"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? If you were unable to awake from that dream, how would you know the difference between that dream world and the real world?" -Morpheus 0:31:45

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In my previous web paper, I contemplated the idea of a link between depression and the default mode network. I would like to explore the link between the two in this web paper.

Controversial news has broken loose in the mental health community: antidepressants are hardly better than placebos!

   Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink is an exploration of rapid cognition, of the thinking that happens in the blink of an eye, and is an attempt to “understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment” (Gladwell 260). He refrains from using “intuition” to describe this kind of thinking, as he believes we use that word to describe irrational thought. Gladwell argues that those first two seconds of rapid cognition are completely rational and just involve thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than deliberate, conscious thought and decision-making.

    Imagine an army of ants crawling up your back. Slowly they move up your spine, their short legs scurrying along. Eventually they reach your neck, briefly touching your skin before they move up the back of your head. Does your skin feel tingly? Did your head start to itch? Did you give in to the temptation to scratch? If so, you aren’t alone; I had those same sensations as I was writing this. That inexplicable sensation of itching just by reading about it is not uncommon. Atul Gawande, in The Itch, a treatise on itching published in The New Yorker, described a similar experience.

 “The Eyes sees what it sees, even when we know what we know”(P17).