The Screen Inside the Mind

Somewhere in our brains there's an arrangement of neurons that allows us to project our thoughts onto a 2-dimensional "screen", which we perceive whenever we imagine something.  Scientists don't exactly know where these neurons are located yet, or how the brain processes imaginary images, but if we were to suppose that our brains are like computers, the extraction of any "file" should pull up a "document" resembling the memory that a certain neuron (or network of them) stores.  The information from this neuron(s) could be projected onto a "screen" of grid cells, which are arrangements of neurons in the brain that serve visual functions, such as interpreting the direction in which one is moving relative to the world around them. 

Memories and images from the subconscious, all of which are capable of manifesting themselves in dreams and activities like reading, must seep to the surface of our awareness through "channels" of neurons, which flash onto the screen like they came from a projector.  What's more, the dream state allows us to walk right into the scene on the screen, adding a third dimension to our imagination.  In this manner, the beginning of a dream is literally like stepping into the world inside a television or computer.  The "movie" of our thoughts suddenly becomes real, and we are no longer in control of it.  Once we're inside the dream, all kinds of ideas symbolized by emotional representations of memories draw forth from these neural channels. 

Our minds are so special; it's like we have an enormous database of movies that we're capable of wandering through while we sleep, each associated with a particular streaming of memories.  It's as if we had the power to cut up all our memories and paste them into different narratives, like the way an Incanter could in real life in the book Anathem*.  Each memory involved associates itself with the one before and after it, through some unconscious mechanism that seeks to preserve important lessons learned that day. 

The screen inside the mind is like a miniature version of the world we perceive with our regular eyes.  This begs the question: if there's a second screen inside us, which allows us to perceive memories and dreams, shouldn't there be an organ for interpreting such perceptions?  Many believe the pineal gland to be this third eye.  Descartes thought it was the center of the soul, where all our thoughts are formed**.  Unfortunately, he was chastised by many of his contemporaries for this theory, and there is no evidence that supports the pineal gland being a center of cognition.  However, it does play a pivotal role in sleep and dreams.  One wonders what Descartes would have thought about the discovery of melatonin, which might have brought more people around to his idea back in the 17th century.  It's the pineal gland that releases this hormone at night, allowing us to drift off into sleep once our circadian rhythm comes full circle.  For this reason, and other sorts of wild conjectures, the pineal gland has reached an almost mystical status in our modern age. 

The gland is thought to have evolved from a third eye that is still seen in reptiles today.  Also known as the parietal eye, it mainly acts as a photoreceptor and is much nearer to the surface of the face on reptiles.  Our pineal gland seems to have evolved so intricately from this eye that it might have developed its own way of seeing images that the brain creates.  If I had to bet on how the imagination works, I would say the thalamus, an organ which is located just above the gland and serves as a crossroads of all neural pathways in the brain, acts as the screen and the pineal gland as the third eye.  The thalamus would be supplying the grid cells for the pineal eye to interpret, much like the way a computer monitor or television receives electrical signals to illuminate pixels.  It wouldn't surprise me if these organs gain more eminence in the coming years as the cerebral theater of all our imaginary thoughts, especially in dreams. 

 

*In the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson, an Incanter is a person with the ability to change the past by slicing up narratives and re-arranging them in certain ways. It seems that our dreams reflect this same kind of power, although few of us are willing to accept that the astral plane is as real as the physical one.  Another obvious difference is that the Anathem Incanters could consciously re-arrange narratives, while our power is restricted to the subconscious.  Although there are a select few who can control their dreams consciously, a great majority of people cannot. 

 

**Other interesting speculations about the pineal gland can be found in Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy.