Sunday, November 24, 2013

Back in Post-Synaptic Black

Well.. it has certainly been a long time since I wrote anything here. Why the long face? Or long delay as it were... I had started this blog as a way of exploring my own qualitative experience of a lifetime of lucid dreams with the express purpose of breaking out of the nexus of Freudian psychoanalysis, by looking at dreams through their neural underpinnings.

....and there in lied the problem. I knew scantily little about neuroscience, so this (excuse the pun) dream of mine was quite short lived. More so: In my express desire to break from Freudian 'fortune cookie' interpretation I felt I was dooming myself to simply reinvent the wheel and repeat Freud's mistakes. Well, time has a way of showing us all what we always wanted to know. Three years on, a hell of a lot more Neuroscience later, this project of mine may actually work.

I also happened to stumble upon the works of one Allan Hobson and one Kenji Doya, who form the most crucial basis for my current neuroscientific thinking. Both have taught me to address the complexities of neural basis of cognition, to appropriate the timeless battle-cry of the ethologists; by thinking of the brain 'using its own language'. And what language is that? None that I can speak, but some of the symbols are starting to look familiar and I think I am working out a little basic syntax here and there.

Thus, I can with some misplaced confidence actually try make a guess or two about what is going on in these dreams, and my mission comes full circle. Stay tuned, much more to come!!