The Brain in Conflict: Sexual Arousal, Cephalic Warfare, and the Retrospective Illusion of the “I”
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Modern Behavioural science inherited one of its deepest assumptions from the illusion of conscious continuity: That the human organism behaves as a unified internal self.
Under this model:
- consciousness commands behaviour,
- the self initiates action,
- emotions emerge through deliberate interpretation,
- and behavioural states belong to a singular psychological identity.
Psychextrics dismantles this assumption completely.
The human organism is not a unified thinker, but a layered behavioural civilisation.
What humans experience as:
- identity,
- selfhood,
- intention,
- and personal continuity
emerges only after multiple cephalic systems have already:
- processed,
- fought over,
- stabilised,
- integrated,
- and packaged
behavioural reality beneath awareness.
The cortex feels like the self precisely because it never directly experiences the chaotic fragmentation occurring underneath it.
The Telencephalon inherits only the finished behavioural script. It never sees the behavioural war between competing cephalic systems that produced it.
1. Why the Cortex Feels Unified
The lower cephalic systems process entirely different categories of behavioural reality.
The:
- Myelencephalon manages survival vigilance,
- Metencephalon stabilises kinetic execution,
- Mesencephalon governs spatial orientation,
- Diencephalon calculates contextual meaning and saliency,
- while the Siencephalon integrates and packages behavioural signals.
These systems do not behave like a harmonious parliament. They behave more like independent mechanical governments operating under specialised survival mandates.
Because each cephalon is rigidly biowired for its own task, direct conflicts frequently emerge between them beneath awareness.
Yet the cortex never consciously experiences this fragmentation in its raw form. By the time behavioural reality reaches the Telencephalon, the conflict has already been:
- compressed,
- stabilised,
- emotionally indexed,
- and narratively packaged,
by the Siencephalon.
The cortex therefore experiences a clean behavioural summary, rather than the fragmented cephalic struggle itself. This creates the illusion of a singular internal self.
2. The Train Station Scenario
To understand this conflict structurally, consider a starkly ordinary human event.
A man stands inside a crowded public train station when an explicit adult advertisement suddenly enters his visual field. The behavioural reaction begins instantly beneath awareness.
Before reflective consciousness has time to organise a coherent thought, the lower cephalic systems activate simultaneously according to their specialised mandates.
The Mesencephalon immediately locks orientational attention toward the explicit stimulus. The visual geometry of the advertisement captures spatial saliency, keeping the eyes fixed within that behavioural orbit.
At the same moment, the Metencephalon responds kinetically through downstream autonomic vascular changes associated with sexual arousal. The body begins physically reacting before the conscious narrator fully understands what is happening.
The behavioural organism is already moving. Consciousness arrives afterward.
But another cephalic force now enters the conflict. The Diencephalon instantly calculates contextual meaning. It recognises:
- the crowded public environment,
- the social exposure risk,
- the possibility of humiliation,
- and the emotional danger of public embarrassment.
The Diencephalon therefore amplifies:
- shame,
- urgency,
- emotional pressure,
- and behavioural panic.
The organism now experiences multiple contradictory behavioural realities simultaneously.
The Metencephalon cannot immediately terminate the autonomic kinetic state because the Mesencephalon remains spatially locked onto the visual trigger. The Myelencephalon quietly enjoying the whole show and welcomes the event because the hormonal cascades represents what makes life going well for the organism.
The Diencephalon simultaneously condemns the behavioural situation through contextual saliency weighting.
The lower cephalic systems therefore enter direct structural conflict.
3. The Battlefield Beneath Awareness
What appears consciously as “I felt aroused and embarrassed in a public place” is actually a complex cephalic battlefield.
- The Mesencephalon continues orientational fixation.
- The Metencephalon continues kinetic projection.
- The Myelencephalon continues survival preservation.
- The Diencephalon continues emotional condemnation.
None of these systems can directly perform the role of the other.
- The Diencephalon blames Metencephalon for causing public embarrassment for the organism.
- The Metencephalon blames Mesencephalon for introducing the trigger in the visual field that started it.
- The Myelencephalon blames Diencephalon to stop complaining.
Each cephalon remains trapped within its own specialised behavioural jurisdiction.
- The Mesencephalon cannot terminate vascular arousal.
- The Myelencephalon cannot alter contextual meaning.
- The Metencephalon remains trapped within its own kinetic projection.
- The Diencephalon cannot physically redirect visual orientation.
The organism therefore experiences:
- tension,
- conflict,
- urgency,
- embarrassment,
- attraction,
- and behavioural instability
before consciousness fully narrates the event.
This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence against the myth of the unified executive self. Because no singular ruler exists within this behavioural sequence. Only specialised cephalic systems competing beneath awareness.
4. The Neutrality of the Siencephalon
Amid this behavioural warfare, one structure remains functionally neutral “the Siencephalon”. The Siencephalon does not:
- morally judge,
- consciously choose,
- or emotionally side with any particular cephalic faction.
Its responsibility is behavioural integration.
The Amygdalar systems extract:
- threat vectors,
- pleasure intensity,
- and emotional urgency
from the competing cephalic streams.
The Hippocampal indexing systems organise:
- saliency,
- familiarity,
- environmental relevance,
- and behavioural priority.
The Entorhinal gateway then compresses these fragmented behavioural realities together under the modulation of:
- GIM-HIM,
- and EIM-HFI
into a single coherent behavioural package.
This package is then projected upward onto the Telencephalic display-cortex.
5. The Birth of the “I”
By the time the behavioural signal reaches consciousness, the original fragmentation has disappeared. The cortex no longer sees:
- competing cephalic systems,
- autonomic conflict,
- orientational warfare,
- and contextual saliency collisions.
It inherits only the final narrative impression.
The organism therefore consciously experiences: “I became aroused.” “I felt embarrassed.” “I reacted.”
This is the precise origin of the retrospective optical illusion of the “I.”
Because the Siencephalon packages behavioural fragmentation so seamlessly, the cortex mistakes the polished behavioural script for the original source of behaviour itself.
The organism retrospectively invents:
- a singular author,
- a unified self,
- and a conscious internal ruler
that supposedly generated the behavioural event intentionally.
But the Telencephalon never directly controlled:
- the orientational fixation,
- the autonomic vascular response,
- the emotional saliency weighting,
- or the behavioural conflict occurring beneath awareness.
It merely inherited the completed behavioural summary after the cephalic systems had already:
- fought,
- negotiated,
- stabilised,
- and packaged
the event beneath consciousness.
6. The Narrator Mistaken for the Architect
This is the great illusion inherited by Psychology and Philosophy.
The cortex hosts:
- symbolic narration,
- linguistic continuity,
- reflective replay,
- and memory projection.
Humans therefore mistake the narrator for the architect. Because the behavioural script appears consciously as:
- thought,
- identity,
- memory,
- and personal intention,
the organism assumes the cortex consciously authored the event.
But the cortex is a passive display interface. It is the mirror, not the engine room.
The lower cephalic civilisation generated the behavioural event long before the cortical narrator inherited the story.
Conclusion: The Collapse of the Executive Self
The train station scenario exposes something profoundly uncomfortable about human identity:
The conscious self is not the sovereign ruler of behaviour.
The “I” emerges retrospectively after behavioural integration has already occurred beneath awareness. The cortex therefore becomes the reflective theatre of behaviour, rather than the originator of behaviour.
The organism continuously mistakes coherent narrative packaging for conscious authorship.
Psychextrics reveals that the unified self is not the commander of the cephalic civilisation. It is the polished symbolic reflection produced after the cephalic civilisation has already completed its invisible labour below.
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