What If the Brain’s Hidden Activity Has Another Purpose?

At the beginning of every episode of our 4 Ever Paranormal podcast, before we get into whatever subject we’re discussing that week, Deb brings me something to discuss quick. Sometimes it’s an interesting news story, and other times it’s a question she wants me to consider from a paranormal perspective. This past week, she managed to combine the two, and what she brought up sent me down another one of those rabbit holes I seem to find myself in so often.

She had found an article about scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who were studying how the brain switches back and forth between conscious and unconscious experiences up to 15 times a second, filtering out some information while prioritizing other information. Then she asked whether this might mean we’re experiencing two versions of reality without knowing it.

I told her I didn’t think that was what was happening. The moment she mentioned that rapid switching, something clicked. My thoughts didn’t go to thinking about two versions of reality at all. I was thinking about the possibility that our brains are constantly sending and receiving information.

Now, if you’ve been following my articles on consciousness, you’ll know where I’m going with this. A while back I wrote a series called What If Your Brain Is Connected to Something Bigger? One of those articles, What If Consciousness Has a Mainframe, explored my idea that there is a universal consciousness, something like a mainframe computer, with our individual brains connected to it.

I’ve never thought of that connection as a one-way street. In my theory, we’re continually uploading the experiences of our physical lives into that larger consciousness and downloading information from it. Our subconscious handles the exchange while our conscious minds are occupied with living. We don’t have to do anything to make it happen. It’s simply part of how we’re connected to the whole.

So you can probably understand why Deb’s question got my attention. Here were scientists observing rapid changes in brain activity, and I was wondering whether those changes might have something to do with the very process I’d been describing. Not two versions of reality, but an ongoing exchange of information between our brains and something much larger.

I decided to spend some time with the original research rather than rely on the news article. The paper is titled Rapid Alternation of Conscious and Suppressed Stimulus Representations in the Primate Brain, by Janis K. Hesse, Frank F. Lanfranchi, Conor McGrory, Yuelin Shi, Tatiana A. Engel, and Doris Y. Tsao. It was published as a preprint in October 2026, and anyone interested can follow the link and read it for themselves.

The experiments involved presenting competing images to the eyes and recording neural activity in two rhesus monkeys. The researchers found that the brain could alternate between representing the image being consciously perceived and the image that was suppressed. Those representations changed at intervals of roughly 60 to 67 milliseconds. That’s where the figure of approximately 15 times a second comes from.

I’ll admit that some of the technical details went well beyond what I normally spend my time reading and I even got lost with what they were saying a time or two. But the findings themselves interested me, especially when I started thinking about what they might mean in relation to my theory.

I’ve always pictured the subconscious as the part of us handling the connection to universal consciousness. It receives information from the mainframe and transmits our experiences back without our conscious awareness. If that’s happening continuously, then there must be some physical process involved in allowing the exchange to take place. I’ve wondered about that before, but I never had anything specific to point toward.

Then along comes this research showing neural representations alternating at an incredible speed, and naturally I started wondering whether there could be a connection.

I don’t believe our experiences are stored in some little compartment of the soul, waiting to be carried into another lifetime. I’ve discussed that in my earlier articles about reincarnation and consciousness. In my thoughts the soul is what travels from body to body and makes the connection to that new body.

What I hadn’t considered was whether some of the physical activity involved in maintaining that connection might eventually show up in neuroscience research.

Of course, the Berkeley scientists weren’t studying anything of the sort. They were simply studying conscious perception. Noting in their experiments tells us that information is being sent from the brain. I’m not claiming they discovered a universal consciousness. What caught my attention was the possibility that the rapid alternations they observed might be related to a process I’ve been thinking about from an entirely different perspective.

I seem to keep running across things like this. I’ll be reading about some new discovery, often one that has absolutely nothing to do with paranormal research, and something in it reminds me of an idea I’ve been exploring. You know how it is when you have something on your mind, like blue cars, suddenly you see tons of blue cars. That doesn’t mean there are suddenly more blue cars on the road. I’m just paying more attention to them. And I suppose the same thing could be happening when I come across research that reminds me of my theory. Sometimes it’s worth looking into, and other times it’s just another rabbit hole with nothing but a rabbit waiting at the end.

Deb finished her question and I was immediately stuck at sending and receiving. It is what made me decide to dig into their research.

Maybe those rapid changes have nothing whatsoever to do with the exchange I’m proposing. But if our brains really are connected to a universal consciousness, and that connection is active throughout our lives, then something has to make it work.

I wonder whether we’re beginning to see little pieces of that process without recognizing what we’re looking at.

And that brings me back to Deb’s original question. She wanted to know if we are experiencing two versions of reality? I don’t think so. I think we’re in the same reality while continuously sharing information with something far greater than ourselves.

The question I’m left with isn’t whether the brain can switch 15 times a second.

I’m wondering what else might be happening during those 15 switches.