Why does your brain sometimes send you to one thought, and sometimes to another?
Because a brain works with learning gaps.
Depending on your personality, it sends you to the place where the least knowledge density exists. That doesn't translate very well. What it really does is send you to the chain of thoughts that, if you add them all together, gives you the best foundation to become who you want to be.
It optimizes very quickly around themes of thought. For example, if you want to become a fighter, you also need very dark thoughts and very dark periods.
Yeah, it really works like this. When science is ready for it in a few years, we'll talk again.
To me, my brain is a relationship machine. So when you have a psychiatric disorder, the problem is usually a broken relationship between things.
Anorexia is a "disorder" because your relationship with food—and the emotions that come with it—is broken.
A lot of anxiety and stress exist because you avoid things, because you refuse to enter into a relationship with something, or because your relationship with excitement has become distorted. The same is true for many forms of depression: you don't want a relationship with painful emotions, so in the end all emotions turn gray, including the good ones. It can also mean that your relationship with other people has become distorted.
These relationships become more and more important. At some point, the relationship between psychiatric disorders and nutrition becomes obvious. Or the relationship between avoidance and anxiety.
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Another fundamental property of the brain is importance.
If you make one relationship overwhelmingly important—for example, calories when it comes to food—then your entire relationship with eating becomes almost completely about calories.
And that pushes every other relationship with food into the background. You stop noticing when you're actually hungry, what your body is asking for, or that one day you simply need more food than the next.
That single relationship becomes the center of gravity for everything else. And that can be dangerous. (I've made that mistake so many times I've lost count. Beautiful.)
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You see the same thing in people who look at reality through a single lens. If you only see reality through a scientific lens, you'll miss countless other relationships.
I understand things that nobody else understands.
I know things that nobody else knows.
Sexy, right?
I'm going to do one last effort to explain why it is so hard to explain the difference between religion and science.
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Let's say somebody counts calories. They calculate their maintenance, they get to the body weight they want. They succeed. The problem is that you cannot reason against this. Whatever logical argument you come up with, you will always come up short. It works exactly as it should be; you get to your goals. So the calorie counter is completely right.
But it's still a bad idea.
Let's take two people. One eats 2,500 calories every day and gets into exactly the perfect shape. The other person has no idea what calories are.
The person who counts calories partly decided what to eat before the start of the day. You already know that you're going to eat 2,500 calories.
The other person has no idea what the day is going to bring. Maybe they want a banana one hour from now. Maybe they eat so much lunch that they have a very small dinner.
Even if they both eat 2,500 calories, both days feel one hundred percent different. So when you measure it, you measure 2,500 calories twice. But the measurement is completely irrelevant in real life.
From the perspective of the one who doesn't count calories, the one who counts calories is one percent off. Because there are virtually no days that you actually need to eat exactly 2,500 calories. Some days you need 2,000, some 3,000. So the calorie counter is off 100% of the time.
From the perspective of the one who does count calories, the other one is like a steerless ship.
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In this comparison, the calorie counter is science. Because you have built up a one-dimensional relationship with this universe, you don't see all the other relationships that are possible. You literally miss everything else there is. You cannot argue against this, because science is very good when it comes to logic, just like a calorie counter has completely sound logic. But it's very hard to explain to a calorie counter that sometimes it's better to listen to your body and eat what your body needs at any given moment. That's taking into account all the information, or at least as much as possible.
I know this is a vague story. But this is the problem: it's hard to use normal logic, because religion uses a different kind of logic that has nothing to do with regular logic.
If you look at the world a certain way, that is what it becomes, and you don't see everything else that it is.