Gliaxen

Why music gives you goosebumps?

Ever felt a sudden wave of goosebumps, a tight chest, or literal chills when a song hits a specific chord change?

In cognitive science, this beautiful emotional rush is called "frisson." But from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s actually a brilliant neural glitch. Millions of years ago, your ancestors spiked adrenaline to trigger goosebumps as a survival reflex to trap heat or face predators.

When music takes an unexpected turn, your brain's prediction software briefly panics, misinterpreting the acoustic shift as an environmental threat. The moment your conscious mind realizes you're completely safe, it floods your system with a massive dose of dopamine to celebrate surviving a danger that never existed.

Roughly half of the population experiences this. Are you part of the 50%? Let me know what song does this to you in the comments.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind. Told through cinema, not lectures.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

You've Felt Homesick For A Place That Doesn't Exist.Your Brain Knows Why.
You've been somewhere beautiful and still felt like something was missing. Not a person. Not a place you know. Something you can't point to. An ache for somewhere that doesn't exist — or somewhere you can never return to. The Welsh have carried this feeling for centuries. They gave it a name.

hiraeth /hɪraɪθ/ — Welsh

A longing for a home that never was, or can never be again. A grief for something you can't return to — because it may never have truly existed. It is homesickness without a destination. An ache that follows you even into beautiful places. Even into good days.

Psychologists who study this describe it as a form of ambiguous loss — grief for something that has no clear object. Your brain's attachment system registers absence without being able to identify what is absent. The loss feels real. The object of the loss remains unnamed.

This is why the feeling can't be fixed by arriving somewhere new. No place resolves it because no place is what it's pointing to. It points somewhere older than memory. Somewhere that may have only ever existed as a feeling.
The Welsh didn't just name it. They built a literature around it. Poets, wanderers, people who stood somewhere stunning and felt the ache anyway — they all felt what you've felt. Across centuries. The same unnamed thing. Until it had a name.

You are not the first to carry this.
You will not be the last.

Someone named it a long time ago.
Someone felt it too.

hiraeth.
Now you have the word.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind. Told through cinema, not lectures.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

There's A Voice In Your Head Reading This. That's Not You.
Right now there's a voice in your head reading these words. You didn't choose it. You can't turn it off. And here's the strangest part — that voice isn't you. It's your brain's narrator. And it's been running the whole show.

Neuroscience calls this the Narrative Interpreter — a function of the left hemisphere of the brain first identified by neurologist Michael Gazzaniga. Your brain doesn't experience reality and then describe it. It constructs a story about what just happened and presents that story to you as if it were experience.

You think you're watching the world happen. You're actually watching your brain's edited version of it — assembled from fragments of sensation, filtered through memory, expectation, and survival instinct, and narrated in real time.

This is also why your inner voice can't be silenced by thinking about it. The moment you try to observe the voice — the voice narrates the observation. You can't step outside the narrator because the narrator is the only tool you have for stepping outside anything.

Researchers also identify this through sensory gating — your brain filters out roughly 90% of raw sensory data before it reaches conscious awareness. What you experience as reality is the 10% your brain decided was worth your attention. The rest was edited out before you knew it existed.
Notice the voice right now.

It's already narrating you noticing it.
It always does.

The question isn't how to silence it.
The question is — who is listening?

If the voice is the narrator, the editor, and the filter...
who is actually watching the movie?

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind. Told through cinema, not lectures.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

She was typing the name.Then it rang.
You were thinking about someone. About to reach out. And then — they called. Before you sent anything. Like they knew. Has this ever happened to you? Because there's actually a reason it does.

This isn't telepathy. But it isn't coincidence either.

When two people share significant emotional history, their brains encode each other through overlapping neural networks — specifically the default mode network and the medial prefrontal cortex. These are the regions that activate both when you think about someone close to you and when you process your own internal experience.

Shared emotional bonds create synchronized patterns of activation. Meaning the same triggers — a season, a song, a feeling of longing, a life transition — tend to activate both people's thoughts of each other at similar times. You're not reading each other's minds. You're both responding to the same emotional frequency.

Researchers also point to the Zeigarnik effect — unfinished emotional connections stay cognitively active longer than resolved ones. If something was left unsaid between two people, both brains flag it as an open loop. Open loops activate more often. Both people carry the same loop. Both people get pulled toward it at similar moments.

It's not magic. It just feels like it because the science is invisible.

Think of someone right now.

Someone you haven't called in too long.
Someone you almost reached out to this week.
Someone whose name came to mind just now.

They might be thinking of you too.

Call them.
Before you talk yourself out of it again.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind. Told through cinema, not lectures.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

You Already Chose A Side. You Don't Know What Happened.
Two women arguing on a city street. You don't know what happened. You don't know who started it. You have zero information. And yet — your brain already decided who's right. Before you heard a single word.
This is called implicit bias — and it happens in under 100 milliseconds.

Your brain processes faces faster than conscious thought. Before you've heard a word, before you've understood a single gesture, your brain has already run a rapid calculation based on facial structure, expression, clothing, similarity to people you already trust — and delivered a verdict. Guilty or innocent. Reasonable or unreasonable. Right or wrong.

Neuroscientists call this the rapid face evaluation system — a survival mechanism that evolved to quickly assess threat or safety in strangers. It was designed for a world of immediate physical danger. But your brain still runs it on everyone you see. Every day. In every argument you witness. In every disagreement you're told about second-hand.

You didn't choose your bias. Your brain chose it for you. Based on your past. Not on what actually happened.

Next time you hear one side of an argument —

Notice the moment your brain decides.
It will be before you have enough information.
It always is.

Neither of them was lying.
Both of them were completely right.
Inside their own heads.

So is everyone who disagrees with you.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind. Told through cinema, not lectures.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

A Stranger Gave Her This. She's Never Taken It Off.
There's an object you own that you could never throw away. Not because it's valuable. Because it holds someone inside it. And when you touch it — your body remembers before your mind does.

This is not sentimental. This is neuroscience.

Your nervous system creates what researchers call somatic markers — physical anchors tied to peak emotional experiences. When a moment carries enough emotional weight, your brain encodes it not just as a memory but as a bodily feeling. A warmth. A chill. A tightening in the chest.

Objects present during those moments become carriers of the feeling. When you touch them, the body replays the emotional state — not as a thought, but as a physical sensation. Before you've had a single conscious memory, your nervous system has already begun the recall.

This is why certain objects feel alive in your hands. Why you can't bring yourself to move them. Why touching them feels like touching the person they came from.

Your body stores love physically. In the things you keep.

Think of your object right now.

The necklace. The note. The pin. The ticket. The photograph. The thing in the back of the drawer you haven't looked at in months but couldn't throw away if you tried.

Your body encoded someone in it.
Every time you touch it — they come back.
Not as a memory.
As a feeling.

That's not grief. That's not nostalgia.
That's your nervous system keeping someone close the only way it knows how.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind. Told through cinema, not lectures.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

There's A Word For Feeling Alone In A Crowd. Most People Never Learn It.

You've felt it on a packed train. In a crowded restaurant. Walking through a busy street. Surrounded by people — completely alone. There's a word for that feeling. And knowing it changes something.

The word is sonder.

It describes the realization that each person you pass has a life as vivid and complex as your own — full of their own fears, ambitions, routines, and private griefs. A whole universe running quietly behind every face you'll never look at twice.

Psychologists and neuroscientists who study social cognition call this a failure of what's known as Theory of Mind at scale — our brain's ability to understand that other people have inner lives. In everyday crowds our brain stops extending that understanding. It processes strangers as background. As scenery. Not as people.

Sonder is the moment that processing breaks down. When one stranger becomes real. When their life suddenly has weight. Researchers have found that experiencing sonder — really feeling it — activates the same neural regions as deep empathy. It doesn't just change how you see strangers. It changes how lonely you feel among them.

The next time you're in a crowd and the feeling hits —
Pick one stranger.
Give them a whole life in your mind.
Where are they going. What are they carrying.
What did they dream about last night.

You won't feel less alone.
But you'll feel less strange in your aloneness.

That's what sonder does.
You are not the only one living a life this complicated.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind.

Follow if your brain never shuts up.

It's 3am And Your Brain Picked Someone. You Know Who.
3am. You should be asleep. Instead your brain picked someone and now you're standing at the window thinking about them again. You know exactly who it is.

Here's why 3am is different from every other hour.

During the day your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for logic, impulse control, and telling yourself "don't go there" — is fully active. It manages your thoughts. Keeps things in check. Redirects you.

At 3am it goes quiet.

What's left are the unfiltered things. The unresolved feelings. The people your brain never finished processing. The conversations that never got an ending. Without the prefrontal cortex guarding the door — everything you've been managing all day walks right in.

It's not weakness. It's not obsession. It's just 3am. And your brain finally being honest about what it hasn't let go of yet.

You can't think your way out of a 3am thought.

The only thing that works —
Write it down. All of it. Everything you'd say to them.
Then close it. Don't send it. Just close it.

Give your brain the ending it's been looking for.
Go to sleep. You can think about them tomorrow.

🧠 Gliaxen — the hidden side of your mind.

🔔 Follow if your brain never shuts up.