David B

TX 🛫🛬 SC to NC. I 💜 Volleyball Clemson🐯2017

[David B @IMDB_21]

How much more extra can I get about Whata? The limit does not exist.

[Texas Humor @TexasHumor]

Y'all heard it here first: Whataburger just released these tasty new holiday sweaters! Head over to https://t.co/pMj0Env5l1 to snag one!

[Clemson University @ClemsonUniv]

Thanks for visiting Tigertown, @FreddyLA7!

[C.J. Wilson @str8edgeracer]

the turntables

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

This is Oreo. He will eventually eat the blueberry. But first he must establish dominance over it. 12/10

[Evan Grant @Evan_P_Grant]

The Rangers win, 6-3, thanks to Cam Cauley's debut triple, Justin Foscue punishment of lefties and Jake Latz's unmatched multi-inning closing ability. They have now won 5 straight on road for first time since 2018.

[Michael Mathes @MichaelMathes]

“England historically has struggled here in Massachusetts”
— #WorldCup announcer on Fox
👀

[ESPN FC @ESPNFC]

The longest time EVER between a player's first and latest World Cup goal:

-Ronaldo: 20 years and 11 days
-Messi: 20 years and 11 days

We'll never see anything like this ever again 🐐🐐

[ESPN FC @ESPNFC]

Lionel Messi has scored more World Cup goals after turning 35 (10) than the following players in their entire careers:

-Cristiano Ronaldo
-Thierry Henry
-Maradona
-Rivaldo
-Neymar
-Harry Kane

Absolutely insane 🤯🐐

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

We only rate dogs. This is a whirlpool. Please don't get too close. It is quite powerful. Still 13/10

[Texas Rangers @Rangers]

.@You_Found_Nimmo catching the first pitch from his grandpa is the most wholesome thing you'll see today 🥹

[delaney☀️ @delllannney]

The Rangers powder blue uniforms are soooooo sweet, I will never not love them

[David B @IMDB_21]

@InTheAssembly Been in since June 30, 2025. Good to see it finally getting some visibility.

[ESPN Insights @ESPNInsights]

On Monday, the Astros completed a no-hitter against the Rangers. Tonight, the Rangers scored 8 runs in the 1st inning 😲

Per Elias, the Rangers are the first team since the 1905 Chicago White Sox to record 8 or more runs in the 1st inning following a game in which they were no-hit 🤯

[David B @IMDB_21]

@ICT_Concepts @infamousmanos I was thinking the same. 79.3k has a couple great confluences and what I’d like to see before shorting.

[David B @IMDB_21]

@David_Tracey Personally looking for 79.3k before shorting to new lows. But I can see 70-75k holding. Next few weeks will be crucial.

[ESPN Insights @ESPNInsights]

This century, teams were 0-640 when trailing by 8+ runs in an NCAA softball tourney game.

It's now 1-640. Texas Tech was down 8 runs WITH ONLY ONE OUT LEFT and somehow became the first 🤯

[MLB Stats @MLBStats]

The Rangers and Astros have faced each other 300 times, including the Postseason.

Their all-time records? 150-150

[David B @IMDB_21]

This is absolutely crazy interesting. Must read.

[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.

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

This is Jam. He said he was the highest jumping golden retriever in Ontario. May or may not have lied on his resume. Still 13/10

[Christopher Paolini @paolini]

Says you! I'll find a way to work 'em into a new novel. Ahahahaha! Urgals could definitely be 'gruntled'.

[George Strait @GeorgeStrait]

Memorial Stadium “Death Valley” in Clemson, South Carolina — y’all set a record for George’s biggest show ever outside of Texas with 90,037 fans! Special thanks to @CodyJohnson and @WyattFlores10 for kicking things off! #HereForAGoodTime

📸 1, 2: Justin Cook
📸 3, 4: Clemson Athletics