The Derealizing Nature of Analytical Thinking

What we now tend to see as “realistic” or “rational” is cognitive analysis. Thinking, explaining, understanding, interpreting. The idea that the more someone thinks about something, the closer they get to reality. As if analysis itself equals objective truth and reality. Yet neurobiologically, that assumption is far less realistic than we tend to think, because analysis does not exist independently. It emerges from underlying processes and is shaped by them.

Sensory input is considered vague, thinking is considered reality?

It is actually striking how physical presence has come to be viewed as something vague, soft, or “alternative.” Feeling your feet making contact with the ground. Registering gravity. Orientation in space and time. Noticing what is present right now. These things are often dismissed as unscientific or abstract, while they are in fact the most direct, measurable, and biological information a human being can have. They also form the foundation for the reflective brain.

Analytical thinking, on the other hand, is treated as the highest form of intelligence and reality. But what is thinking, exactly? It is not an object we can point to and directly measure in itself. It is not a stable entity existing separately from the rest of neurobiology.

Thinking emerges from information first processed through older systems: sensory input, orientation, autonomic survival responses, internal state, memory activation, and previous associations. Information first moves through systems that evaluate safety and organize survival — the brainstem, midbrain, sensory pathways, and limbic system — before analysis, reflection, and conscious interpretation arise. The prefrontal cortex eventually constructs an interpretation from this information and uses it to make sense of the world. That process is important, but it is not an independent conductor controlling everything. Especially under stress or in traumatized states, the cortex becomes recruited into survival processes or is partially taken offline.

Thinking as a structural panic response

When the survival brain becomes activated, the function of the prefrontal cortex shifts from reflection toward finding and maintaining control over feelings, impulses, uncertainty, and potential external threat. Thinking begins scanning for danger, predicting situations, interpreting, controlling, explaining, and monitoring because the system is constantly trying to stay ahead of possible threat. It has no direct influence over the survival brain that is generating the alarms in the first place. Over time this can become almost obsessive and permanently present. Attention is pulled increasingly inward, away from the environment, away from other people, and away from direct presence in the moment.

That makes the current social hierarchy somewhat strange. We treat analytical functioning as if it stands above everything else, while that function is completely dependent on what older systems transmit — or fail to transmit. Just consider how differently someone walks through the world in a state of fear versus a state of joy.

The control society as our norm

Yet we have organized nearly all of society around analysis and control. Education rewards analysis while suppressing sensations, emotions, and needs. Psychology largely focuses on cognition and behavior — the outcome — rather than the underlying systems organizing them. People are taught to examine, explain, and correct their thoughts and behavior, as if conscious understanding automatically creates change, even though under stress it has little regulating influence over the survival brain. Our broader social attitude assumes that things must always improve, that the present moment must always be surpassed. Constantly pursuing more, bigger, stronger, faster, easier, smarter, wealthier. And the thinking brain becomes obsessed with this pursuit, to the point where reality itself begins to blur and truth can become whatever someone constructs internally.

Thinking from control is detached from reality

Analysis therefore is no longer necessarily a sign of realism. Often it is the opposite. Thinking exists in a space where time is unstable and where attention usually moves through the past or future. Scenarios can be repeated endlessly and retrospectively rewritten. Feelings can become activated without a clear cause and easily blend together. The brain can simultaneously be occupied with yesterday, later, long ago, and possible danger right now. Analysis can gradually pull someone further away from direct registration of the present moment. Everything becomes possible, and people can become trapped in that because analysis drowns everything else out. Someone can no longer even make a cup of tea without disappearing into thought.

We increasingly see people losing contact with reality and actively avoiding it, while displaying behavior that is reactive, boundless, and disconnected. There is growing focus on controlling thoughts, interpretations, predictions, and analyses, while direct contact with the environment, spatial orientation, and present-day safety decreases. As a result, there is less development of integrated cooperation between brain networks and between human beings themselves. The brain remains organized around threat and internal prediction rather than present orientation and connection.

The thinking society as a retraumatizing catalyst

The constant social emphasis on analysis and control therefore reinforces the exact state many people are already trapped in. Internal focus. Disconnection from the environment. Reduced contact with the present moment. Reduced registration of gravity, position, space, and other people. And perhaps that is the greatest paradox of all. We have come to see analysis as the opposite of being disconnected or “floating,” while endless thinking largely takes place in an invisible, unstable reality that is barely directly observable. Thoughts can move anywhere without limitation from time, space, or present context.

The most concrete information a human being has actually comes from direct registration. Where are you? What do you see? What do you hear? What is the position of your body in space and in relation to other people? What is actually happening right now? That is the foundation upon which the rest of neurobiology organizes itself. Ideally, society and its systems would be built around that reality. But for now, we continue to cling to the cognitive idea that human beings can be engineered through thought and analysis, whether that assumption is realistic or not. The need to gain analytical control over everything has itself become so detached from reality that we have now even created a computer-driven prefrontal cortex in the form of AI — a system that only knows what it is told and remains fundamentally disconnected from actual human reality.