But don't get me wrong about my scepticism of all spoonbending, levitating, synchronizing, sawing the woman in half type 'phenomena'. They illustrate not a miraculous physical world, but a miraculous mental world, in which the conscious search for logic meets the inherent evolutionary distortions of a strangely-wired mind, combined with neural biochemical metaprogramming.
It's what art is about. You can't be me, I'm taken
Spoonbending etc. I see as charlatan nonsense as it involves capturing the audience and controlling the scene. Which can be fun, I think, the willing suspension of disbelief. They do say, though, that once you see the stage filled with e.g. wires for the levitation trick, it puts most people off magic for life, like those Penn and Teller (?) programs where they debunk magic tricks. I prefer sleight of hand, though it takes years of juggling cards between your fingers...I do know a good card trick, just the one, but it usually works. Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
An example of the former is endorphins, an example of the latter is GABA. GABA is biochemical used by inhibitory neurons to control active neurons. Gaba runs our after a circadian shift of work and needs to be replenished (cue protein factories) This is done as we sleep.
If you don't get enough sleep, you don't get enough GABA, and the inhibitory function is weak. You will eventually start to hallucinate, as anyone who has been up for 30 hours can attest. You can't be me, I'm taken
Go watch some ducks for a while. Ducks have four active programs - random waddle, mate (but only in spring), find food, fight. (And there's also sleep as a rest mode.)
Ducks switch between programs very obviously, because they have very short attention spans. It's fun to look at.
Humans work the same way. We have a slightly wider range of responses, a longer attention span, and the self-referential ability to model actions before performing them. But the principle is the same.
People who lack self-awareness and have no idea about metaprogramming will switch between responses in the same way that a duck does. All it takes to switch modes is the right kind of stimulus. This makes them very predictable, very boring, and very easy to manipulate.
A lot of politics and economics is based on the practical application of this principle.
It should be at the root of any discussion of what democracy actually is. You can't be me, I'm taken
