Intro
A soft mass weighing less than a kilogram and a half sits entirely in the darkness of the skull, yet it is where the world you experience begins.
From the electrochemical activity of nerve cells, somehow, colour, sound, love, fear and the feeling of “I exist” emerge. Neuroscience has built an increasingly detailed picture of how the brain processes information and responds to its surroundings. Yet the deeper we look, the clearer the gap becomes between what instruments can measure and what a person actually experiences.
Across five parts, the series follows different questions surrounding the brain and consciousness:
- how the brain constructs the world we experience;
- how the body, the gut, the environment and the people around us continually affect the brain;
- why the pineal gland became a place where people projected ideas about the soul, intuition and the “inner eye”;
- Schumann resonance and the pull of “frequency”;
- and finally, the edge of the question of consciousness, where science can measure a great deal while some parts still have no widely accepted explanation.
“Sanctuary of the universe” is used here as a metaphor for the meeting point between biology, experience and questions about consciousness. Throughout the series, the brain remains at the boundary between scientific evidence, the history of ideas and mystical interpretations.
From a little over a kilogram of tissue, a human being can remember, dream, love, fear, imagine, observe itself and investigate its own experience.