I’m skipping part II for now; it concerns a feeling of confusion yet bliss that I’ve had several times in my life that fascinated me but that I found almost impossible to describe. One day I hope to be able to write about it.

There is another feeling that I’ve had that I found much easier to write about, because it’s very tactile and concrete. I’ve had it maybe a few dozen times in my life; each time it lasted maybe for a minute. I guess it can be compared to a high but it feels very natural and right (and I can’t correlate having it with any substance I could have taken; it happens out of the blue, during the day. I don’t recall having eaten or drunk anything unusual before any of the times it happened).

I feel a sudden rush. My sense become more acute. I can feel my eyes moving much more rapidly. My mind is suddenly much clearer, sharper. Time seems to almost stop, or it’s me that thinks and moves really fast, I can’t tell exactly. It’s as if the electrical signals in my brain intensified manifold.

When it happens I’m usually in the middle of thinking about something and often also typing or writing. The feeling usually lasts a minute; a minute that seems to take forever; but a minute that seems the most productive minute of my life. Information that originates in my mind seems to get reduced to quanta at an incredible rate and transformed into words that appear on screen, almost as if the notepad or the computer screen had some ethereal connection with my brain.

I’m fascinated by these things precisely because they happen naturally. They are a testament to the complexity of our brains. The fact that they are so hard to describe highlights the limitations of the human language (or, conversely, the expressiveness of the human perception).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 21:25 and is filed under discovery, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.