Repetitive patterns of information form the basis of both events and experience. Patterns, replete with similarity and variation in specific sequences form the basic components of space-time and set the structure of all things: living and non-living. Patterns of relationships create the connections binding causes to effects. Patterns position the past, the present, and the future. If it is not a repetitive pattern, you have neither seen it nor experienced it. For something to exist at all, it must exist in the form of a persistent, repetitive pattern.
From the most simple vibrating entities: light, heat, subatomic particles, atoms of hydrogen to the most complex: consciousness, living beings, patterns of space, time, matter, and energy, patterned information serves as both the structure and substance of what is called “the real world” and also forms the basis for what is called “the mind.”
Understanding the meaning and significance of the complex vibrations of matter and mind that comprise the patterns of human consciousness is, by definition perhaps, the most subtle and difficult concept for human consciousness to grasp.
Hundreds of billions of individual interconnected neurons are interacting in the human brain, heart, and viscera. In other words, they are vibrating with electro-magnetic rhythms, chemical interactions, and physical movements that constitute the most complex dynamic system in the known universe.
We can measure the gross frequency output of large numbers of these neurons and are just now learning to read out some of the information encoded within individual neurons and their myriad interconnections in the laboratory by means of computers, supercomputers, and quantum computing methods.
Think of the brain as a bowl of jelly floating in a soft container. As a result of its fluid nature, it is in a state of vibration. It pulsates with electro-chemical processes involving myriad cellular connections and it beats in resonance with the heart-based rhythms of the body. Connections to the body itself and the world outside are continuously adding information in the form of patterns of vibrating wavefronts/packets of quantum energy. This vibrating mass of jelly-like substance within our skulls is, as far as we know, the most complex non-linear dynamical system of patterns the universe has ever produced.
What the brain does is to identify and process patterns of information and energy and to encode them as experience. In other words, the brain uses its own pattern-recognition ability to identify, formulate, and conceptualize experience into recognizable patterns. During this process, it acts according to pre-existing rules or algorithms or it creates new ones to assimilate the new experience.
This process maintains an active balance between under-stimulation and overstimulation. It is moving toward an ideally desirable, yet unachievable, equilibrium. On the one hand, the brain is always seeking to identify and categorize experience as either already known or as new information. If the information is new, it must be attended to. If it is not, then it has already been assimilated and the system treats it in a habitual way. This is the most efficient way to handle old information but it does not allow for the possibility that some novel aspect of the information was missed in the initial assessment.
This tendency for the system to move toward habituation – to close itself off from the possibility of novel experience – is an addictive process. The system tends to get itself stuck – unless there is a significant amount of new information being processed, which is sufficient to cause the system to stay in its optimal state of openness. Powerful repetitive patterns have a tendency to persist. Truly novel patterns are rarely encountered. Even when they are encountered, they must somehow rise above the threshold of resistance the system needs to maintain a steady self-regulation. Interrupting the dull repetition of an over-organized system is as significant as providing some structure for one too loosely organized.
Our understanding of the iterative self-similarity, multi-dimensionality, and periodic instability of chaotic systems is a significant aspect of the emergent paradigm, in which we are seeing the instruments of our vision as co-creative in acts of perception and our very being as an instance of the act of creation with which the universe begins.
We are seeing the whole of our vision as an evolving pattern – a self-conscious pattern-recognition system for contemplation, reflection, emotion, and action with the objective of creating more positive, more ethical, and more beautiful thoughts, actions, events, and experiences…
Image: “brainwaves 081710″ by Tullio DeSantis, ink on paper and digital image, 2010.
Image: EEG Chart from: http://david-delaney.com/neurofeedback/
YouTube Video: “How the Body Works, EEG Brain Waves”.
YouTube Video: “EEG”(moving a wheelchair with thoughts alone).