That's the Underpath, son. We don't talk about the Underpath.

I have a problem with thinking; that is, I greatly dislike thinking. Not because I’m lazy or a genius, or that thinking is difficult or that I have so many brilliant ideas that trying to express them is painful, nothing like that. But I’m scared.

Everything in the universe is more complicated than we can see; not as in microscopic and too small for the naked eye, but too complex for the human brain to be able to process, so is simplified. For example, the ground we walk on is far more textured in colour than we can process, there is a larger gradient than we know. You might be thinking ‘well duh, we have the light/wavelength scale which proves that, we can only see a very fine range of lights’. While that’s true, this theory would state that the scale (including but not limited to things like UVA rays and gamma rays) is in fact only a fraction of light out there; just to pluck a figure out of the sky, we see about 2% or all known light for example, but all known light could only be 2% of what is actually out there, but our brains shut off those other samples, as they are too complex for our tiny little human brains to process and we would simply implode from trying. Unfortunately, my brain likes to try.

What I often wonder is what if we all see different things? So everyone knows that ‘they sky is blue’ and ‘leaves are green’ and ‘tree trunks are brown’. But what if the colour which you perceive as brown is different to the one I do? You see, how would we know if your brown was my pink, and my pink was your green? If that’s what we’ve been taught to see as the colour, a word is meaningless. We would need a totally independent intelligent life form to convert colours to algorithms and tell us what we’re seeing and confirm if they’re the same as another human. That’s the most simple of my fear-thoughts. They go on to get more complicated, such as our minds blocking and mutating different textures; what I see as a human might be someone else’s image of my alien image, we wouldn’t know because we’ve just been taught that this picture is human and this one is alien, and if we’re seeing different things then that’s just what we correlate to different sights. I feel like I’m not making sense anymore but it somewhat makes sense in my mind, if being slightly jumbled. It’s horribly confusing and I hate thinking about it because I just feel so different and isolated – no one would understand so I’ve never tried explaining it to anyone. I’m just desperately hoping someone who reads this thinks the same. I know other people think about the colour thing because of the song ‘Quiet’ from “Matilda the Musical” – I can’t explain my joy and feeling of normality the day I first heard that song.

The other thing I hate about thinking is when my thoughts grow exponentially. I start thinking about the world and think ‘wow the world is big’. Then I think about the universe, constantly expanding, and here is the first of my horrible conundrums: people think the universe is expanding and everything moving further away from everything else and go to prove this with the light/wavelength thing saying the further away it is the more red it will appear and blah blah blah, but my thoughts ask me if everything is really moving away or if everything is just getting smaller? For if everything is getting smaller, every single particle of every single thing in the universe is constantly getting smaller, we wouldn’t be able to tell for we too would be getting smaller. If the size is slowly getting sucked out of the things in the universe we wouldn’t know; obviously things would seem further away because they’re getting smaller. Space wouldn’t get smaller because space is a vacuum and has nothing, no particles, no atmosphere whatsoever, so it would just be the ‘stuff’ getting smaller, like I said, becoming further apart in proximity to each other, but not their physical placement. This would produce those same light wavelength readings as if everything is getting further apart, but no one could ever prove that, just as if someone had suggested everything getting smaller first, things moving away would never be able to be a valid theory. I hate that I have these thoughts and that no one can ever confirm them.

The next thought I get (these happen really quickly by the way, in waves of about 2 seconds, if that, and I have so many thoughts in my head that I just want to cry, it’s horrible) is that the universe is so huge and supposedly expanding constantly, what comes after it? What comes after the edge of space? You’re telling me that there is nothing else, just space, but what’s after creation? In my head I come up with lots of different explanations which momentarily pacify me- we’re in a shoe box. We’re actually tiny tiny tiny and God is sat there holding us on His lap in this box, maybe with 9 or 10 other Gods of other universes or dimensions, all going “Oh God, you’ll never believe what this one just did- they just disproved we exist!” or “Oh for God’s sake, stop trying to fly to the end of the universe, it’s never gonna happen people!”. This is enough for me, imagining these bearded guys in nighties holding their science experiments, but then I think “oh no, what comes after that?” because in my mind they’re just sat in a room. But where is the room? What comes after the room?! And then my mind zooms out into whatever happens next. What is outside the universe? Doctor Who suggested Silence, but how can there be nothing after silence? There can’t just be it, otherwise how do we exist? How are we suspended in nothing? If there is nothing after that, how is the universe expanding? Then I think ‘oh after the universe is heaven’ but WHAT COMES AFTER HEAVEN? WHAT IS HEAVEN IN? It just makes me fear life itself because I could imagine infinite things to be outside the universe or alternative dimensions, or parallel whatevers stacked on top of each other. It literally blows my mind. I can’t handle it and it makes me want to stop existing. I hate that I have the capacity to think.

The last one I’ve been struggling with is actually a really recent thing, but I don’t have any ways to explain it and it’s just plain annoying rather than scary or mind blowing. How minds work. Okay so you’ve got your brain which has your long term short term memories, sensory processing and recalling, blah blah, learnt in basic terms I’m sure at GCSE and AS psychology. I don’t have problem with the surface processes of how you remember- I’m fine with the processes and what happens when things happen and dejá vu and “glitches”, I’m fine with the fact that the left brain controls the right part of your body and is all creative and fun and your right brain controls the left side of your body and is logical and makes you want to be a lawyer. The hippocampus deals with co-ordination and the corpus-colossum joins your two brain parts. I’ve also learnt in biological terms the components of cells, and while these vary a great deal depending on the function of the cells, I know that they’re all just cells. So how the hell do they remember things? Okay so cells recognise sounds and sensory input. I mean, that’s okay to sort of grasp but once I think about memories, I don’t get how they’re stored- where are they stored? Where do your brains cells literally put the information? I think this episode of Spongebob squared (pardon the pun) the logical solutions pretty well, but of course due to scientific research of dissection and looking at physical human brains, we know this isn’t how it’s done. But how is it? Are there chests in cells with reams and reams of manuscript of your life? I mean, the information can’t just be floating around.

Another thing here that does sort of connect is that when you look at CT scans of healthy brains then look at those of dementia patients, you can see a marked difference in brain capacity – physically. Healthy brain looks like a butterfly, dementia brain looks like a butterfly someone set slightly on fire or trod on around the edges. It’s a horrible thing to see, but is a physical manifestation of the fact that you literally lose your memories. Your brain breaks down, and the memories go with it. Which means that memories are most certainly stored within the cells- BUT HOW?!

These are things that confuse me and today’s blog post title is sort of unconnected to the fact that we do process things differently as humans; I was playing Mario Kart 8 (good game, would recommend) with my brother: on one of the tracks I noticed there were very few people around but I was in 11^th place in this race which had 12 people. I hadn’t been driving badly but couldn’t see more than two players in front of me, suddenly they all came surging out of a crack in the ground and I exclaimed “Oh they went down the under path”. My brother replied about the “lower path being slower but he accidentally drove down the hole”. I kept calling it the Underpath and he mentioned how it sounds like a dark deserted place in a fantasy world.

“That’s the Underpath, son. None return where many have gone.”