[NoraSpinnor]

On the matter of mental illness, we ask the question: “What makes us so certain of any particular reality?” The reality each of us lives inside is a collaboration between what is present and what our nervous system allows in. Your brain builds a working world model by selecting, suppressing, and arranging information into a story that feels continuous and reliable. That story is useful for survival, yet it is never complete. What you experience as “obvious” is often the result of invisible editing, where thousands of signals are dismissed before they ever reach conscious awareness.

Our minds are powerful filter mechanisms. A well-functioning brain can focus on a single conversation in a crowded room, yet if someone across the room says that person’s name, they notice it immediately. This is one example of how the brain selects information to bring into conscious attention. Advanced signal selection is happening at every waking moment.

Studies in attention show that the brain selects information to focus on while ignoring information that seems irrelevant. The Invisible Gorilla Experiment is a famous psychological study where participants were asked to count basketball passes between players on two teams. In the middle of the experiment, a person in a gorilla suit walked directly through the scene, paused, faced the camera, and beat their chest before walking off. A large percentage of participants never noticed the gorilla at all.

The result was due to selective attention. The task of counting passes consumed the attentional filter, so information outside that task was excluded from conscious awareness. When participants were later told about the gorilla, many insisted it could not have been there, even when shown the video again.

This study illustrates a critical point. Perception is not a full recording of reality. It is an edited stream shaped by expectation, focus, and internal priorities. The brain routinely removes information that does not fit the current model of what matters. This begs the question: what are our brains filtering out, and who is to say what is really there and what is not? Recall that some participants refused to believe there was a gorilla in the middle of the experiment.

In a 24-hour period, our consciousness cycles from ordinary waking awareness into vivid dreams and then into deep, restorative sleep. Our dreaming minds and waking minds operate in different modes. This is apparent in the brief period between dreaming and waking. As soon as we open our eyes, we may still have vivid memories of where we just were. After getting up and moving around for a few minutes, the conscious mind struggles to recall even fragments, if it can remember anything at all. This is what a well-functioning brain does. As soon as we enter waking consciousness, the dreaming mode is shut down. This is necessary for effective functioning in the material world.

If the mind did not disconnect upon waking, a person might catch glimpses of the astral plane or experience subconscious symbolic projections with no obvious cause. In a dream, this can be understood as inner wounds reaching out to be healed. In waking consciousness, the same kind of content is confusing and terrifying, and it makes little sense to the person experiencing it or to others around them. In the current medical paradigm, a person with such symptoms would likely be placed on antipsychotic medication, perhaps for the rest of their life.

Our current mental health paradigm is shaped by two assumptions: that the mind is primarily material in nature, meaning that fixing chemistry fixes illness, and that reality is universal in the sense that deviation from shared perception is treated as pathology. This article proposes a different approach. Reality may be more subjective than our models allow. This does not mean hallucinations are not a problem. Most people suffering from them are plagued by terrifying visions. It means our default approach often assumes that anything outside ordinary experience must be false, and that the only meaningful explanation is a physical malfunction.

Many people do report unusual phenomena, and they interpret them through religious or spiritual frameworks. This can lead to a wide range of emotions and behaviors, and it cannot be classified as inherently good or bad. What we perceive and how we interpret it depend heavily on what we are taught to expect from a young age. If a person grows up in a spiritual community, they may be more likely to interpret unusual experiences as spiritual. In much of the Western world, a materialist view is favored, and spiritual experiences are sometimes classified as physical abnormalities, such as a brain “misfiring.” Two people can witness the same event and process it differently, which may reflect differences in signal filtering rather than differences in what occurred. Recall that in the Invisible Gorilla Experiment, there was a gorilla in the scene, yet many participants insisted there was not. It was there, but their brains screened it out.

When discussing psychosis, including schizophrenia, we can apply the same signal selection concept. In traumatized patients, signals can leak from past wounds into present consciousness without any obvious trigger. To understand how this is possible, you need to understand how a spirit can fracture and recombine across time, space, and dimension.

In Netism, we discuss how trauma can shatter a spirit, leaving pieces of the self fragmented and cycling through the trauma. A person may feel a sense of dissociation from the event, and in extreme cases, may lose most or all memory of it. Even without clear memories, symptoms can persist because the spirit, though separated, remains in communication with its greater whole. This may function as a short-term coping strategy, yet when it continues long-term, it can contribute to anxiety, depression, and more severe forms of mental illness.

According to George Atwood, author and professor of abnormal psychology at MIT, nearly all people with schizophrenia have trauma histories. In his view, the condition is not primarily genetic. Harvard Medical School states that a person has about a 10% likelihood of developing schizophrenia if an immediate family member, such as a sibling or parent, has schizophrenia. Atwood, who has worked with extreme cases throughout his life, cites trauma, not genes, as the most significant contributor to psychotic symptoms.

For a person with PTSD, these fragmented parts of the spirit call out, and they may be experienced as flashbacks. A person with schizophrenia may experience trauma content as hallucinations blended into waking consciousness, experienced as real. This is clearly a problem, yet suppressing brain chemistry might not be the only solution.

One method of healing from trauma is spiritual. The shamanic journey process of soul retrieval mirrors Netism’s process of spiritual reintegration. A person undergoes a meditative journey to the moment of crisis. They then converse with the past version of the self and persuade it to return and reintegrate. When properly performed, a person often feels a sense of long-absent inner peace, along with a more vivid recollection of the event. The past cannot be erased, yet many find that once integration is complete, spontaneous flashbacks and nightmares stop. This suggests that trauma memories may function as signals from a distressed, fractured spirit.

If the brain is largely a signal-processing mechanism, then we should be able to identify processes by which signals are filtered and prioritized. Rosehip cells may be one piece of that filtering system.

Rosehip cells are inhibitory neurons, which act like brakes and dampers. They help prevent the brain from amplifying every input into a full-blown perception. Researchers found rosehip cells in the outermost layer of the human cortex, a region that helps coordinate and fine-tune signals arriving from many directions at once. They appear designed to apply very precise braking to the branches of larger brain cells that integrate information. In everyday terms, they may help your brain decide, at a very fine level, which signals get turned up and which signals get turned down before you experience them as thoughts, images, or meaning.

Because rosehip cells were only recently discovered, there is no definitive research yet on how they relate to diagnoses such as schizophrenia and autism. This analysis does offer hope that broad suppression of brain activity, such as with heavy psychiatric medication, could one day be replaced by more targeted approaches that strengthen natural filtering systems, potentially including pathways influenced by rosehip cells. This would be a relief for many patients who feel forced to choose between feeling drowsy on medication and being unable to reliably assess their environment without it.
For most of human history, those who could perceive unusual phenomena were often described as spiritually gifted, open to realms that others could not access. We hesitate to make that claim for people who suffer from terrifying hallucinations. We do suggest that if trauma can be healed and perception can be stabilized, the ability to sense a wider field of reality could become an asset. Many spiritual practices aim toward that outcome while emphasizing stability, discernment, and connection to the greater whole.

What many people who suffer from delusions lack is a framework for interpretation. Instead of dismissing signals that do not match other people’s realities as false, we can examine them as meaningful to the person experiencing them. A purely individual experience, such as a projection from a fractured spirit, cannot be classified as false any more than a memory can. If imagery is vivid, the nervous system responds regardless of whether the threat is physically present. What we propose is a more integrative and understanding approach, rather than one based solely on materialism and a rigid concept of objective reality.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you ever had an experience you struggled to make sense of?

You can view the substack article with images here:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-182381293

Bibliography
Atwood, George E. (2011). The Abyss of Madness. Routledge.
Boldog, E., Bakken, T. E., Hodge, R. D., Novotny, M., Aevermann, B. D., Baka, J., Bordé, S., Close, J. L., Diez-Fuertes, F., Ding, S.-L., Faragó, N., Goldy, J., Graham, L. C., Hanson, E. J., Hardy, M., Horváth, S., Kroes, R. A., et al. (2018). Transcriptomic and morphophysiological evidence for a specialized human cortical GABAergic cell type. Nature Neuroscience.
Hamilton, Jon. (2018, August 27). A new discovery may explain what makes the human brain unique. NPR, Health Shots.
Simons, Daniel J., and Chabris, Christopher F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074.
Harvard Health Publishing. (2024, September 19). Schizophrenia: A to Z.

[MayaMoonHealer]

As a therapist, I 100% support this. Some patients come to me not being able to trust themselves. This is a fresh take and I like it a lot.

[IndigoSoul111]

I have a family member with schizophrenia and it is hard to see him struggle. The meds definitely do make him drowsy and he hates them. It’s a struggle for so many people. Such an important area for more research, we can do better!

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