Phase Shift: What Really Happens When You Get Knocked Out

Phase Shift

When I was a kid I lived way up north, above the Arctic Circle. Our apartment buildings had huge stairwells where we kids used to play all the time.

One day I was playing alone, and it was fun to see how many steps I could skip jumping down the stairs. At some point, maybe around the fifth step, I suddenly found myself on the floor, lying down, and I couldn’t remember how it happened.

Through some simple logical deduction I figured that, most likely, jumping from the fifth or sixth step, I hit my head on the ceiling — the wall above me.

So yeah, that’s a phase shift. Or a concussion.

Have you ever wondered why you lose consciousness when you hit your head? Turns out, there’s a pretty interesting explanation.

In simple terms, our brains and neurons float in fluid, and during a concussion that fluid shakes in a way that suddenly changes the chemical balance between neural connections in the membranes, in the substance, between the axon thingies, and suddenly changes axonal conductivity.

All of this affects different parts of the brain because electricity just doesn’t conduct as well anymore. Consciousness coherence gets disrupted.

There’s a phase shift in neural oscillations (those beta and gamma rhythms) and a “collapse of the brain’s global workspace.”

That’s the deal, folks. ChatGPT kept feeding me some bullshit about a protective mechanism against overload. I had to interrogate it.

What interesting questions have you had for ChatGPT?