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Val Zudans MD
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Val Zudans MD
@Zudans
Frugal philosopher-physician mitochondriac EnSurf ZudEye
Vero Beach, Florida, USA Katılım Mart 2018
2.1K Takip Edilen4.1K Takipçiler
A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.
The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.
His name is David Eagleman.
He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.
Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.
Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.
You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.
Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.
This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.
In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.
Now sit with the implication of that for a second.
Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.
If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.
But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.
Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.
Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.
They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.
The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.
The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.
Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.
So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.
Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.
A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.
And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.
Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.
Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.
For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.
They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.
The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.
You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.
Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.
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@curtis_yarvin Good book:
“Normal” USG operating procedure is probably not what people think.
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The lab leak conclusion is terrifying because everyone who knows how the USG works can intuitively sense that it completely discredits the way the USG works.
Covid was a normal failure. It was caused by normal bureaucratic incentives motivating normal human beings
The Seeker@TheSeeker268
CIA whistleblower’s written testimony just dropped. It’s worth reading in full but here is the short version: By March 2021, before Biden’s 90-day COVID-origin review, FBI and DOE were already leaning towards lab origin. CIA analysts were leaning the same way, but CIA management didn’t like where the evidence was pointing and were actively obstructing their own people. Then, once the 90-day review kicked off in May 2021, Fauci personally fed the interagency team a curated list of experts. The same ones who wrote “Proximal Origin,” along with others, all part of the same ecosystem shaped by the same overlapping incentives. Basically, the same people involved in funding, defending, or advising on risky virological research were now tasked with assessing and informing official analyses on whether that research caused the pandemic. And then towards the end of the 90-day review period, someone at the CIA management flipped the agency’s assessment from lab-origin to non-consensus. Between 2022-2023, the bureaucratic ecosystem at CIA was stil working overtime to block its own analysts and technical experts. Internal emails even admitted analysts would have called a lab origin if management had let them. Not just that, the analysts who pushed back saw their careers wrecked. And those who buried it got promoted. All this comes from a career intelligence officer on Gabbard's DIG task force, the group literally tasked with declassifying COVID origins. His position gave him direct access to the documents and communications they were trying to hide. So why was the lab-leak conclusion resisted, delayed, and obscured for years? Groupthink. Political pressure. Fear of anything geopolitically inconvenient about China. Reluctance to implicate a research infrastructure funded for decades with American taxpayer money. Motives would be hard to prove, but the result was a textbook cover-up, intentional or otherwise. The real question now is whether Congress, DOJ and the powers that be will follow this wherever it leads.
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I aware of the 90 minute sleep cycles. But, the components of each cycle are not symmetric or including all components and the vast majority of time spent in REM seems to be in second half of night based on EEG sleep studies.
Most people have 2-4 cycle components of deep in first sleep with minimal or no REM. The converse characterizes 2nd sleep. People isolated from modern sleep patterns even often have an awake period in between.
REM EEG patterns are nearly indistinguishable from awake.
Your hypothesis seems to me to be modeled on a physicalist ontology that the brain is base ontology. Is that correct? I think what is happening is better explained with mind as base reality 🤷♂️
I start with Spinoza, Kastrup, Hoffman, Friston, … and think a better model results.
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@ComentorInChief @ihtesham2005 I would say both his understanding and his telos are probably wrong. I made no attempt at answering the why of dreams, just the what.
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@Zudans @ihtesham2005 Your theory does not explain the why as his does.
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@grok @ItsBiggyBoy Grok, are all things we find attractive signs of health/vitality? Symmetry, height, vibrant eyes, full lips, physique, straight teeth, vibrant skin, posture, happiness, humor, intelligence, fertility, competence, empathy, character, energy … Is beauty more than skin deep?
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Elon didn’t lean in for the selfie. He understands green line theory. Incredible. 😂
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@AutismCapital Wasn’t he just imitating Asian tourists?
… when in Rome. 🤷♂️😭
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Babe wake up Elon’s doing the autism spin again 💀
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@MarioNawfal Producers: ‘We need an expert on probing strange objects from outer space!’
Booker: ‘Got it — urologist or ophthalmologist?’
Doctor shows up: ‘Look, I can identify them by their eyes… but if it’s about Uranus, you’re in the wrong office.’🥁
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An Argentinian TV show accidentally invited a urologist instead of a ufologist on and asked him about aliens.
“I’m a urologist, not a ufologist. It sounds similar, but it’s not the same.”
To be honest it sounds close enough to me.
x.com/nexta_tv/statu…
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@Kekius_Sage Dark matter seems a fudge factor of broken physicalist ontology.🤔
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Physicist Michio Kaku suggests dark matter isn’t matter at all. It is gravity leaking from a parallel dimension.
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@DiedSuddenly_ Anyone without high cardiac risk want to stop their statins? 🤔 (*** not medical advice… ask your physician).
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Huge win for health!
RFK Jr just explained that doctors will now get paid to take patients OFF unnecessary and harmful medications through a new policy called “deprescribing.”
This is the first policy of its kind, and will incentivize doctors to STOP prescribing unnecessary medications.
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The greatest pleasure in life is a cool breeze.
Change my mind.
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🚨 BREAKING: Canada’s MAiD euthanasia machine just hit rock bottom.
A Quebec physician has formally suggested assisted suicide for infants — babies from birth to one year old with severe deformities and syndromes. Parents “should have the opportunity” to have their newborn killed.
Federal committees are now pushing to expand MAiD to “mature minors” (children), where a doctor — not the parents — decides if the kid can “consent” to their own death.
Ontario’s Chief Coroner confirms hundreds of MAiD deaths are driven by poverty, loneliness, and lack of housing — not terminal illness.
People are being offered lethal injection because they feel like a burden.
This isn’t healthcare.
This is a moral horror show.
Years of Liberal-NDP rule have turned Canada into one of the most dangerous places on Earth for the vulnerable — from newborns to the poor.
Danielle Smith is fighting this insanity in Alberta.
The rest of the country needs to wake the hell up before it gets even worse.
Watch the full press conference 👇
#MAiD #EuthanasiaCanada #cdnpoli #ProtectOurKids #CanadaIsBroken #LiberalFailure
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@alwynlhoir @ihtesham2005 A better explanation is that dreams are an internal dissociation of mind.
Under that model the dream mind is still capable of intuitive (transcendent) knowledge of external world.
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@ihtesham2005 Oh good. The Darwinism of dreams. How does one explain, if it’s strictly optical cortex defense, how the Benzene ring was seen in a dream by the chemist who was working on it, or how people see solutions to problems in their dreams?
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@Zudans @ihtesham2005 The non rem sleep doesn't take over your eyeballs..
Rem sleep moves the eye balls.
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@SamaHoole I sometimes explain the proper human diet to patients as the “grandma diet.”
Eat what your grandma (or great-grandma) used to eat, prepared exactly like she made it.
I learned that from @drcateshanahan with her excellent book (2017):
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There is a single test that will do more for your health than any diet book, any tracking app, and most of the advice you will ever get from a person with a clipboard.
Would your great-grandmother recognise it as food?
Not "is it healthy." Not "how many calories." Just: would the woman who ran a kitchen a hundred years ago know what the thing in your hand was?
A chop. An egg. A herring. A wheel of cheese. A loaf with four ingredients. A jug of milk with the cream still on it. A pot of dripping. She recognises all of it instantly, because it is the food humans have eaten for as long as there have been humans.
Now try it with the middle aisles of the supermarket. A "high-protein" bar held together with glycerine and twelve other things. A spread engineered from rapeseed oil to impersonate butter. A yoghurt with the fat stripped out and four teaspoons of sugar added back. A cereal with a heart symbol printed on the box.
She would not know what any of it was. She would be looking at a marketing problem that had been given an ingredients list.
That is the whole test. It costs nothing. It needs no expertise. It survives every change in nutritional fashion, because it is not a theory. It is just the fact that the foods which kept your ancestors alive for thousands of years are unlikely to be the ones working against you now.
And you do not have to get it perfect. Keep choosing the things she would recognise, most of the time, and let the rest fall away. Do only that, and you have already stepped out of the experiment most of the population is still living inside. That alone puts you ahead of 90% of the people around you.
Your great-grandmother was not a nutritionist. She did not need to be. It was simply normal to her, the water she swam in. That knowledge was not lost by accident. It was talked out of three generations and replaced with products that need advertising precisely because no instinct would reach for them.
Walk back to where she was standing. The food is still there. It is mostly around the edges of the shop, and it mostly doesn't have a slogan.
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@bTheResistance @BretWeinstein @HustleBitch_ If it works for you, great… but this is why it generally has not worked out like mouse experiments.
x.com/i/grok/share/6…
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@Zudans @BretWeinstein @HustleBitch_ Thank you. I’ve been taking resveratrol for years. I swear by the stuff.
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🚨 SURGEON WARNS THE BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGH IN HUMAN HISTORY IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW — “BIGGER THAN AI”
A surgeon is going viral after claiming scientists may have already discovered a way to partially REVERSE aging at the DNA level… and he says the implications are bigger than AI, social media, smartphones, or even the internet itself.
Dr. Buck Parker’s claim:
“The fountain of youth has been discovered.”
“This is bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Bigger than the advent of the internet. Bigger than Amazon, Apple, the iPhone, Google, social media… bigger than AI.”
And according to Dr. Parker… it’s already happening RIGHT NOW.
The core claim revolves around something called “Yamanaka factors,” proteins discovered by Nobel Prize-winning researcher Shinya Yamanaka that can reportedly reset damaged cells back to a younger biological state.
According to Dr. Parker:
• Scientists have reportedly reversed visible signs of aging in animals
• Wrinkled skin in test subjects appeared to become youthful again
• Researchers are now experimenting with literally “turning back” cellular age
• Human trials are reportedly beginning
• Some scientists now believe aging itself may simply be accumulated DNA damage
His warning:
“If you’ve been alive for the last 40 years… you’ve seen some wild sh*t happen. It’s about to get more wild.”
If this became available tomorrow… would you actually take it?
📹: drbuckparker
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