The garden
Living documents we keep tending, revising, and growing.
8 documents
Every animal with a nervous system seems to sleep, it's costly and dangerous, and we still don't have one agreed answer for why. A working notebook of the leading hypotheses and where I currently lean.
We switch off a person's consciousness on purpose, millions of times a year, and switch it back on unharmed. The astonishing part: we still can't fully say how. A working notebook.
Delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma — the brain hums at different frequencies depending on what it's doing. A guide to the rhythms an EEG picks up, and what each one means.
Your brain runs on about 20 watts — a dim lightbulb — whether you're solving equations or staring at a wall. The energy is real, but it barely moves when you think harder.
The idea is seductive: consciousness is mysterious, quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe one explains the other. Here's why physicists mostly say no — and what quantum biology really shows.
We can explain what the brain does — process, react, report. We cannot explain why any of it is accompanied by an inner experience. That gap has a name, and it may be the deepest question in science.
You don't play memories back like a video; you rebuild them from scratch, a little differently each time. What's stored isn't the scene but the strength of a few connections.
A thought, a flinch, a stubbed toe — all of it rides on a one-millisecond pulse. But the nerve impulse isn't electricity in a wire; it's a wave of salt, and it moves a million times slower.