There’s a popular myth that “you only use 10% of your brain.” Neuroscientists are quick to point out the fallacy in the “use 10%” part of that sentence. I remember a professor of mine once saying, “I don’t know about you but I use all of my brain,” joking that while he couldn’t vouch for anyone else in particular, for neurotypical humans, the entire brain is used, not just 10%.

However, if you focus instead on the word “you”, I would argue that 10% is actually a gross exaggeration. The human brain receives, by some accounts, upwards of 11 million bits per second from it’s sense organs (about 10 million from the eyes alone). Of that, you are only actually conscious of, maybe 40 (or by some counts, closer to 4) bits per second.

So while it’s true that your whole brain is, in fact, working hard to construct the reality you experience and help you move your body through the world, it could also be said that you, as in the conscious entity that regards itself as a self, accounts less than 0.0001% of your brain. In fact, much less when you consider the fact that the vast majority of neural activity is internally generated. The lateral geniculate nucleus, the part of the brain that routes visual information, receives 20x more information from the cortex than it does from the eyes. All that is to say, there is far more to your own brain that you can even begin to imagine.

There are, basically, four theories, or metaphysical models, explaining how mind and matter interact.

The first is cartesian dualism, referring back to the French philosopher Descartes, famous for the maxim, cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore, I am.” Cartesian dualism says that there are essentially two worlds: the mental and the physical, or the subjective and the objective. This is how most of us think about it most of the time. When you say “my body” or “my brain”, it implies that there is a “you” that is somehow separate from “your body” or “your brain.” It raises the question though, how do the two interact? This is called “the hard problem of consciousness.” Descartes thought it happened through the pineal gland. Modern cartesians are more likely to say the brain is a kind of “radio receiver” of consciousness.

The second is materialism or physical monism. This is the basic stance of most physical scientists. The argument is that the physical world is causally complete and there is no need nor room for a mental agent. But instead of actually explaining consciousness, they merely shove it under the rug, because, at the end of the day, Descartes was right about one thing: the one thing we can ever be fully confident in is that we have a subjective point of view. Saying consciousness is an illusion doesn’t explain that there is someone perceiving that illusion.

The third theory is idealism or mental monism. This is the stance of Bishop George Berkeley and (arguably) some Hindu and Buddhist philosophers. The idea is that the mental world is the only “real” world and that the material world is an illusion. This raises a host of problems that are solved by the introduction of God, saying that we exist in a world of God’s imagination. But since God can be anything (or everything) that doesn’t end up explaining anything. I have trouble with idealism because the world is too surprising for any mind to have come up with it. While it’s true 95% of perception is internally generated, that 5% that isn’t is still vitally important.

This brings us to the fourth theory, which has become popular among philosophers, and is even gaining traction among some scientists, and that is panpsychism or panprotopsychism (depending on how precise you want to be about what “psyche” means). This theory is also known as neutral monism or property dualism. “Neutral monism” because it proposes one world (monism) but that is neither “physical” nor “mental”. “Property dualism” because that one stuff has both mental and physical (or subject and objective) properties. In other words, the stuff that makes up the universe is inherently conscious, or at least proto-conscious (hence “panprotopsychism”).

In the mid-20th century, some folks with intractable epilepsy underwent a heroic surgery to separate the two halves of the brain by cutting the corpus callosum. What was remarkable was that, at first, nothing seemed very different about them. But after interviewing them, some clever researchers came up with some interesting experiments to see what had changed. One experiment in particular tells us a lot about how we construct our sense of self.

In this experiment, the person with the split brain was shown two images: one to the left hemisphere, and one to the right. Remember: the left hemisphere is responsible for language. Also, each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body. So the right hemisphere controls the left hand. The person was shown a chicken foot and a snowy field to the left and right hemispheres respectively. They were asked to pick what went with what they saw. The right hemisphere, seeing the snowy field, directed the left hand to point to a snow shovel. They were asked why they picked that. The left hemisphere, controlling language, having seen the chicken foot and their left hand picking the snow shovel (but NOT the snowy field) said, without hesitation: “to clean out the chicken shed.”

They did not say, “I don’t know,” or “that’s strange.” The brain immediately came up with a story to explain its behavior. This is what it does all the time. This is not pathological behavior. This is how the brain normally works.

It’s well known that most of matter is empty space. Between the nucleus of an atom and it’s electron shell is a vast void. Even most of the electron shell is empty most of the time. The only reason anything seems solid is because the electrons at the edge of your skin repel the electrons at the edge of what you “touch”. From a subatomic perspective, nothing ever touches anything (excepting nuclear fusion). It’s like two magnets repelling each other. Think about this the next time you walk across the floor. In a manner of speaking, your feet never really touch the ground.

Likewise with light. Most of space is a black void, with occasional photons flowing through. It doesn’t appear this way because your nervous system did not evolve to represent the world as it is, but rather in a way that would be useful. It fills in the gaps. Everything you experience is an illusion your brain constructs, not to represent the world accurately, but it in a way that is useful. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about an experience of a predator, of food, or of God. They are all internally generated experiences, extrapolated from some (but really, not much) external sense data.

This is why I like to say, “the universe is black and empty.” I find it to be a useful reminder that my perception is not the world.

Referred pain is when you feel pain in a part of your body that’s not the part that’s causing the pain. A common example is when a heart attack causes pain in the shoulder or jaw. This reminds me that the experience of my body is not my body. Under normal circumstances, there is a correlation. If you feel pain in your toe, there’s probably something wrong with your toe. But those are actually two different toes. The first one is part of your “body image” or the representation of your body in your mind. The second is part of your physical body, which you never experience directly. Your “body image” is all you ever experience.

While practicing meditation, you may experience strange sensations in your body. If you meditate on “chakras” or energy centers at different points in your body, you are likely to feel them there. You may experience kundalini rising through your spine. It should not surprise you that chakras and kundalini do not exist anywhere in the physical body outside of the brain. The fact is, neither does any experience of your body. It’s all in your head.

So you can cause bodily hallucinations through meditation, so what? So your body image is another way of interacting with the rest of your brain and your unconscious intelligence. This is how placebo works. Simply wanting to feel love for all is not going to be as effective as a heart-centered meditation.

What about gods (lowercase 'g')? Cultures from all over the planet have concepts of non-human intelligences that sometimes interact with the human world. They may be godds, faeries, dæmons, devas, angels, spirits, djinn, etc. It is remarkable both how widespread this is and also how little conformity there is between how they appear in different cultures.

While I cannot rule out the possibility that such beings literally exist, I have yet to see convincing evidence that they exist in any kind of material form, at least in the way as is commonly thought. What definitely does exist, however, are aspects of the mind that appear independent of egoic thought.

If “God” is the cosmic mystery, we might also call this “the Real.” Then perhaps “the godds” are “the Imaginary.” But being imaginary, they are nonetheless useful and powerful, perhaps even more than "God" who is unimaginably transcendent and unknowable.

The gods, saints, angels, and even heroes, personify forces in our unconscious that can affect us in powerful ways without us even realizing it. When we interact with faeries, angels, demons, gods, and other such beings, we are most likely interacting with aspects of ourselves that are otherwise inaccessible to us. And for this reason, it can be useful to engage with them.