Helena Dax

1973, España, slasher y friki de nacimiento.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

No sé por qué los tranvías en Valencia se molestan en anunciar que van con retraso. A estas alturas lo sorprendente sería que no lo fueran.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

6) 7) y 8) Silo. Empecé a leerlos por la serie, que me gustó bastante (sin pasarse). Lo mismo puedo decir de los libros. Historia post-apocaliptica en la que los humanos viven en un silo subterráneo. Su única ventana al exterior muestra un mundo desolado. Entretenido y ya.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

Libros 2026
1) Me ha gustado mucho. Mundo en decadencia, con comunidades valladas, nómadas, pseudoesclavitud y pirómanos drogadictos, y en medio de todo ello, una chica joven e inteligente con hiperempatía tratando de sobrevivir y de crear una comunidad y una filosofía. Grande.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

5) Cuánto me gusta Ishiguro! Novela de sci-fi muy de su estilo, ambiguo y sutil, donde parece que no pasan cosas mientras pasan cosas. Cuenta la historia de una androide creada para ser la amiga de un/a niño/a y es una reflexión sobre el amor, el sacrificio y la humanidad.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.

His name is David Eagleman.

He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.

Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.

Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.

You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.

Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.

This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.

In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.

Now sit with the implication of that for a second.

Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.

If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.

But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.

Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.

Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.

They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.

The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.

The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.

Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.

So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.

Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.

A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.

And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.

Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.

Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.

For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.

They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.

The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.

You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.

Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

A mí esto me parece 100 veces más punk y transgresor que todos los grupos punks de la época, siguiendo la moda de turno religiosamente. Freddie siempre fue el más valiente de todos

[Queen @QueenWillRock]

Queen were on the second day of a three-day debut run at London’s Wembley Arena in 1978. Which famous cover did they include in their set? 🇬🇧

📸 Credit: Neal Preston

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@CerebrodeLoredi También podría ser eso, que quería cotillear con quién hablabas en redes.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

Me acabo de dar cuenta de que cada vez que le he enviado un vídeo de YouTube a un compañero de trabajo ha salido que era de la cuenta de Helena Dax, vosotros qué tal, yo quiero morirme

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@CerebrodeLoredi Omg, en serio?? Una siempre da por sentado que la gente que la lee es maja y con buen gusto, pero se ve que hay excepciones, jaja

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@hesselia2727 Ostras, que no había entendido bien tu tuit. Me hago mayor, jaja. El caso es que solo me agobia un poco por el tema Slash, no quiero que en el curro lo sepan, pero este tío es guay, y si se ha dado cuenta no me meterá en líos

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@hesselia2727 Eso es lo que diré, jaja, que va y tenía la cuenta de HD porque es muy amiga mía 😜 Pero igual no se ha dado cuenta porque he descubierto que es algo nuevo que ha implementado YT desde hace poco. Ya lo he desconectado. Ahora a ver si dice algo. Por suerte es buen tío.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

Me refiero a videos random, no videos míos, que no tengo. O sea que si le pasáis a alguien un video sobre el tema x, subido por la persona x, les dirá que ese vídeo es de parte vuestra

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

Me acabo de dar cuenta de que cada vez que le he enviado un vídeo de YouTube a un compañero de trabajo ha salido que era de la cuenta de Helena Dax, vosotros qué tal, yo quiero morirme

[Kalshi Film @Kalshi_Film]

A terrific foreground miniature by Spanish effects maestro Emilio Ruiz del Río for Conan the Destroyer (1984)

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@CerebrodeLoredi No subestimes el poder de Brian Kinney 😘

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

Flashbacks tremendos

[Pedro J. García @fuertecito]

🏳️‍🌈 Atención, Prime Video ha subido las tres primeras temporadas de QUEER AS FOLK (USA)

Con audio en inglés y castellano, pero sin subtítulos 😑

Bueno, al menos podemos ver por fin en streaming el clásico queer que tantos vimos a escondidas en los 2000. A ver si suben el resto.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@CerebrodeLoredi Gracias 😘

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@CerebrodeLoredi Hay q hacer algo, Lore, o los importarán automáticamente si no decimos lo contrario?

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

El olor a tabaco es desagradable, pero la nube acre y tóxica que desprenden los usuarios de vaper incluso cuando no están usándolo no se queda atrás. A veces me mareo y todo.

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

@dimpledeity Ostras, gracias,veo que no estoy loca!!

[Helena Dax @HelenaDax]

Empiezo a sospechar que los productos con retinol, incluso los de uso externo, me dan dolor de cabeza. A alguien más le pasa?

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This is how confusing perspective plays with your mind.

First you see two giants in the street, and then...

[Tolkienverse ᚠ @ToIkienverse]

Dato curioso:

En las películas de El Señor de los Anillos, la mayoría de los jinetes de Rohan eran en realidad mujeres con barbas falsas porque cuando la producción abrió el casting para buscar jinetes locales con experiencia, muchas mujeres se presentaron con sus propios caballos.