I am updating my thoughts, thoughts that I have had in the past, waking them up for reconsolidation. I am thinking about consciousness, the placebo effect, drug addiction, and various other interesting subjects. If I were to write a book, rather than simply reviewing the latest research and information, I would focus more on unanswered questions and the implications they carry. For instance, consider the unconscious brain and its role in information processing. The unconscious brain is where everything happens, it is where actions and decisions are planned and executed. On the other hand, the conscious brain possesses limited bandwidth and its influence on brain and behavior is therefore extremely limited. The amount of information, in bits, that can enter our stream of consciousness from second to second is infinitesimally small compared to the vast processing of the unconscious brain. In fact, one could write an entire book about human nature and omit mentioning consciousness entirely, and still yield a thorough analysis. Consciousness could maybe get a brief mention in the appendix, describing what it feels like. But we would be making too many assumptions to suggest consciousness impacts how we think and do things. For example, perception that we have free will over our thoughts and actions is a huge part of the conscious experience. Yet evidence for free will is still missing. So what are we left to conclude about the function of consciousness? As much as we can try to come to terms with the fact that we don’t have free will, our day to day lives continue unchanged as we continue perceiving that we do. So we are left to wonder what the role of consciousness might be and how different our lives would be without it. Attempting to imagine what it would be like to not have consciousness is difficult, much like trying to understand multiple space time dimensions or time travel. These are all unsolved mysteries that we can’t fully comprehend, at least not yet.