This may seem like a question for a riddle or utter non-sense, but there are sufferers of an odd syndrome caused by serotonin and a little part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens. In Scientific American Mar. ‘07, there is a story of a neuroscientist that suffered from a horrid grating noise coming from his eyeballs while he tries to fall asleep.

Now before you start reading on, I want you to keep this thought in the back of your head: “Do you perceive the world around you as it really is, or just as your brain wants to interpret it?” Hopefully I have not lost you by now, but keep up as this gets interesting.

The story starts with Douglas Fields, the neuroscientist with “loud” eyeballs. In attending a neuroscience meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, he sat down with a college friend of his to have a couple of beers at a bar. When Douglas noticed Josef Rauschecker of Georgetown University drinking a beer as well, he acquired enough courage to ask him about his really unique problem since he knew Josef was an authority on the auditory cortex. Once Douglas gets his attention and starts describing how his eyeballs start to make a loud, irritating noise as soon as he tries to go to sleep, the guy sitting right next to him says, “Me, too!” Who knows what the actual likelihood of this happening is…but let me go on.

Once the two recover from being dumbfounded over this very strange, unique coincidence, Josef blurts out, “I know what your problem is.” Douglas thinks to himself:

What are the chances of meeting someone else who shares my oddball noise and in front of the only person in the world who could understand it?

Josef goes on to say that their problem is serotonin. “Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that stimulates neurons in the nucleus accumbens (NA) to activate it.” The nucleus accumbens or NA is basically an input regulation device. It allows a certain amount of sensory input into the conscious mind depending on what “we” are doing at that time. When one is deeply focused on a specific task, the NA will block out or heavily regulate unwanted noise or other sensory input. A good example is the selective hearing that men are so good at while watching a football game. His NA is blocking out the talking of his wife, so that he can continue watching his football game uninterrupted.

What does this mean for good old Douglas and his friend? Well, when Douglas was younger he injured his inner ear, and when his nerve fibers sprouted to repair the damage some of them “miss-wired” and ended up cross-wiring to his circuits that are responsible for vision and balance. So, some of the sensory input from his eyes that should go to his visual cortex ended up going to his auditory cortex causing him to hear his eyes move. How does that sound [Pun intended]?

Serotonin comes into play to control what the NA lets through when one tries to “fall” asleep. So when Douglas starts to enter into his twilight sleep, his NA falls asleep as well, allowing him to hear his eyeballs move. The same action occurs when he wakes up. Fortunately, all Douglas has to do is adjust his serotonin and he should never hear his eyeballs again.

After I originally read this story, I couldn’t stop thinking about how this proves that our reality is nothing but electrical inputs, and how we trust our brains to interpret them correctly. It is our brain that will decide what is essential and what is not. But, what if our brain does not interpret them in the way that represents what is really “out there”. What does that do to our sense of “reality”. So, is the world around you really like what you think it is, or is your brain wrong? I guess we will never know. But what can be learned from the above incredible story, is what you think you perceive may not be “really” reality.