Sometimes it’s nice to be vindicated. In this case, it comes from a BBC article on research at University College London about how the brain uses its “spidey sense” to detect dangerous situations, by matching conditions against past traumatic events.

“Although we may not always be aware of it, the brain tries to ensure our self-preservation through a complex mathematical strategy.

“We have shown how it works out what are potentially dangerous or painful episodes by interpreting chains of events and basically assessing the odds.

“Imagine you are bitten by your neighbour’s dog,” he said. “You soon learn not only to avoid the dog, but also things associated with it like its favourite haunts.”

I have been writing *around* this subject quite a lot from various directions this past year. Try this reference out, for example, which goes into Scientology’s equivalent to this: engrams, or as I termed them, memories that get holographically frozen during traumatic moments. Also check out this section from the BBC article, which - for me anyway - correlates closesly to what I was intuitively doing with my random image chains during my “spambot” period:

They were shown a series of abstract pictures followed by a one-second electric shock - equivalent to a pin-prick.

When the tests were completed many of the volunteers could not recall the sequence of images.

But the scanner revealed that two key areas, the ventral striatum and part of the cerebral cortex, were working together to figure out what was coming next.

Dr Ben Seymour, who led the research, said: “If we showed a square followed by a circle followed by the painful shock this part of the brain could soon learn to predict that the circle was bad news.

“However, after a while, it would learn that the square wasn’t that good either, as it was followed by the circle.

“By recording these chains of events, the brain was able to set early alarm bells ringing in the volunteer.”

The most important take-away message in all of this: is that your brain and the perceptual mechanisms which it is responsible for controlling do what they do in order to protect and to serve you. It abstracts rules from past events which it applies as filters to your perception. In many cases, these rules are faulty because they are based on only partial information. A major component of “becoming conscious” is to learn how to consciously recognize when these triggers are fired in your brain, root out why they were encoded into your memory, and figure out how to pick the lock on them. Very important stuff… I have some more in-depth articles I wrote on this several months ago which I will look around for.