RUPTURED SPACE AND "FREE WILL"...
For me one of the most profound and disastrous ways in which one can experience ruptured space is when the fabric of one's mind rips or tears. I mean this in two senses. The first is physical…
Glial cells make up about 80-90% of the brain - the rest of the brain is made up of neurons. There are several kinds of glial cells. Astrocytes help clear neurotransmitter from the synapse, without them your neurons would overheat and die from over stimulation. Oligodendrocytes wrap around neural axons and allow electric signals to pass between cells at astonishing speeds. Glial cells can reproduce and be replaced, neurons largely cannot. It’s good that glial cells can replenish themselves except in rare case where they divide mitotically in an uncontrolled fashion. They can form what is known as a space-occupying lesion, the worst type is a glioblastoma, the most aggressive of all brain tumors. It pushes everything adjacent to it out of place, placing pressure on other areas of the brain; it ruptures the precarious composition of everything in the intracranial space.
The other kind of ruptured space I think of most is the psychotic break. These profuse disconnects from reality remind me of how tenuous sanity is. We take it for granted that our mind will always be ours, that our thoughts are our own. But what must it feel like when you start hearing other people’s voices in your head? What must it be like to be so tortured by stress and fear that eventually the mind shuts down, when the space your reality exists in, ruptures beyond repair.
And on that note, one parting thought about who controls your brain. Neurophysicists have recently discovered that most motor signals which precipitate physical movement, actually manifest and are sent several milliseconds before we actually “make the choice” to move.
Kind of makes you wonder about the whole free will thing.
[My friend David Slape, originally from Adelaide, is Psychologist by Day & Bartender by Night. A teetotaler who has perfected – and invented – the Art of the Cocktail at such places of repute as The Slanted Door in San Francisco, Gramercy Tavern, Del Posto, and PDT in New York. David currently studies Psychology at Columbia.]
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2 comments:
Bright, thoughtful, sensitive. Must be something in the Adelaide water... But I have another spin on free will, or the illusion thereof. There is no such thing, I am sure, because character is destiny. Given another chance, when faced with the same decisions, and tellingly armed with the same tools (the toolkit being our character with all its strengths, weaknesses and quirks which we can conceal but we cannot eliminate), we'd do it all the same, again and again and again, like Groundhog Day... Kinda depressing yet kinda calming, i.e. it lets us all off the hook!
- Suzanne from Adelaide
Ruptured space, for me, occurs when one looses one's sense of reality, which is what I've also concluded from David’s post.
Cadence occurs in musical compositions, as an improvisation which is derived from the notes of its origin. As if to interrupt, to give the original composition a fresh point of view, or, even, to conclude.
The human minds, or rather healthy brains, are able to do as such, without ever loses the grasp of its origin, the memories of which these "conclusions" are derived from. I supposed this is what I would call imagination. What happens when these imaginations, these improvised memories, takes over the real ones, loses its origin, takes over our sanity? Is this when our free will is then taken away?
As an artist, I instinctively stimulate (or de-stimulate?) my brain to perform these “cadences”, to revert to a certain sense of space and time, to let the subconscious, the wondering, imaginative mind takes over when creating my artwork. I wonder if there is an apex to which if one surpasses, one’s space shall be ruptured for good and one’s sense of self is then..improvished.
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