Perhaps creativity is a function of how little we know. There is this guy who keeps popping up on my radar—name David Eagleman. We share an interest in time. I credit a physician for giving me the metaphor of what we don’t know we don’t know by once saying in passing, “A fish will be the last to know it is in water.” This morphed into a question posed in our first year class on the Time Dimension, “A fish is to water as humans are to_____________?” An Eagleman quote: “We’re stuck in time like fish in water.”
Eagleman is a neuroscientist by trade and his experiments on how the brain processes time are unique. For a taste of Eagleman see a 2011 profile in the New Yorker entitled The Possibilian, a word Eagleman made up–which morphed into a movement he is proud to lead on a road between what he labels as the “certainties called atheism and religious belief.” He has a talent for making hard things easy to understand while giving you a headache at the same time. He is one of those meteors that enters the earth’s atmosphere and leaves debris in the back yard of your mind.
As reported in the New Yorker profile, Eagleman wears a Russian wristwatch to work though it’s been broken for months. It turns out that all the scientists in his lab wear broken watches. Eagleman noted that, in his experience, scientists are often drawn to things that bedevil the–citing a lab that studies nicotine receptors where all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control where all the scientists are overweight.
This small piece of Eagleman observational debris is a wonderful confirmation of the metaphor work we engage in at Kabbalah Experience—what in Kabbalah study we call the connection between the story (metaphor) and the reality HCG Diet we manifest. In this case, what a scientist takes interest in is a reflection of the story of their (personal) life. Eagleman also has a deep and abiding interest in story-making; he argues that our brains are continuously creating stories about reality. Through his investigations as a neuroscientist he calls into question what the present moment can possibly be for us humans as the present moment from the perspective of the function of the brain is inevitably a reconfiguration (story) of the past (even if admittedly that past may be only milliseconds old).
I am writing this blog in the early hours of Friday morning—it is pitch black except for the brightly lit face of my laptop—now an old friend, who in computer years is about as old as I am in human years. During the last couple of days I have been off the “grid” living the holiday of Shavuot and as often happens, holidays brings me into reflection about community. And while I was reflecting on community I received an ‘unsolicited’ e-mail about guess who? David Eagleman.
I imagine Eagleman, a man I may never meet in person, up, as well, in the light of a laptop, typing some debris that will fall into the backyard of my brain. Eagleman points out that there are more connections in a cubic millimeter of brain tissue than stars in the Milky Way.
I imagine other words that could start movements such as Impossibilian or Probabilian. What I do experience is a neural net, not related to grey matter, which David Eagleman and other neuroscientists have yet to chart (and probably won’t be charting very soon). This neural net also consists of trillions of connections—deep connectivity of souls that form a community that are related to “light matter” in which all its members don’t smoke, overeat or wear watches.
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