On Dreaming And Judging In The Brain Poem by Denis Mair

(Inspired by a question posed by John Olson.)

Dreams happen because neurons have a built-in imperative to fire every so often. So they practice linking up and firing off chimeras now and then, or maybe they squirt in a little dopamine and massage each other with waves. With a touch of emotion and aesthetics, a chimera can make you giddy. There are also memory-forming pathways that don't indulge in ebullient fizz. They are more into consolidating formations that can help with future survival. So they need a glutamate-GABA balance (allowing for plasticity plus inhibition) , to identify and retain them. Usually they don't know what to make of a fanciful dream, so they let it fade away downstream. But if it touches on something that those fussbudget pathways are concerned about, it will be stored away to be used as a touchstone. The problem is, workspaces capable of linking up multiple regions tend to be provisional and not always responsible to the future. So sometimes those GABAergic consolidations may get tangled up with a pulsating formation that's on a dopaminergic spree. This is what I call a neural 'Nantucket sleighride.'