Where does our mind go when we sleep?
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Where does a song go when a violin stops? The song only exists as long as the violin is playing. The brain changes its function in fundamental ways during sleep, so the mind fundamentally changes. In other words it doesn’t go anywhere, as it only exists when it is sustained by the brain. What is truly amazing is how consistent the mind is from day to day when the brain starts the song every morning.
It keeps going, but hallucinates as it saves memories from the day and does other refreshing things. During most of this time you don’t remember it so when you wake up you think it didn’t happen. The parts you do remember are just dreams like you would expect.
Where *does* the mind go when we sleep?
The short answer is, ‘we don’t know’.
We don’t fully understand what a ‘mind’ is. On a technical level, we know that electrical potentials and neurochemical reactions create something that we call ‘consciousness’, but we’re still struggling to understand exactly what that is and how it forms.
We have lots of hypotheses, and philosophers have been arguing over ‘cogito, ergo sum’ for centuries, but we’re no closer to finding an answer today than we were hundreds or thousands of years ago.
So…we really don’t have any idea where the mind ‘goes’ when we’re asleep.
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