What is consciousness, really — and how does your brain build your reality?

In this episode of The Write Brain podcast, Ellis and Dr. Robert Melillo dive into the trippy but practical side of consciousness: how your brain stitches together sight, sound, memory, and emotion into a “movie” of your life… and what happens when that timing gets thrown off (anxiety, paranoia, psychosis, false memories, and more).

They get into gamma waves (40 Hz), quantum entanglement, parallel realities, why two people can remember the same moment totally differently, and how brain timing tools like the Interactive Metronome can actually help rebalance perception.

All of that… plus Jackie’s pastries and Ellis’s croissant cravings as B-plot. 🥐

In this episode, we talk about:

• What consciousness actually is (and why it’s the #1 question in neuroscience)
• How the brain “binds” sight, sound, memory, and emotion into one reality
• Why your brain is really a reality emulator
• How timing issues between the hemispheres can warp perception
• False memories, paranoia & “filling in the blanks”
• Quantum entanglement & the idea of a collective consciousness
• How tools like Interactive Metronome help sync the brain’s timing
• Why big life changes (moving cities, quitting drinking) can feel like “timeline jumps”

Timestamps

00:00 Intro, fasting, pastries & live audience energy
 02:30 What is consciousness? Self-awareness & subjective experience
 06:30 The “binding problem”: how the brain turns fragments into a single reality
 10:30 40 Hz gamma waves & the brain as a reality emulator
 14:30 When reality in your head doesn’t match the outside world
 19:30 False memories & the left brain “filling in” stories
 23:30 Right-brain big-picture paranoia (texts, tone, overthinking)
 27:30 Quantum entanglement & universal/collective consciousness
 33:00 Timelines, “quantum leaping” & changing your reality
 38:00 Interactive Metronome, timing, and balancing the hemispheres
 42:30 Wrap-up: how all of this connects back to mental health