The Frequency of Neuron
Clever, meaningless title because my neurons are sluggish yet pondering how the mind communicates with them.
Thinking about the science behind The Soul’s Reckoning, I heard in my mind a question: What frequencies do neurons detect when directly stimulated?
We don’t reeally think about this much because our senses are our brain’s inputs. What else would our neurons respond to? But think about it. Aside from thought, which seems to be generated out of some mysterious chasm, everything else comes through our senses.
Conversation happens when our ears, eyes, skin, hair, fingernails, and nose send signals they pick up from others and the environment to our brain. Our brain translates those signals to brainwave frequencies that travel along neural pathways to various areas, which results in processing, interpretation, and outputting in the form of talking or listening.
But how do ghosts communicate?
Last week, I hypothesized what ghosts are made of by considering how photographic film would record them. This week, I’m pondering how ghosts would communicate. After all, they’re not made of matter but energy. And even though we can feel energy such as static or lightning, generally speaking, we don’t feel the energy that comes off of other humans. Perhaps that’s what auras are, and only a few or some have the ability to perceive them. But for the most part, we don’t feel their energy.
https://shireenjeejeebhoy.substack.com/p/photographic-film-and-ghosts
I decided that ghosts would communicate directly to the brain. That led to my question: Can neurons detect frequencies directly and translate them as if the stimulation was coming through the senses?
Deep Brain Stimulation
Research and clinical applications of deep brain stimulation to treat epilepsy led me to finding answers pretty quickly. These answers dovetailed in nicely with what I’d learned about film.
High-frequency stimulation excites neurons.
I have to say the surgery these patients go through is…<horror emoji>! They have implanted electrodes that stimulate MRI-selected locations on the brain, as well as many electrodes placed near and far from the stimulation electrodes and near both white and grey matter in order to record the propagation of the stimulus through their brain. For research purposes, they receive stimulation many times in a short period of time. Because of their tolerance and bravery, researchers can improve deep brain stimulation, and I can create a hypothesis of mind and ghost communication!
I also — FINALLY — found an almost-answer to a question about my retina and returning vision. For years, I’ve been Googling futilely and asking ophthamology researchers and clinicians on social media what frequency retinal ganglion cells fire at. Unbelievably, no answer showed up through Google nor did clinicians/researchers know. But through stumbling on research for implanted prosthetics for the blind, I discovered that these cells fire at 20 Hz. Interestingly, studies demonstrated the same findings as deep brain stimulation found for direct stimulation of neurons.
Enhancing Memory Through Direct Neuron Stimulation
In one study, they were looking at stimulating neurons at T1 and T2 in order to enhance memory in people with epilepsy. High-frequency stimulation of 200 Hz not only excited neurons — unlike 10 Hz (alpha-wave frequency) — but also propagated farther.
“HFA (high-frequency activity) power increases from depth stimulation were more prevalent and showed a greater distance effect than increases from surface stimulation.” See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1935861X2030108X
That difference makes sense, logically speaking. It’s also no surprise that stimulating near white matter lead to more excited neuronal activity since white matter is designed to propagate action potentials along axons swiftly and efficiently unlike grey matter. (Axons are the long arms of neurons along which electrical signals travel. Dendrites are the multiple arms sticking out from the neuron’s cell body that detect and release neurotransmitters.)
In another paper, a meta-analysis of very high-frequency stimulation in the kiloHertz territory looked at various methods of using kHz stimulation. One of them is a variation of the tDCS that I received, which resulted in restoring my conversational skills within a month of starting the treatment. While tDCS uses direct current stimulation, tACS uses alternating current. Transcranial alternating current stimulation of 2 to 133 kHz leads to action potential propagation to the deep structures of the brain.
One of the issues of non-invasive neurostimulation and neuromodulation is reaching the deeper structures. Although stimulating the cortical-thalamic loop through brain biofeedback or audiovisual entrainment is one way to do that, it’s only one section of the brain. As an aside, 10 kHz stimulation of the spinal cord and peripheral nerves seems to lead to pain relief.
Vision and Neurostimulation
Stimulating retinal ganglion cells at 200 Hz that are closest to the outside (versus deeper layers), and have smaller dendritic bodies, creates stable phosphenes and a firing frequency of 20 Hz. This is the beta brainwave frequency, that is, thinking waves. Twenty hertz verges on the anxiety-level of beta brainwave frequencies.
It’s interesting that high frequency stimulates a 20-Hz response, which is the same frequency retinal ganglion cells send sensory information to the optic nerve and thence to the visual cortex.
This makes me wonder if it’s the entraining effect of daily audiovisual entrainment at beta frequencies that led to my improved vision by creating stable phosphenes and doing to retinal ganglion cells what it does to neurons in the brain: taking chaotic firing and entraining towards a stable firing rate in the entrainment frequency range.
Meanwhile, another paper provided evidence backing up long-known visual effects of neurostimulation (at certain frequencies) and which I personally experience.
Receiving brain biofeedback or using audiovisual entrainment so clears up and sharpens my eyesight (what the paper authors in the below quote call “visual acuity”) that it’s like getting a new set of eyeballs. Although clinicians had explained my brain-injury-induced blurry vision a result of a tired brain and improved vision from neurostimulation increasing energy, it seems that it’s more about a specific electrophysiological effect.
““Brief repetitive low-frequency stimulation (2 Hz) is sufficient to induce a visual response potentiation that is expressed exclusively in visual cortex layer 4 and in response to a familiar stimulus. In contrast, brief, repetitive high-frequency stimulation (HFS, 20 Hz) is sufficient to induce a visual response potentiation that is expressed in all cortical layers and transfers to novel stimuli. HFS induces a long-term suppression of the activity of fast-spiking interneurons and primes ongoing gamma oscillatory rhythms for phase reset by subsequent visual stimulation. This novel form of generalized visual response enhancement induced by HFS is paralleled by an increase in visual acuity, measured as improved performance in a visual detection task.” See https://academic.oup.com/cercorcomms/article/2/2/tgab016/6157468
To Sum Up
Neurons get excited at higher frequencies and propagate activity deeper and farther than lower frequencies. This is also true for retinal ganglion cells — the neurons of the eyeballs that sit behind the light-and-colour detecting rods and cones.
So theoretically, if ghosts exist at the higher frequencies that film detects, they can directly stimulate neurons and retinal ganglion cells to create language, metaphors, visual, and auditory messages and other effects.
I mentioned the mind in the subtitle because I believe in dualism, that the brain and mind are two separate entities. Descartes is the most famous and original philosopher on putting forth this idea. David Chalmers calls this the hard problem because, despite all the writings on it, no one knows what the mind really is. Because of my brain injury, I experienced my mind telling my brain what to do until the two harmonized again after extensive treatments. It was an…interesting…experience.