mystical readings

"Did you do anything different that day?"

"No"

Ore and I stared at this chart he had generated of my brain activity, puzzled by the strange phenomenon. I was one of the test subjects for some research he was conducting for his startup, Neurofusion.

As part of the trial, every day of the month I'd place an EEG headset on my scalp and have it read my brain's electrical activity for a while before submitting to him. Most of the readings were chill, except for that drop you see there, on a seemingly random Sunday.

"What about the day before?"

"Uhh, I don't think so…"

I was too embarrassed to share what I'd been up to a few days before…the dip. Recent breakup, nights crying to Asem's Bye Bye (mese ɔkɔɔ ooo!), mornings in frantic distraction. The usual post-breakup mess, but nothing that'd explain what happened next.

The morning of the dip felt off. I woke up feeling like something was missing. It felt eerily quiet as if the power was out. I got up and flicked the lamp switch. There was power. So why did everything feel so silent?

Days before my body had been trying to shake off the anxious energy from the breakup. But this morning felt unexpectedly pristine and clear, even though my refrigerator was still whirring, machines still clattering on stone outside, and a nearby sparrow still chirping.

I honestly wondered if it was a dream, this altered state, but I don't ever remember phones showing up in my dreams, let alone receiving alerts like "Record EEG activity for Ore". I sat for five minutes with a neurosity crown on my scalp and waited for the app to say "submitted", and went about my usual errands: cleaning my place, grabbing bread from the local store and visiting a friend in Surrey who even noticed "something different" about the way I moved, more…present. Where else would I have been?

It took me a while to make sense of what had happened. The most notable thing was the absence of mental chatter, you know how your mind usually bounces between thoughts about the future, or gets triggered by things you see? That Sunday, it was completely quiet up there. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but the constant background noise in my head was just…gone. I wondered if some people lived this peacefully all the time.

Turns out I wasn't the only one who noticed. Ore saw it too, and so did his instruments. The chart showed a significant dip in all brain wave frequencies (about 50% drop in relative band power), which was unusual. While my experience of the day was completely alien, I don't remember feeling less capable.

Ore asked about how I felt and I said "zen", like how I imagined monks and contemplative mystics to have experienced reality after like 100 days of meditation. But in this case, I did nothing to earn that state; I just woke up in it.

We were both trained computational scientists with at least enough understanding of science to know that while incredible, this single recording was not statistically credible enough (could be anything from faulty devices to improper methodology).

"We'll have to repro. Please keep doing daily recordings and let me know if anything"

It did not repro, as I expected. Most of the mystical experiences I've had have never been repro'd. They were elusive, I guess that's part of what makes them mystical.

Still, I delight that not only can I rely on memory or sparse journal entries from that mystical day, but also a statistically insignificant though sentimentally significant EEG diagram of my brain activity. Reminding me that I could probably live just fine with a lot less mental chatter.