#grace fieselman

The Mendeleyev’s Chart

Atoms as fundamental building blocks

Everything in your body is made from elements in the periodic table such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, iron, etc. These elements combine to form molecules such as proteins, lipids, DNA, neurotransmitters that structure your cells, including neurons.

Neurons and electrochemical activity

Neurons are made of molecules, which in turn are made of atoms. Their firing, action potentials, is caused by ion movement (Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺) across membranes. This is physics and chemistry in motion, not “magic thought energy.”

Neurotransmitters and communication

Chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, GABA are molecules composed of C, H, O, N atoms. They transmit signals between neurons, creating patterns of activation that correspond to sensations, thoughts, emotions.

Experience as emergent pattern

When billions of neurons fire in organized patterns, integrated with your body and sensory inputs, consciousness arises as a patterned output of these atomic interactions. Warmth, light, sound, thought, everything is just atomic events organized in extremely complex structures.

Memory and higher cognition

Synaptic changes (strengthening, weakening) are biochemical and structural, atoms reconfiguring themselves. Every “idea” or “self-reflection” is a temporarily stable pattern of atomic-level changes in your brain and body.

Everything is one substance

A Pleasant Surprise

From a mechanistic perspective, what we call appreciation or aesthetic pleasure is the brain detecting a mismatch between expectation and actual input, a prediction error that isn’t threatening, just surprising.

In art, music, or nature, subtle deviations from patterns you unconsciously predict trigger attention and interest.

In life, noticing micro-details, unusual expressions, or unexpected events engages the system in the same way. You’re registering reality as it is, beyond your habitual compression.

So, reality appreciation is fundamentally about nice surprises, moments where the world refuses to be fully predicted, and your brain gets a taste of something beyond ordinary expectation.

There is no enlightenment.

The buddhist monks preach to stop thinking or overthinking because they don’t understand the mechanism they’re trying to describe. And when they do understand it, they package it as a slogan because slogans sell better than neurocognitive mechanics.

You cannot stop thought. Cortical prediction never stops. Even the attempt to “stop thinking” is a thought. The awareness of no-thought is a thought. The instruction to focus on breath is a thought-loop. The organism is electrically active until death.

What looks like stopping thought is reduced narrative bandwidth. Meditation reduces activity in the “default mode network” (the self-story generator). It does not stop cortical processing. It simply quiets the autobiographical chatter. So the buddhism brigade confuses narrative-dampening with thought cessation.

It’s like saying the computer is “silent” because the notification sounds are muted, while the CPU is still running millions of operations per second.

Their mistake is category confusion. Thought is all cortical representational activity. Narrative is self-referential, socially-learned interpretive loop. They collapse the two and then try to kill them both.

The brain is not designed to have no thoughts. Predictive processing is fundamental to staying alive. Try to “stop thoughts” and the system will just produce new thoughts about the attempt.

This is why mindfulness culture always ends in self-gaslighting; people judge themselves for not achieving a physiologically impossible state.

What meditation really does (when it works at all) is lowering precision of priors, reducing inhibitory filtering, increasing exposure to raw sensory input, and quieting autobiographical simulation. They interpret this as “thought disappearing.” But it’s just reduced compression, not transcendence.

The irony is that if thought actually stopped, the organism would be functionally blind, deaf, and non-responsive because perception itself is predictive thought. The monks would walk into traffic.