Road to Perception

 

Anomalies of any kind (name the anomalous phenomenon you want) have always been considered as part of an anomalous perception. This, which seems obvious, tells us that when an anomalous phenomenon appears, it is due to an “anomalous perception” of it, but perhaps through the “anomalous” stimulation of our senses, which we remember are basically five: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. But as you know, I tend to go a bit “free-wheeling”, and using this scheme, I am going to give this hypothesis a twist.

Well, as we were saying, anomalous phenomena are sometimes considered “anomalous perceptions”; in fact, if you look in the literature or bibliography, this is the term that normally appears: to put it simply, these senses would pick up stimuli that they do not normally pick up and they are the ones that would then be integrated in a normal way using the pathways that each of these senses have. That is, if you see, it would be the auditory pathway, if you hear, the auditory pathway, if you smell, the olfactory pathway, and so on. In other words, what is anomalous is the reception of the information.

And now I am going to give my opinion (not yet a hypothesis because it needs a lot of thought) on this subject: and I would like you to recall the first image: if you remember it, it tells us that there are two ways in which the brain has access to what happens both around it (external environment) and inside it (internal environment). That is, we have “sensors” for both the external and internal environment. And each has its specific pathways: normally the sensors of the internal environment work autonomously, through the so-called autonomic nervous system.

Classically, this system is composed of two subsystems, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems: of both, the one I would like you to focus your attention on is the parasympathetic: and why? Because this system has four components that we could call "the aristocracy" of the nervous system, which are called cranial nerves: in a simple way and without much technicality, they are large nerves that originate in the brain stem, that is, they are part of the central nervous system. (Remember this point).

Four of these cranial pairs belong to the parasympathetic system: the oculomotor (III), facial (VII), glossopharyngeal (IX) and vagus (X). This is important because from now on we are going to introduce another variable into our equation: what in anatomy is called “anatomical variables”, which are nothing more than differences in the normal arrangement of certain components of our body: some of them have a very important significance, as is the case of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which causes a potentially fatal cardiac disorder.

From these wickerwork, I am going to state the idea: what if what really happened was not an anomalous perception but an “anomalous integration” of information? What if anomalous phenomena were “perceived” through alterations in the internal environment and not the external one? And the next question you would ask me would be: if so, how would it be done? Well, here I am going to present one of the most important nerves that exist in our body, with a name that does not do it justice: the Tenth Cranial Nerve or Vagus Nerve.

As we can see, the vagus nerve is anything but vague, it is perhaps one of the most important nerves in our body. But what interests me now is how it integrates information: normally, we do not need to think about breathing, or making our heart beat: this is regulated automatically, and it does so through specific pathways. It does so through a set of cells in the brain stem called “nuclei”, in this case, the dorsal nucleus of the vagus nerve. If we look at the image, its afferent fibers (from the receptors) and efferent fibers (that come out) do not go beyond the brain stem.

As a result, we never become “conscious” of the mechanisms that regulate the functions assigned to this nerve. But now comes my proposal: what if there were some anatomical variability in some people that connected these brain stem cells with higher structures? What if what people with certain sensitivities did was to integrate differently the information that reaches them from the internal environment, and once it entered the sensory integration pathways, this information was treated normally?.

That is to say, it would not be an “anomalous perception” of the senses that is responsible for the anomalous phenomena, but rather an “anomalous integration” of the information carried out through pathways that are not the usual ones for the integration of these senses: it would be a process analogous to synaesthesia, which as we know is the integration of the information of a sense through a pathway other than the one to which it corresponds: to be exact, we would not be talking about synaesthesia, but rather a “xenointegration” of the information not from the “external” senses, but from the “internal” ones.

To start, let's stop here: I think that any contribution you want to make may be interesting: the fact of what and how the internal receptors are altered is another question that we will leave aside for now: for now I only talk about how it would be integrated (in this case through an anomalous integration pathway). I hope you liked it and I look forward to your comments.