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My Own Personal Nothingness: From childhood hallucination to theoretical physics
- amvalo 8y agoI have a milder form of this hallucination every few months or so. Certain thought patterns related to "arbitrariness" trigger it, for example asking why earth has the continents it does, a question to which there is no satisfying answer.
- dchichkov 8y agoCan you give more examples :-p ?
- amvalo 8y agoWhy am I amvalo instead of dchichkov?
- IAmGraydon 8y agoIt's called derealization, and it's a protective mechanism the brain uses to remove itself from painful stimuli, which typically manifests alongside a sense of anxiety, although obvious anxiety is not always present. Yours is likely triggered by an underlying need for control, which is usually satisfied by understanding the world around you in-depth. You can control what you can understand. When you come to a question with no satisfying answer, the sense of control is broken and your brain perceives it as a threat, which causes derealization, thereby removing the painful stimuli that the thought is causing. All of this happens at a subconscious level. Many people with PTSD have this feeling of derealization on an almost constant basis, as their brains are hypervigilant and tend to perceive harmless stimuli as potentially painful and/or threatening.
- amvalo 8y agoI guess my brain perceives being bored on a long bus ride as unduly painful or threatening.
- allemagne 8y agoThe childhood experience sounds a lot like dissociation. It can be terrifying and it can be somewhat pleasant. On a darker note it can be associated with childhood trauma, but having had episodes every so often when I was younger and a little less often as an adult I can confirm that it's not exclusively caused by traumatic experiences.
- madengr 8y agoI thought Michelson and Morley disproved the ether, not Einstein?
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoDoes the concept of “nothing” exist in our physical Universe, though? Even a vacuum has vacuum energy, virtual particles, etc...
- kr4 8y agoYogis of the yore have contemplated deeply on the subject of nothingness, consciousness, will, mind and intelligence. I can point to one such very interesting read here: http://tripura.omswami.com/2012/01/chapter-12-illusory-universe.html http://tripura.omswami.com/2012/01/chapter-12-illusory-unive...