There is a keen difference between having an analytical mind and a compulsory need to indulge in interpreting every detail of every event (or non-event) that one comes across. Too much effort spent on discovering the hidden nuance in a tossed-off phrase quickly gets in the way of understanding the moment. Treating life’s every-day occurrences as mini-conspiracies that must be revealed in full can cause the sort of mind-trap that prohibits an individual from being able to revel in the beautiful mysteries that life is actually throwing at us every moment. Sometimes, being able to let go of the need to “know” everything can actually open up a world of understanding, awareness and appreciation.

And then there are people like R. Salvador Reyes. An accomplished poet, he has spent some time on the observation of the minutiae. When I first encountered his fragile, emerging prose nearly thirty years ago, it was apparent that he was interested in deeper themes and unseen details. I recall a piece he wrote about the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which had clearly affected him, touching as it did his poetic side as well as the inquisitive instinct inherent in a scientist and the longing sense of adventure that science instills in those who are aware of how boundaries are being broken down on the frontier (wherever that may be). The poem may have been obvious and direct in a way that most of his current work is not, but it told volumes about how he would express himself over the coming decades.

For much of the ensuing 25 years, Mr. Reyes explored his inner world while remaining fascinated by the controls of the Universe. His tolerance of ignorance has grown arguably shorter, though his fan-boy appreciation of professional sports shows that he has a certain flexibility with his perception of values and probably a decent ability to compartmentalize the things he weighs as important. He can get his ire up over baseball as readily as politics, and it is sometimes difficult to ascertain which social issue is of greater importance in his eyes. But passion about daily things, large and small, is expected of practicing poets. Perhaps it helps them see, even at the risk of clouding greater vision. Yet this conundrum seems at the heart of Mr. Reyes’ highly interesting current cycle of work.

Quite simply, he has re-imagined the brain. Not the physical brain, but the processes that we consider the essence of the brain from a conscious perspective. Beginning with the concept of patterns and their relevance to our understanding or interpretation of the world, he expounds upon memory, story, sensory perception, empathy, emotions, dreams and human understanding. It would be easy to brush this work off as a poet’s self-indulgent efforts to validate his own self-obsession, but the work is actually grounded in hard neuroscience rather than pseudoscience or science fiction. He may not have done all the hard research himself (borrowing as most good writers will on the ideas and labor of those who came before them), but Mr. Reyes has synthesized something beautiful and tangible and completely original out of a web of research and his own epiphanies.

Nothing can replace the fabled spark of inspiration that has guided the advancement of science over the ages. Whether Copernicus, Newton, Einstein or any other revered genius who saw that which had theretofore been unrevealed, scientists and revolutionary thinkers have shaped the future by simply being aware at the right instant. Impossible to determine the cause of these sudden insights, divine intervention, luck and other forms of mysticism have all been ineffectively argued. More likely it is simply that the insights were not sudden at all, but merely the result of a dogged determination to notice what the observer had already been slowly and steadily studying. This is true as well of R. Salvador Reyes, whose work has been clearly building in this manner, however indirectly. Then blending his natural inclination toward science and psychology with his incessant drive to un-entwine the secrets he needed to reveal of his own mental mechanisms could lead in but one natural direction: a new theory of how (and why) the brain works.

The amazing thing about this theory is not so much that it is new, but that it actually makes sense.

Start here:

Story Theory: http://www.tottenvillereview.com/story-theory-confessions-of-a-literary-darwinist/

Then dig in to this:

Narrative Complexity: http://www.rsalvador.com/complexity.html