Harmonic nature of awareness

A key characteristic of human brain activity is coherent, spatially distributed oscillations forming behavior-dependent brain networks. However, a fundamental principle underlying these networks remains unknown.

In this blog we are gonna discuss the way our mind perceives the world around us and this blog post is an abstract of a very mathematical oriented article written by Selen Atasoy, Isaac Donnelly & Joel Pearson.

So, What are harmonic waves?

Any oscillations travelling following the equations of sine/cosine functions are harmonic waves.

Like as shown below.

So, what does the brain have anything to do with harmonic waves?

The brain's fundamental cell is called neuron, which are like wires forming a network inside your brain and actually send and receive electrical signals. Now the question arises,

"Okay electric signals are easy, it's like you close the circuit and the bulb glows. What does that have anything to do with the sine/cosine waves?"

The problem is when you have so many input signals, from your ears, constantly hearing noises and eyes, watching something and your skin feeling the air and clothes around you. There is a certain need to control these flow of signals so that our brain can process these signals and this has to be done so rapidly that there is no loss or latency of information that we receive. 

An image with lots of signals and with no order or processing is just noise. 

We will talk about speed later, now let's focus on how our brain maintains the flow of control of signals. 

So, first of all Division of work

As we know, the brain is divided into several parts. Each part has a function to process signals received from a single sense organ. 

Second Regularization of Power

Also it regulates its processing power for efficiency and smooth transitions. If we plot activity of the brain(vertical axis) VS time( in mili-seconds) graph(on horizontal axis) , it may look something like this.

And by using Fourier transform equations we can break down this complex wave into simple harmonic waves.

For the sake of simplicity let us consider only one part of the brain and one  wave that we  obtained from fourier analysis.

We are products of thousands of years of evolution and our brain is optimised for living on earth. 

But still it's not perfect. The lights in our homes receive 50Hz A.C current and they switch on/off 50 times a second. Our brain cannot process the information so fast, so it appears as a continuous glowing bulb. 

Another good example is the negligence of latency of audio we experience while we watch Television. 

And since we all have different response times, that means we all have slightly different brain activity harmonics from each other but when it comes to other species like cats and dogs, these different harmonics affect their response time by a significant amount. 

The reflexes also depend on body size, smaller animals and insects have high reflexes 'cause the electric pulse has to cover a small distance and their brain could react rapidly. On the counterpart large animals have slow reflexes, and that's the reason elephants are scared of rats cause they can't react to rat's fast movement. And that's why we can't catch a fly easily. 

The brain's activity is affected by a  number of factors and the most important one is hormones and chemicals. 

Drugs can tweek with the frequencies and amplitude of brain activity waves and affect our stimulus response. 

Some drugs (that claim to help you with living in the moment) may decrease the frequency of brain activity so none of the fore-mentioned latencies occur and the brain can process each signal from sense organs. 

Some drugs (painkillers, anaesthesia etc.) increase the frequency of the same. So that brain does not get enough time to analyse each signal and ignores some of them. 

Conclusion:

I really don't know how to put an end to this post. Because the list of things our brain does is never ending. But to derive some conclusion, I'd say that the concept of time as we know is fictional, the definition of a second is different for a rabbit, elephant or a dog. It even varies with the state of mind the organism is in.When we are sad and depressed we have the feeling that the flow of time slows down. Every hour seems like an eternity, as if time had stopped. In contrast, the feeling of stress seems to accelerate the flow of time.It may seem strange to speak about the reality of time since humans are not equipped with any specific sensory receptor enabling them to capture temporal information.

Our curious minds constantly try to find the core of reality but we have barely scratched the surface, and the answer to the question, what is real and what is not, remains unknown.