Hi everyone!
My username, TheUniversalSigh, is reference to one of my favorite songs -- Bloom by Radiohead. I used to have lukewarm feelings towards the album that the song is on, The King of Limbs, but after giving it more listens I now appreciate the themes of rebirth and cyclicity. Not to mention the beautiful sounds!
If you look at my profile avatar you will see a couple of pretty, colorful picture. This is a network connectivity image of the Default Mode Network inside of a human brain. The DMN, although I’m sure many of you are somewhat familiar, is a network of interacting brain structures that are active when we aren’t doing much at all. It involves your memories, your fantasies of the future, your perceptions of others, your autobiographical information, and quite a bit more. It, in some sense, has been pointed to as a kind of neural correlate of the “self” (Andrews-Hanna, 2012). I bring this up because I am an undergraduate student involved in some research on the topic. Also, there is some new research indicating that the use of LSD can de-correlate DMN connectivity (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016). For the past several years the topic of psychedelics and their interactions with our brain and mind has been a source of fascination for me.
However, outside my field of study, I find myself often thinking about moral philosophy and ethics. How should we treat the one we care about? How should we treat everyone? Non-human animals? What does it mean to live a good life? What are the limits of free speech (if any)? Answering these questions and many others may prove to be impossible, they’ve certainly proven to be difficult, but there is a value in trying to answer them!
So that’s some basic information about my interests!
Lately I’ve been getting a sense that at every, or last at many, moments reality could just evaporate and become totally meaningless with just a few turning of my neural knobs. That things make less and less sense the more you pull them apart. It’s a bit unsettling, has anyone else experienced this?
References:
Andrews-Hanna, Jessica R. (2012-06-01). "The brain's default network and its adaptive role in internal mentation". The Neuroscientist: A Review Journal Bringing Neurobiology, Neurology and Psychiatry. 18 (3): 251–270.
Carhart-Harris, Robin L.; Muthukumaraswamy, Suresh; Roseman, Leor; Kaelen, Mendel; Droog, Wouter; Murphy, Kevin; Tagliazucchi, Enzo; Schenberg, Eduardo E.; Nest, Timothy. "Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113: 4853–4858.