By Sonia Barrett | Source

I have written and spoken about this subject a number of times over the years, each time returning to it with an expanded awareness and, inevitably, more questions. I have always been fascinated by how our bodies change in stages, puberty being one such example of the cycles at work—this counting, in effect.

I think something worth keeping in mind is that life is counting—or, perhaps more accurately, the experience we call life appears to unfold through an extraordinary architecture of cycles.A millisecond, a second, an hour, a day, a month and a year are measurements we have assigned to something that is actually occurring. Long before clocks hung on walls or calendars sat on desks, the planet was rotating, orbiting the Sun, moving through seasons and participating in larger astronomical cycles.

Historically, even the second was defined as a fraction of Earth’s rotational day. Today we use the far greater precision of atomic oscillations to define it, but our earliest measurements of time emerged from observing recurring astronomical movement.

So, when we say that a year has passed, we are not merely acknowledging numbers printed on a calendar. Earth has actually completed another orbit around the Sun. A day corresponds to Earth’s rotation relative to the Sun. Seasons emerge largely because of Earth’s axial tilt as it travels through that orbit.

We are counting movement. We are counting cycles.

And biology appears to have incorporated these cycles into itself.

The Cycles Within Us

The rotation of Earth produces the recurring environmental pattern of light and darkness, and organisms have evolved internal circadian clocks capable of anticipating this approximately 24-hour cycle. These clocks influence sleep and wakefulness, hormone release, metabolism, body temperature, cardiovascular function and numerous other physiological processes.

Even when external time cues are temporarily removed, our internal clocks continue oscillating.

That alone is extraordinary when we really think about it.

The planet moves, the environment cycles, and biology has developed mechanisms that anticipate that movement.

Then there are cycles within cycles.

Sleeping and waking. Hormonal pulses. Menstruation and ovulation. Reproductive maturation. Pregnancy and birth. Cellular repair and replacement. Development, puberty and aging. Cortisol rises and falls according to a daily rhythm. Melatonin responds strongly to the light-dark environment. The menstrual cycle operates over a much longer biological rhythm.

Pregnancy provides another remarkable example. We casually speak of nine months of gestation, yet hidden inside those months are enormously complex sequences of gene expression, cellular differentiation, hormonal signaling, neurological development and physiological adaptation.

Perhaps we have become so accustomed to biological cycles that we no longer recognize how remarkable they are.

Something is maintaining timing.

Something is detecting change.

Something is coordinating countless processes occurring at different speeds while producing what appears to us as one continuous living experience.

Who Is Keeping Track?

This leads me to a question I find much more interesting:

How does the human organism integrate all of these different cycles into one coherent experience?

Increasingly, neuroscience points toward the brain as a major part of that integration.

The brain is not simply sitting inside the skull waiting for something to happen and then responding. Contemporary neuroscience increasingly describes it as an anticipatory organ.

It continuously receives information from outside the body and from within it. It monitors temperature, blood chemistry, cardiovascular activity, hormonal signaling, immune activity, energy requirements, visceral sensations, light, sound and countless other variables while drawing upon previous experience to determine what all of this information might mean.

The concept of allostasis is particularly useful here. Rather than maintaining the body by waiting for disturbances and correcting them afterward, the brain anticipates physiological needs and helps allocate resources accordingly.

This means regulation is partly predictive.

The brain must somehow reconcile what has happened before, what is happening now and what it predicts is likely to happen next.

Light changes.

Temperature changes.

Hormones fluctuate.

Glucose rises and falls.

The heart accelerates.

Cortisol changes throughout the day.

Memories provide information from the past.

The senses provide information about the present.

And somehow these streams are integrated into the singular experience we casually call now.

Perhaps the brain is therefore not merely an organ of thought.

Perhaps it is better understood as an extraordinary integrative network and reality interpreter.

But What Do We Mean by “Life”?

This is where I think we need to make another distinction.

When I use the word life, what exactly am I describing?

Perhaps what I am really describing is life as experienced and interpreted through the human lens.

Human beings have collectively developed definitions around what constitutes life, normality, aging, health, consciousness, time and even reality itself. These definitions are necessary. Without sufficient perceptual agreement, collective human functioning would become extraordinarily difficult.

But usefulness does not necessarily make a model complete.

What we recognize as the obvious characteristics of human existence may represent the range of experience available through the biological and perceptual architecture we inherited.

And this leads me toward a much more provocative possibility:

What if human beings are streaming a remarkably persistent common perceptual program?

I don’t mean a computer program in the literal sense. I mean an inherited biological architecture—genes, sensory systems, nervous systems, developmental patterns, survival strategies and predispositions—which produces a sufficiently similar model of reality for members of our species to share an environment.

Consider how limited our conscious sensory window already is.

We do not see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We do not hear every frequency of sound. We don’t consciously perceive most of the molecular, electromagnetic and microscopic activity occurring around and within us.

Yet none of these phenomena cease to exist because our ordinary sensory systems fail to present them to consciousness.

So already, human reality and reality itself cannot automatically be assumed to be identical things.

We experience a biologically filtered version.

Is the Brain Creating Reality—or Interpreting It?

Predictive processing makes this question even more interesting.

The brain does not appear simply to produce an exact internal photograph of whatever exists outside of us. Contemporary predictive-processing models propose that it continuously generates predictions about the causes of incoming sensory information and modifies those predictions when the incoming data sufficiently contradict them.

In other words, perception involves an ongoing negotiation between what is arriving and what the brain already expects.

Perhaps the question is not whether reality is real or imaginary, but what exactly we mean by reality in the first place. What we experience as reality may be a convincing interpretation—a biologically useful rendering of something far more complex than the human perceptual system allows us to experience directly.

Einstein’s observation that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” reminds us that even some of the most fundamental features of experience may not be quite what they appear to be.

Our experience of reality is interpreted—and perhaps the persistence of that interpretation is precisely what makes it feel so unquestionably real.

Even the word “real” deserves closer examination. In The Holographic Canvas, I explored real as a “realm of focus”—a point of focus—and drew attention to the relationship between the words real, realm, and reality. I continue to question whether what we call “real” describes some final state of existence, or simply the realm of experience upon which our human perceptual system is presently focused.

It means that our experience of reality is interpreted.

And if perception depends partly upon prediction, another question immediately follows:

How much of what we experience is determined by what is present, and how much is shaped by what the brain has become accustomed to expecting?

This becomes especially interesting when we consider trauma.

A nervous system shaped by prolonged danger may continue anticipating danger even when the original environment has disappeared. The organism isn’t necessarily responding only to what is occurring now. It may be responding partly to a prediction constructed from what repeatedly occurred before.

The past becomes information.

Information becomes prediction.

Prediction influences physiology.

Physiology influences perception.

And perception provides new information reinforcing the model.

That can become a remarkably convincing loop.

The Inheritance of Expectation

Now take this beyond the individual.

Genes do not contain philosophical beliefs about reality. But genes participate in constructing the sensory systems, nervous systems, endocrine mechanisms and developmental programs through which reality becomes available to us.

Culture then adds another extraordinary layer.

From birth, we inherit language, categories, beliefs, expectations and explanations from people whose own perceptions were shaped by previous generations.

Biological inheritance meets cultural inheritance.

Culture influences experience.

Experience shapes neural predictions.

Prediction reinforces familiarity.

Familiarity becomes expectation.

And expectation can begin to look remarkably like reality itself.

So when generations of human beings agree that something is normal, inevitable or impossible, we should at least be willing to ask:

Are we observing an absolute boundary, or an extraordinarily persistent human model?

Aging Gives Us an Interesting Clue

Aging provides a fascinating example of why such questions matter.

For generations, much of the physiological deterioration associated with old age was regarded largely as the inevitable wear and tear of living long enough.

Geroscience has begun challenging the simplicity of that assumption.

Researchers now investigate biological mechanisms associated with aging—including cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, epigenetic alteration, altered nutrient sensing, loss of proteostasis and other processes—as potentially modifiable contributors to age-related disease and functional decline.

This does not mean science has demonstrated that human aging can simply be reversed, nor is aging universally classified as a disease. But researchers continue to investigate and work toward interventions that may slow, modify, or potentially reverse specific biological processes associated with aging.

But something enormously important has changed:

The question changed.

Biology did not suddenly begin aging differently because scientists reconsidered it.

The interpretation changed from this simply happens toward what mechanisms cause this, and can those mechanisms be altered?

Once the assumption changed, entirely different experiments became reasonable. I have questioned the matter of aging since I was a child, and what I do know is that the mechanics of biological function—and the mechanics underlying all of life—do not wait for scientific discovery. These functions, and whatever underlies the orchestration of life, are already in effect, whether we have discovered, measured, or explained them yet or not.

That fascinates me because it raises a larger question:

How many other human limitations are waiting for us to change the question?

Part 2

Are We Rehearsing the Human Experience?

The brain is extraordinarily adaptive.

Neuroplasticity allows neural systems to reorganize according to experience. Repeated behaviors become increasingly efficient. Frequently used neural pathways become easier to recruit. Predictions based upon successful previous experience become increasingly useful.

This is brilliant from the standpoint of survival.

But adaptation has another side.

What happens when yesterday’s successful adaptation becomes tomorrow’s limitation?

A brain designed to predict efficiently has little reason to reconstruct reality from scratch every morning. It uses what it already knows.

And perhaps this means humans can become caught inside extraordinarily persistent repetitions—not necessarily because those repetitions represent the full range of human possibility, but because our nervous systems have become exceptionally good at predicting and reproducing what has previously worked.

Trauma demonstrates this dramatically, but I wonder whether subtler versions operate throughout ordinary human life.

Our expectations about aging.

Our expectations about capability.

Our expectations about identity.

Our expectations about what the body can and cannot do.

Our expectations about reality itself.

How much of human experience is adaptive behavior that is continuously being rehearsed until it is no longer recognized as adaptation? But Is the Brain Creating the Cycles—or Reading Them?

The brain doesn’t cause Earth to rotate.

It doesn’t create sunlight, gravity, seasons or the astronomical environment in which the organism developed.

Yet biology contains mechanisms capable of synchronizing internal processes with recurring environmental information.

Circadian biology provides an obvious example. Light entering the eye helps synchronize the brain’s master circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which contributes to coordinating rhythms throughout the body.

There is an undeniable conversation occurring between environment and biology.

And perhaps conversation is a better word than influence.

When we ask whether the cosmos influences human beings, the language itself can create an artificial separation as though there is the universe over there and the human being over here.

But we are physically constructed from material produced through cosmic history. Carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron and other elements within the human body have histories extending far beyond the existence of our species.

We didn’t arrive from somewhere outside the universe and get placed into it.

We didn’t arrive from somewhere outside the universe and get placed into it.

At the very least, our biology and the processes that sustain its function are configurations of the same material and forces operating within this larger cosmic system.

Perhaps interconnectedness should therefore be the starting assumption, while the mechanisms and limits of that interconnectedness remain legitimate questions.

What Haven’t We Learned to Detect?

This brings me to another distinction I consider essential.

Science interprets nature through what can presently be observed, measured, reproduced and tested.

That is precisely what gives science its enormous power.

But what can presently be measured should not automatically be mistaken for the boundary of what exists.

Our instruments have repeatedly changed what humans are capable of detecting.

Microorganisms existed before microscopes.

Radio waves existed before radio receivers.

X-rays existed before Wilhelm Röntgen detected them.

Subatomic particles did not appear when we developed instruments capable of revealing their effects.

Our access to the information changed.

This is why I don’t see established scientific conclusions as places where curiosity should necessarily stop. They are often platforms from which better questions become possible.

Conclusive deductions are essential. They allow us to build upon what has already been demonstrated.

But is there ever really an end to the story?

Or is reality an endless rabbit hole in which every answer simply gives us a more sophisticated position from which to ask the next question?

Part 3

The Value of the Outrageous Question

This is where I believe science and curiosity sometimes become unnecessarily separated.

Science requires evidence before something can responsibly be presented as established knowledge.

Curiosity does not require permission to formulate the hypothesis.

There is an enormous difference between making an unsupported claim and asking an unsupported question.

Hypotheses necessarily exist before the evidence capable of confirming or rejecting them. Human discovery has repeatedly depended upon people willing to entertain possibilities that appeared unreasonable within the prevailing model.

My questions did not begin with my degree in neuroscience. If anything, studying neuroscience has provided another lens through which to examine and, in some instances, find support for questions and possibilities I had been exploring long before entering academia.

The more we learn about the brain, the less interested I become in using neuroscience to define where thinking must stop, or in restricting curiosity to what academia has already given us permission to consider.

I am interested in using what we know to discover where the next question begins.

I am not particularly concerned with being right about every speculation.

I am interested in asking questions large enough to disturb assumptions.

What happens if we interrupt deeply rehearsed predictions?

What happens when the organism receives information inconsistent with what it has spent decades expecting?

Can perception itself alter the physiological information being generated by the body?

How much of what we identify as biological limitation is fixed architecture, and how much remains adaptive?

And if the human brain evolved primarily to help an organism successfully navigate reality rather than reveal every dimension of reality to conscious awareness, what might exist beyond the perceptual model that has proven sufficient for our survival?

These are not conclusions. They are invitations.

The Reality Interpreter

This brings me back to the brain.

If the brain continuously integrates signals from the body, information from the environment, memories from the past and predictions about the future, then the experience we call the present moment is already an extraordinary synthesis.

And perhaps this has implications for some of the most interesting states of human consciousness.

Trauma.

Meditation.

Dreaming.

Sleep deprivation.

Hormonal transitions.

Pregnancy.

The postpartum state.

Altered states of consciousness.

Each, in very different ways, can change the relationship between internal information, sensory information, memory, attention, prediction and perception.

This raises a question that I think deserves much deeper investigation:

What happens to our experience of reality when the regulatory systems ordinarily maintaining that coherent interpretation are significantly altered?

The question becomes particularly interesting during profound biological transitions such as childbirth, when endocrine, immune, metabolic, circadian and neurological systems must undergo substantial recalibration.

Could changes within that integrative machinery change not reality itself, but the boundaries through which an individual experiences it?

And if so, what exactly are those boundaries?

Cycles Within Cycles

I return finally to where I began.

Movement.

Cycles.

Information.

Earth rotates.

Earth orbits.

Light and darkness alternate.

Seasons change.

Biological clocks oscillate.

Hormones rise and fall.

Cells signal.

Neural networks predict.

Bodies adapt.

Human beings create explanations for what they observe and then build cultures around those explanations.

Perhaps life as experienced through the human lens is an extraordinary nesting of cycles within cycles, predictions within predictions and adaptations within adaptations.

Science gives us increasingly sophisticated ways of observing these relationships.

Metaphysics allows us to ask what those observations might ultimately mean.

I don’t believe the two need to be enemies.

Science can tell us what the evidence currently allows us to demonstrate.

Metaphysical and philosophical inquiry can keep us from mistaking the edge of today’s evidence for the edge of possibility.

And perhaps the more interesting question is no longer simply:

What is reality?

Perhaps it is:

How much information is the human biological system integrating to construct the coherent experience we call reality and what information might exist beyond what this particular human perceptual model has learned to recognize?

If adaptation is one of the fundamental strategies through which human beings have survived and evolved, perhaps our next adaptation requires something rather unusual:

Becoming conscious of the predictions we have inherited.

Questioning the realities we continuously rehearse.

And developing the courage to ask what else the human organism might become.