When I think back to those times and the decisions I made, I would never make most of them right now. Yet, without a shadow of a doubt, my brain convinces me that I am still me. The words I and me are more than just pronouns; they are the two ways we describe self.

When we say “I,” we talk about a being who is consciously aware of the present moment—so I am reading this line on a script right now. On the other hand, when we describe self using the word me, we're usually referring to a personal identity—who we think we are. Me usually reflects who we are through the lenses of our past, present, and plans for the future. But we color our memories based on what we need to be in the present, and our plans for the future are always changing.

How can there be a consistent being if everything that forms it changes? We like to think of memories as simply playing back a video in our head of what happened in the past, but that’s not what memories are. Memories are our brain’s reconstruction of past experiences; we create these memories to fit the present narrative based on what we know now, how we describe me now, as well as our present needs and goals.

So if you now think of yourself as a kind person, you’re more likely to remember all the times you've been kind to people rather than the times you've been unkind. We form narratives about ourselves around how we want to be seen by others; we convince ourselves that we’ll act and behave a certain way to fit that narrative, even when we’re often mistaken. If this is true and we can’t trust our memories to give an accurate description of who we were in the past, then how can we have a self that exists through time?

Aren't we just creating new selves every time this narrative completely changes? Think about it. It's not that the narrative continues down a different path; it changes completely, such that what was no longer is. And if what was can no longer be, then we cannot say that there is a self that persists through time. Rather, the idea of self is one that is constantly recreated by our brains when the need arises. This is what we refer to as the illusion of self.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, this does not mean that we don’t have a self; it simply means that it does not exist the way we think it does. Our bodies are made up of a bundle of perceptions, sensations, and thoughts. Our brains try to make sense of the randomized nature of our being by creating a linear storyline: you were there, now you're here. It is this storyline of sorts that we describe as self; it’s just the brain’s way of making sense of the randomness that is human existence. This is why the idea of self we have now cannot be true.

When most people think of a self, they think of something that can exist outside of the brain, but that's just not possible. The self is a sensation of continuity and unity of self that is created by the brain. Anything other than this is just wishful thinking—that humans are more than just a sentient bunch of molecules. The idea that deep down we have a soul, an immaterial essence, the driving force of individual existence, and in most religions of the world, this is true.

But not Buddhism. Anatta is the Buddhist doctrine that teaches against the idea of a self. It teaches that there’s no underlying permanent substance; there’s no soul. Rather, everything we experience is simply perceived by our senses, not by I or me. It teaches that since there is no I, material wealth can’t belong to me, so we shouldn’t crave these things or hold on to them like they’re worth more than just a few good sensations.

Dropping all the other pictures I was flipping through, I picked up the picture from when I was a kid again. I held it in front of my face and stared at the mirror again, and as the existential crisis flooded my mind, I couldn't help but ask if I wasn’t told that that was me, would I have known? If I had seen this picture randomly without any context, would I have been able to tell that it was me? Definitely not. So then how can I say that there’s a self that existed in that kid that still exists in me?

How can I say our experiences are linear, that we’re the same person? The truth is, you're not the same person that existed before, and you're not the same person that will exist in the future—at least there's no evidence to prove it. This thought is both terrifying and exciting. It's terrifying because it's fundamentally against everything we know about ourselves. If there's no self, then there's no self-will, and if there's no self-will, there's no morality; there's no right or wrong, good or evil—just a bunch of molecules interacting to the stimuli they're presented with.

But on the other hand, it is exciting because it liberates you. Now you don’t have to think it’s me against the world because there is no you to begin with. You’ll no longer think life is unfair because bad things happen to you. You’ll see bad things happening to you simply as things just happening. Whether it's good or bad, it doesn't really matter. You’ll no longer be scared of death because nothing can die that never was. You’ll understand that death is simply a natural occurrence.

The illusion of self is one of the most powerful and consistent illusions we experience. It's there right from when we're toddlers up until the day we die. If it isn't real, then why do our brains create these storylines? Why does this illusion exist? As living things, our goal is to survive and thrive. We learn, adapt, and grow, and one of the most important building blocks of survival is competition. Without competition, we’ll all be satisfied with where we are and have no desire to strive for anything at all.

Without the illusion of self, there is no competition. Competition is built on the idea of a single entity outdoing another. If there is no single entity, and just sentient chemical reactions, there will be no competition. And without competition, things just don’t really work the way they do now. If you’re still not convinced that the need for competition alone is the reason our brains make up the idea of a unified and persistent being in all of us, you’re not alone.

Not everyone believes in the idea of a lack of self. Some people who meditate can sometimes get to a state of complete quietness and emptiness, described as a pure consciousness event. This is an empty state of consciousness. There are no thoughts, no technical mental processes going—just a deep-seated sense of self and an independent identity. Many people use this state as an argument for the existence of self, but there are two things wrong with this school of thought.

One, there is no scientific evidence to back it up. We cannot determine what is what simply by judging based on people's personal experiences. Unfortunately, two, the feeling of emptiness is a mental process that in itself is your brain telling you that you're free of thoughts. It's still a brain activity. Some people argue that if there is no self, then how can we trust the judgments of anyone? If a ghost came out today to tell us that there are no ghosts, how do we believe them? For you to be able to pass judgment on consciousness, you need to be an objective observer. But being an objective observer means you need to have a self who observes all, like you're a god or something. So that negates almost every argument you're trying to defend.

But in truth, the illusion of self is not a ghost telling us that there are no ghosts. It's a figure that we call a ghost telling us that they can feel, touch, and smell. They can interact with living things, so they cannot be ghosts. It's not just postulating the absence of a self; it's showing the reality of its absence through scientific research.

We don't need a self to tell us there is no self; we only need the evidence, and the evidence is clear. When I hold up the picture of when I was a kid to my face, it's clear that everything has changed. I know I am still causally related to who that kid was, but there is no evidence to prove that there’s something in that kid that is still in me, that has persisted through time.

At this point, I was having an existential crisis, so I put down my own pictures and picked up pictures of my grandma. She's much older now; she doesn't really speak much, but she still talks. She still remembers what the world was like when she was younger. But what about people her age who suffer from advanced Alzheimer's? People who can't recognize their own loved ones, who can't remember anything from the past—do they still have a self? When does a person stop being a self? If you no longer have any memories of the past or plans for the future, what then is self? What does the word 'me' refer to if the very components that make the self can easily be altered or wiped away completely?

Then the idea of a persistent existence through time is not possible. Only when we disregard the idea of self can we begin to understand why people seem to go completely off script. We often judge people by the idea of them we've created in our head, when in reality, we're all just a bunch of competing impulses and urges swaying us one way and then the other. The idea that there is no self that exists through time explains why we sometimes act in ways that are inconsistent with the story we tell both to ourselves and to others.

The truth is, the illusion of self is simply a collection of our memories of the past, desires in the present, and plans for the future. It's our psychological profile; it's not a supernatural entity that exists independently. It does not transcend death; it does not exist through time. We were not, and we won't be. We simply are.

What does a child's mind look like? You have memories of being a child, but that's not really an accurate representation. It's an older you reflecting on the past. Your childhood memories are likely different now from the experiences that formed them. If you have a child, you might have noticed some of these real childhood feelings returning to you briefly. You recognize them in your kid, but these moments are fleeting. You quickly come back to the adult world.

Pixar's "Inside Out" aims to give us a look into the inner workings of the mind of a child. For most of us fortunate enough to have seen it, it's quite moving. You might have cried a bit watching it or held back tears with all your might because you didn't want to cry in front of a child. But does "Inside Out" accurately reflect the child's mind and offer anything real to help them navigate their problems? Of course, does the movie mislead kids about their self?

Standing in the film, an 11-year-old girl named Riley moves from a quaint house in Minnesota to the busy city of San Francisco. She's excited at first, but the reality of how much her life is changing hits her pretty hard. Her first problem is that her new home doesn't meet her expectations. It's small and dusty, nothing like what she left behind. Even worse, her family's moving truck is delayed, separating her from all her familiar items and furniture.

With nothing to cook with, Riley and her mom decide to grab a pizza slice, and to her horror, the pizza is covered with broccoli. Now, the biggest challenge for Riley is that her new school is very intimidating. So intimidating that she cries in front of the other kids on her first day in class. Riley's emotions, represented by living characters, are struggling to keep up with all the changes she's been thrust into. Fear, disgust, anger, sadness, and joy are leading the control panel of Riley's mind.

We spend more time with the emotions than with Riley and her parents. The central conflict unfolds when sadness touches and changes Riley's core memories, which makes them sad. Joy tries to turn these memories joyful again but ends up getting lost in the process, along with sadness and the core memories. And so begins Joy and Sadness' mission to get the core memories and themselves back to the control center. This leaves the other emotions in charge as Riley's personality islands begin to collapse in on the absence of her core memories.

These floating islands represent personality sources such as friendship and family. When Joy and Sadness managed to return to the other emotions, the controls are broken by anger. Riley is left depressed, sitting on a bus in an attempt to run away to Minnesota. Joy then realizes her mistake. She calls Riley problems by not allowing her to express her sadness. She writes her misguided actions by handing the controls over to sadness.

Riley gets off the bus and returns to her parents in tears, telling them how she feels and setting everything right. In this resolution, we get a helpful lesson about emotions. Emotional harmony is important for our mental health. Allowing ourselves to have feelings when they arise naturally is very healthy, especially during our formative younger years.

The story also reflects and criticizes our cultural bias that values feelings of joy over sadness, much like the way we prefer extroversion to introversion and optimism over pessimism. We internalize these values and try to hide our sadness by covering it up with false joy. Riley tries to hide her true feelings from her parents. She doesn't want them to know that the move is having a big impact on her. Her mom also pressures her to put on a happy face for her dad, who is under a lot of pressure at his new job.

The story of "Inside Out" successfully delivers this central message about emotional harmony and a fantastical representation of a child's mind. But does it appropriately capture the inner workings of the child's mind? Not exactly. The way memory works in the film is largely inaccurate. I mean, it's a children's film. Memory is much more valuable than the movie's playback it portrays.

Our memory in general is a lot messier overall. Our memories are unreliable accounts of what happened in the past; they are distorted over time. Whenever we try to recall a memory, it gets corrupted further from the original imprint. I do have to point out, though, that the movie accurately reflects memory when sadness can change the emotional character of Riley's core memories.

Our feelings towards our most cherished memories change based on how we feel and who we've become as an adult. If you're separated from a loved one, your memories of them could be filled with a sense of loss, or they were once a source of joy. While it is fair to have a cleaner version of memory for the audience's sake, the account of core memories is misleading.

These memories aren't linked to our personality islands as in the movie. While we have important memories for our sense of identity, they don't affect us in the way the movie portrays. People who suffer from severe amnesia don't have dramatic shifts in their personality, and twins separated at birth often share personality traits regardless of them sharing similar memories. Many of our personality traits come from genetics and our environment.

The most significant detail "Inside Out" gets wrong about a child's mind is that it's missing an important character—a critical character to the function of a human being: central cognition, between Riley and her emotions. There’s nothing in reality that’s supposed to be a middle one. The central cognition allows us to assess perceptual data and make choices for the sake of our well-being.

It is a part of our conscious experience that is completely absent in Riley and all the other human characters surrounding her. This account of the real-life mind comes from psychology theories first presented in the late 1950s and is still used in cognitive psychology today. It establishes the mind as having two systems: system one is instinctive and unconscious; it's where we make automatic decisions without deliberation and where our emotions are processed. We have no conscious experience of the functioning of system one, only its output.

System two is intentional, effortful, and conscious. It's our central cognition; we use it to think when our system one processes won't suffice. Whenever you have to make a tough decision, you rely on system two. There are moments when we want our system one processes to take over, like when we need to run for safety or pedal a bike. Deliberating and using system two in these moments can get you killed or make your task impossible.

Central cognition exists in our prefrontal cortex alongside our working memory and executive control centers. In "Inside Out," that would align nicely with the command center the emotions occupy. In reality, central cognition and emotions are often competing with each other, but there’s no necessary hierarchy that determines who wins. Sometimes emotions drive action and sometimes cognition takes control.

It's like a disorderly scrum. When we're tired after a long day, our emotions often win. We don’t even try to use central cognition in these moments. Most of us can relate to this, having snapped at somebody by making demands of you when you're just trying to get to bed. By neglecting central cognition, the film implies an emotional determinism of our behavior, which is probably not helpful for kids to understand themselves.

It potentially adds to the already confusing sense of self that comes with growing up. The movie doesn't acknowledge our ability to deliberate and make decisions outside of an emotional reaction. To navigate the world successfully, we need to make good use of system two, otherwise we're at the mercy of the world and our instinctual reaction to it.

Central cognition has a big role to play for kids and adults alike to develop the concept of "Inside Out". Filmmaker Pete Doctor worked closely with neuroscientists and psychologists. Pixar wasn’t naive about the mind when it signed off on the film, but accuracy took a backseat to other priorities. It needed to make a good story for kids and adults. Complexity can add depth to a film but more often than not, it makes the story hard to follow.

When it comes to movies for children, complexity is a greater concern. You can easily lose the younger audience with too many characters to follow and convoluted motivations. Pixar rearranged the processes of the child's mind to have a limited number of protagonists working towards a specific goal, all while facing a healthy amount of resistance.

Adding central cognition as a character would have been more accurate, but it would have made the story more complicated and less straightforward. The new character could play Joy's boss's role, but that would have introduced a new set of problems. For one, the focus would have been removed from the emotions and put on the central cognition. Then it would be hard to separate the internal world of Riley's mind from the external world. Since central cognition is a conscious process, Riley can't be consciously aware of the internal adventure that is taking place, as that world represents her unconscious mind.

If Riley were aware, the reality portrayed in the film would fall apart. Perhaps the only way to be more accurate would be to show Riley's central cognition deliberating on her choices with her emotions overriding her at times. But that would add another layer to the film that would make the journey of the emotions less consequential.

Thinking about it, in a way, the emotions being sentient is a way of representing central cognition. They’re able to deliberate amongst themselves, with Joy taking the lead. This allows them to have a conscious thought process contained within the unconscious mind, avoiding Riley's awareness. Similarly, linking core memories to personality islands isn't accurate, but it is beneficial to the story. It gives the adventure big stakes—if Joy and Sadness fail, the personality islands are gone forever, which has huge consequences for Riley.

As the audience, we root for the protagonist, because failure would be disastrous. If the core memories weren't that important, we wouldn't have nearly as much investment in them. So while "Inside Out" isn't the perfect mapping of a child's mind to a set of relatable characters, its deviations make a lot of sense when considering the demands of storytelling, and the film still manages to get a very poignant message about the value of our emotions.

"In the summer of 2014, the world was in a festive mood as yet another World Cup was about to get underway. But on Wednesday, June 11th, the city of São Paulo, one of the main hosts of the World Cup was anything but festive. Entire parts of the city remained shut as cars were stuck on stretches of tarmac as far as the eye could see. The effects soon extended well beyond the city, as the entire country of Brazil felt the effects of what would become the worst traffic jam in history. Eventually, the jam was said to have been over 214 miles long.

Disputes about the economic implications of hosting a World Cup, worker deaths, and Countrywide protests were ultimately what led to it. But São Paulo is notorious for being one of the most congested places in the entire planet. Now you and I may not have been in such a historic traffic jam, but we've definitely had our experiences of being stuck in traffic, when the cars barely seem to move, the lights barely seem to change, and before you know it, a little 5-minute drive ended up taking you over 2 hours.

Aside from driving us completely out of our minds, these traffic jams have obvious economic implications and otherwise. Just in 2018 alone, traffic congestion is said to have cost the US economy around $87 billion. In addition, congestion increases fuel consumption and by extension emissions. In reality, this just hurts us more than it helps. It wastes precious time that we could have spent just being where we wanted to be. Instances of road rage rise, which then contributes to more driver error, which means more accidents, which means more traffic. It sucks! Traffic is much more demanding on our bodies and minds and deteriorates the quality of life of everyone involved.

You either go to the office to angry bosses or home to a cold dinner, which really begs the question: how far off are we from solving this terrible, terrible thing? Well, let's get to that. What makes traffic jams and congestion so interesting is that beyond the more quantifiable metrics such as the flow of cars, the volume of traffic, number of lanes, and so on, there's this other spontaneous factor to this phenomenon that's much harder to predict or measure—the human factor. Each vehicle is, after all, being maneuvered or piloted by a human driver—at least for now, anyway—and as such, the intricacies of traffic are in a way just expressions of the intricacies of human behavior.

It all defaults back to us, the driver. It's no wonder then that Tom Vanderbilt, a guy who literally wrote an entire book talking about traffic, calls New York City traffic a giant applied psych lab. Let’s see why he would say that. He refers to an experiment conducted in England by a traffic psychologist named Ian Walker, where bicycles are rigged with sensors that would calculate the distance and speed of vehicles driving past. The experimental conditions were as such: in the first scenario, the rider was wearing a helmet; in the second, he wasn't; and in the third, he tried to appear female by wearing a wig and a dress.

It was found that when the rider appeared to be wearing a helmet, cars felt more comfortable driving close by. When he wasn't wearing a helmet, they gave him a bit more space, and when the rider seemed to be a woman, they gave him even more space. These are judgments which Tom likes to call “beneath the subconscious,” that the drivers were making about the competence of the rider and the likelihood of an accident with very little and often inaccurate evidence. Ask yourself: are riders wearing helmets always more experienced? Does wearing a helmet make you safer? Physically, yes, but psychologically, it could cause you to act differently and take risky maneuvers that you otherwise might not have.

There are other experiments like this, of course. You might think that the more regulated traffic is, the safer it is. The more often you see signals and signs at intersections, the more careful they will be, but that's not the case. As it turns out, if there are too many signals, drivers often find themselves in a false sense of security. The seemingly abundance of caution that the traffic lights can portray causes drivers to drop their guard in the most risky parts of the road, which often leads to more accidents.

This seemingly unintuitive idea was actually discovered due to an electrical failure in a traffic light. The observation and the later theory that emerged from it is credited to Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. He developed the idea of shared space when driving. Essentially, instead of adding more signs, street markings, crosswalks, and so on, you instead actually remove these things—the very things you think were actually making you safe. There are no curbs separating the street from the sidewalk; there aren’t sidewalks to begin with.

It's just all together—cars and pedestrians. With this, drivers find themselves less confident than they were before because, well, there's no separation. There's nothing splitting those driving cars from those who are just on bikes or even walking. It makes drivers more cautious, which in turn actually saves more lives by preventing accidents and traffic as opposed to increasing it.

Of course, there are more intuitive instances of traffic behavior, namely things like rubbernecking. It's when an accident in one lane of traffic causes drivers in other lanes or even other roads to slow down while they're passing by to watch things as they unfold—because we're nosy and like to get into other people's business. But beyond the physical obstruction that the accident causes, this is an added slowdown often caused purely by psychological reasons. If just a few cars slow down, the other cars behind them are forced to slow down.

The ripple effect leads to more widespread congestion; and before you know it, you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That's exactly why in some countries, accident sites are quickly covered with portable boundaries to prevent people from catching an unnecessary glance. But here again, the human factor creeps in. Tom suggests that there might be more to this mundane activity. He thinks that drivers sometimes pause not to just see what’s going on, but also to reflect briefly on their own morality, the possibility of something like this happening to them as well.

Everyone thinks they’re a good driver until they aren’t. Another curious aspect of traffic is the nonlinearity between the amount of traffic and the congestion that it leads to. What I mean is, if only 1% of all drivers were to use public transportation, that could lead to a reduction in traffic by more than 20%. Although not a bottleneck in the traditional sense, the convention of 9 to 5 office hours might have a lot to do with congestion as well.

In normal circumstances, in daily routine, traffic tends to form at similar times because everyone is on similar schedules. Everyone heading to work at roughly the same time has been notoriously bad for economies. With the recent pandemic and the wave of companies trying to get their work done online, you have to wonder what the long-term implications of this newfound flexibility will be on traffic.

While most offices will still be operated from physical spaces, even a slight reduction in the daily number of commuters could have a drastic effect on congestion and improve economies while doing so. And while the long-term changes might be positive for the most part, it doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Some studies have emerged stating that while there were indeed fewer accidents by volume, a higher percentage of them were fatal. Drivers were again guilty of feeling safer and were thereby less alert on emptier roads, which led to more speeding.

The psychological implications of feeling safe on the road can cause a chain reaction of decisions that ultimately make you less safe, which is another remarkable stat that doesn’t make sense at first glance. Sometimes the bottlenecks are even more obvious. For example, roads that are not wide enough to accommodate necessary volumes, unplanned infrastructure, or as in the case of São Paulo, a massive countrywide protest. These are some of the biggest causes of congestion on our roads today.

If we were somehow able to control these issues, however, would that mean the eradication of traffic forever? Well, if only things were that simple! In one of the more remarkable experiments by some Japanese physicists, you can see cars traveling in a circle completely devoid of any of the traditional bottlenecks. All they have to do is turn left. That's literally it. They are driving in a closed circular track—no intersections, no distractions. They are also asked to maintain a steady speed and a steady distance; traditional traffic advice. So it's not like the experiment is rigged to cause the drivers to make a mistake.

In fact, they're just asking them to drive normally, and sure enough, they start just fine. But after the experiment runs for a brief period, as time passes on, the human factor steps in. Some of the drivers have difficulty maintaining a steady speed or distance. They are either too close to the vehicle in front or the one behind. To correct this, they have to brake or accelerate.

As with most human drivers, they end up overcompensating. After all, better safe than sorry, right? Now, this causes the driver behind this car to stop as well. The results of all these reactions are further compounded by the reaction times of each of the other drivers. A sudden braking in front of a driver causes him to brake, and that causes the driver behind him to brake as well. Erratic braking emerges out of nowhere, and with it emerges a congested flow of traffic.

Before you know it, you're stuck in traffic where there shouldn't be traffic—it came out of nowhere. This is what is called a phantom traffic jam: out of nothing physical whatsoever, a traffic jam self-generates using only our reaction times. And often, it dissipates as organically as it emerges. Besides, you have to consider the fact that if even the most controlled simulations can lead to such a traffic jam, then the chaos of the real world only adds fuel to the fire.

Roads are not single-lane closed-off circular tracks. They are mazes of tarmac driven on by drivers that are using their phones, drivers that are in a hurry, drivers that are barely rested, drivers that probably shouldn’t be driving. Theoretically, the ripple effect of traffic jams could still be absorbed by maintaining a long enough gap between vehicles.

The more space you have between you and the car ahead of you, the more time you and the cars behind you have to react in time to brake smoothly and still keep going. It can be difficult to accept that the phantom traffic jam seemingly arises out of nothing, especially given the overall impact of traffic jams on the economy, our well-being, and the rest of the world, which brings us to traffic forecasting.

If you aren’t able to prevent traffic, maybe being aware of when it may occur is the next best thing. Right now, most of us use Google Maps to estimate traffic in a particular region. If you've ever used your phone as a GPS, you'll see areas that show up red as congested. Areas begin to form; Google uses Android phones to crowdsource data about numerous things, like the number of vehicles in a region and how fast they're moving. And if you've ever used an Android phone yourself, you've contributed to the pool of data too.

But it's still not necessarily forecasting a jam. It's merely telling you if one has already been formed, which is certainly useful but not a solution. Newer methods of forecasting are being developed with the use of machine learning and AI. Cameras mounted on signals and busy intersections are feeding data to a control center that is then regulating traffic signals across a given region. This is allowing for two things: one, to be able to predict traffic with as much as 90% accuracy, and two, they’ll be able to react to emerging congestions by temporarily closing off certain roads and opening others.

It's being tested in one of the most congested regions in the world—India—but the tests are still on a smaller scale. These systems are yet to see large-scale implementation, but there is a possibility that these forecasting systems will become obsolete before they even roll out. That's because of the emergence of self-driving cars. Think about it: what is at the core of some of the most unavoidable traffic jams? The human factor. It is the inability of human drivers to maintain a steady speed and distance, and self-driving cars can take that element right out of the equation.

Aside from being able to better prevent fatal accidents, I think another major aspect of how self-driving cars will change our roads for the better is by preventing congestion. If cars can communicate amongst themselves, lanes could be merged automatically, blind spots would no longer be a thing if you have 360° cameras on the car, and we could even get rid of signals and traffic lights since the cars would just communicate amongst themselves about when to stop and when to go. That would reduce a lot of the clutter in our cityscapes.

But what about the cars that are still driven by us humans? The thing is, the transition to 100% self-driving cars could be an extremely difficult one if we're not careful. We still have to factor in that in the near future, the roads will not be the automated utopia that we’re dreaming of. Rather, they'll be a bit of both—human-driven cars and self-driven cars, each adapting to one another.

If we're so busy building our infrastructure with driverless cars, we could forget about the very people that are supposed to be benefiting from it. After all, a self-driving car’s job will not only be to drive itself and communicate with other self-driving cars, but to also adapt to the unpredictability of human drivers—however many of them are still remaining.

Transportation has always been tied to civilization. Our ability to cooperate in large numbers, which is what led to the rise and sustenance of our civilization, has a lot to do with the ability to cover large distances sustainably. A large portion of that distance has been covered on roads. In fact, getting from A to B has a remarkable effect on our perception of the world and the decisions we take.

Aside from the obvious economic implications traffic has, it also makes the world seem like a larger place than it needs to be. People spend a disproportionate amount of valuable time out on the roads—time that you'll never get back. They also don’t meet each other as often, and a lot of the world’s wonders that surround us remain untouched, unexplored. Making sure that we explore them involves understanding traffic jams, and by extension, the minds of the humans that caused them.

Why do we dream? This is one of life's great unanswered questions. Given that we spend around six years of our lives in a dream state, it's no wonder people want to understand why we do it. Sure, there are theories and I’ll get to them, but there's no clear consensus on why we do it. No one really knows for sure, or do they? Dreams are strange to say the least and for many of us, they hold great significance—so much that we like to share them with others at length, if we can even remember them, and try to interpret their secret and hidden meanings.

So do they actually hold any real meaning? Well, I have some ideas. Before we get to some of the bigger questions, let's just look at what goes on inside the brain as our nighttime adventures take their course. While sleeping, we go through different cycles of the five stages of sleep. These are divided into REM sleep and non-REM sleep. REM simply means rapid eye movement; it explains itself, right? The first four stages are non-REM sleep; these are restorative and for the most part dreamless.

As we move through these initial stages, our brain activity slows. But about 90 minutes after we finally fall asleep, we hit stage five—REM sleep. This is when the dreaming really gets going. When we’re in this stage, the body is, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed. Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure rises, and brain activity returns to near-waking levels. The paralysis in REM sleep is caused by the release of glycine, an amino acid, from the brain stem onto your brain’s motor neurons.

It's suggested that this paralysis is nature's way of preventing us from acting out our dreams—and that's probably for the best. The limbic system is a pretty primitive part of the brain that deals with emotions and is very active during REM sleep. It’s made up of the amygdala, which is mostly associated with fear; the hippocampus, which is heavily involved in the formation of long-term memory; and the cingulate gyrus, which is involved in our physical reactions to situations.

Break down the roles of these bizarre brain structures, and we can start to paint a picture of why our dreams often take the bizarre and scary forms they do. Couple this with the fact that the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that deals with logic and self-control—isn't really active during REM sleep, and things might just start to make sense. But understanding it isn't enough to prevent these nightmares from happening.

It can also happen while you're awake. Sleep paralysis is a terrifying concept. Like I just mentioned, when you fall asleep, your brain doesn't completely shut off. In order to prevent you from acting out your dreams while you sleep, the brain releases chemicals that leave you paralyzed. This paralysis is supposed to be lifted as soon as you wake up, but sometimes it doesn't, and that’s where you get sleep paralysis.

You wake up; you’re aware of your consciousness, but you can't move. It feels as if there's a massive weight on your body, preventing you from actually waking up. Sleep paralysis often causes dreams while you’re awake. While undergoing sleep paralysis, you’ll often see things standing in the corners of your room or on the ceiling or even closer. Luckily, this usually goes away pretty quickly.

So is it just biology? Is that really the answer? Is there no secret window into our psyche? Everyone at one time or another has wondered what their dreams mean. Some believe that dreams have no meaning and serve no function; others believe that they're one of the most important things that human biology has allowed to happen.

There are in fact many theories of why we dream and what purpose it serves. I can't really go any further without mentioning Freud. His theories of dreams are probably the most well-known around the world. It focuses on the content of the dreams themselves as an explanation of the function of dreaming. German psychiatrist Freud theorized that dreams represented a window into the unconscious mind—a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are beyond our conscious awareness, the bulk of the iceberg submerged deep underwater.

Most of the contents of the unconscious mind are supposedly unacceptable or unpleasant, representing feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. When we're sleeping, the forces that keep these feelings in check are weakened, allowing us to live out our desires and even fears through our dreams. Freud strongly believed that by exploring dreams, people could increase self-awareness and gain insight into their unconscious self that would then help them deal with problems in their day-to-day lives.

He also argued that the true meaning of our dreams is hidden within their actual content and that interpretation is needed to understand how they relate to our unconscious fears or desires. Many of you watching might even agree with this, despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence to back this account—it is pretty much unfalsifiable.

Even though more modern explanations now exist that are better informed due to a deeper understanding of how the brain works, 20th century Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung also believed that dreams allow us to tap into the unconscious but argued that it was a collective unconscious that we were able to access through our dreams. According to Jung, this is a theoretical repository of information shared by everyone, in which certain symbols and dreams have meanings that are similar for all people, regardless of culture or location.

This could explain why so many of us share variations on common themes in our dreams, like falling, being chased, or our teeth falling out. Any of these sound familiar? Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams, and even today, the practice plays an important role in various forms of psychotherapy, which is surprising given that there is only a little evidence so far that shows understanding of interpreting dreams has a positive impact on mental health.

This could be because evidence also shows that people tend not to attribute equal importance to all dreams. Motivated reasoning comes into play; people are more likely to view dreams that confirm their waking beliefs and desires as meaningful compared to dreams that contradict them. But just for fun, let's take a look at some interpretations of the most common dream themes.

We've all had the falling dream, right? Well, this could be a warning from your subconscious and is common in people who are having a major life problem with work or relationships. It could be an indication of insecurities, instability, or worries. You might be feeling overwhelmed and out of control in some situation in your waking life. This type of dream could also reflect a sense of failure or inferiority in some circumstance or situation.

It's typically suggested that showing up to work or school naked represents vulnerability and anxiety. Clearly, research has demonstrated that this dream is common in people who have accepted a promotion, gone off to a new job, or who are coming into public view. Others argue that it means you may be hiding something and are afraid that others can see right through you.

Despite the nightmare’s feel of dreaming that someone or something is chasing you, it can be considered a positive message and a little prompt from the unconscious to encourage the dreamer to face a problem they've been avoiding. It's suggested that who or what is chasing you and how far away they are is important. These common themes barely touch the surface of the complexity and endless variety and variations of dreams.

We know dream interpretation can be entertaining, but there are definitely more contemporary theories about the purpose of dreaming that are probably important to consider too. A better understanding of brain function and activity has allowed for the development of neurobiological theories in recent years, one of which is the activation synthesis theory—not quite as intriguing as the psychoanalytic approach. In fact, it's pretty boring. This theory simply rejects the idea that dreams mean anything at all, which is disappointing.

They could be merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Activation synthesis suggests that humans can create dream stories after they wake up in a natural attempt to make sense of the absurd. I kind of get it, but there are some holes in this theory too, though. The main one being that there is vast documentation of the realistic aspects of human dreaming and evidence that dreams do reflect real life events that are important or prominent for the dreamer.

For example, a study in 2006 asked women who were going through a divorce to report the degree to which their former spouses were on their minds over a 5-month period. These same women were awakened during REM sleep on three nights and asked to provide a detailed account of their dream content. A positive correlation was found between the degree to which women thought about their former spouses during waking hours and the number of times their former spouses appeared as a dream character.

In another study, researchers demonstrated that dreaming can help solve complex mental tasks. Participants were much better—10 times is better, in fact—at getting through a complex 3D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze before their second attempt. This strongly suggests that certain memory processes happen exclusively during sleep and that our dreams are not only a signal that these processes are taking place, but seem to be crucial to better performance.

So unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, the dreams your mind can create have the potential to lay out limitless scenarios to work through problems and produce solutions that you may not have even considered while awake. So it turns out that dreams can be influenced by pre-sleep emotions and can be really helpful for problem solving.

So that’s another theory put to bed. The continual activation theory proposes that the conscious and unconscious mind must remain continually active in order to maintain proper brain function. In this context, dreams function to consolidate working memories into long-term memories, and dreaming is simply an incidental result of the brain's need for continual activation.

The expectation fulfillment theory explains dreaming as a way to release emotional arousals that haven't been expressed during the day. This frees up space in the brain to deal with the emotional arousals of the next day and allows instinctive urges to stay intact. In effect, the action we wanted to take is completed in a metaphorical form, and this prevents a false memory from being created because we perceive the action as a dream instead.

So dreams are metaphors for unfulfilled arousals and expectations, but because sleep does not involve the same stimulation of waking life, dreams draw on memory instead of motor or sensory activity. It is this process that apparently generates the unusual imagery, narratives, and thought patterns we experience in dreams. This explanation has received validation anecdotally through people's personal experiences, but the same old story, it is essentially unfalsifiable.

I could go on with the theories for days, but you get the point—no one really knows. It's very difficult to disprove most theories. Maybe some of the more fascinating dream phenomena can shed light on the function of dreaming. The term "lucid dreaming" was coined by Van Eden way back in 1913. Although people were writing about this kind of experience as far back as the 1800s, it describes a state in which the dreamer is aware they're asleep and sometimes has the ability to control events and actions.

It most commonly occurs during late-stage REM sleep and essentially allows your conscious mind to control something your unconscious mind normally controls. Lucid dreamers report being able to fly, taste, smell, and touch pretty much anything they want. It's more common than you think, with about 55% of people having experienced the state at one time or another.

For starters, participants were asked to perform specific ocular movements if they became lucid while dreaming. By ocular movements, I mean moving your eyes—that's literally it! This is possible, actually, and it's kind of ingenious because eye muscles are free to move during REM sleep. By determining exactly when the sleeper was lucid dreaming, researchers were able to take recordings of brain activity during the state.

The evidence shows some interesting and specific brain activity that represents a mixture of both waking and normal REM sleep. It also seems that the brain undergoes a specific altered state of physiology during lucid dreaming that constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness. Studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex, as well as the frontal, parietal, and temporal zones become activated.

These areas of the brain are responsible for higher order cognitive functioning, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, planning, inhibition, abstract reasoning—the list goes on. So besides being quite entertaining, why do it? Can we learn anything from it? Some advocate many potential benefits, including boosting creativity and confidence, reducing stress, and as a possible therapeutic technique to treat nightmares, PTSD, and other mental health disorders.

Others view the practice as more spiritual and approach it the way they would in meditation—with the intention of increasing a person's sense of the vastness of reality, opening up new realms of discovery. It's even been suggested that some advanced meditation practitioners are able to become conscious of what is beyond the dream state—the deep formlessness of delta sleep. This is questionable at best and in need of much further study.

Given our current relatively limited understanding of the brain, it’s hard right now to understand how it could be possible to be conscious of deep sleep because the brain is in a far more synchronized and deeply unconscious state compared to almost any other state of consciousness. But hey, who knows? Despite the evidence, lucid dreaming remains a controversial topic. Alternative explanations have been suggested for the phenomenon.

It may be that lucid dreamers are in a daydream-like state of semi-wakefulness, or are they dreaming normally but have a memory of the dream and believe that they were conscious and directing the dream when they were not? It could be a sleep state dissociation in which the person is both awake and asleep in the dream state at the same time. I suppose it's even possible that people aren't reporting true experiences, but I personally don't think this is what's going on.

If lucid dreaming is as real as the evidence suggests, I'm left wondering if dreaming serves serves any of the purposes I've already talked about, such as accessing the unconscious, acting out instinctive urges, solving problems; or whether they're simply electrical impulses keeping the brain from shutting down. How does being a conscious witness affect how they play out? Does it hinder or help? Is it a state of heightened reflective consciousness that humans are meant to access so that we can enlighten ourselves about our life, our world, and our purpose?

Or does lucid dreaming stand alone in its function to serve an entirely different purpose? Have you ever dreamt of an event only to find out that it happened in your waking life? It's a weird occurrence. Precognitive dreams are dreams that appear to predict the future through a sixth sense, and there are some pretty famous examples of this happening. When the Titanic sank in 1912, hundreds of people came forward with reports of psychic dreams about it sinking.

It was even possible to validate at least 19 of them, including a date-stamped letter. Several people apparently canceled tickets and decided not to travel based on their dreams. Are all 19 of these people psychic? Well, no. In fact, in this case, it's likely to be simple math and the power of probability. Think about it: there are 7.2 billion people on this planet, each having an average of five dreams per night, whether you remember them or not.

In turn, those dreams support multiple common dream themes, including events like sinking ships and airplane crashes. When all of this is considered, it's highly likely that many thousands of people will dream about a sinking ship on any given night—probably tonight too. Now adding a bit of unconscious insight and media suggestion for good measure, the Titanic was the world's largest ship on its maiden voyage and was in the headlines before it even undocked. The media had called it “unsinkable.”

The power of suggestion is immense, and it's no surprise that all this news attention and maybe even some nerves about taking such a huge trip infiltrated more than just a few dreams. So the next time you dream about an event that has nothing to do with you, when it comes true, it's probably just a