The Broadcast Self

The brain runs on wiring: a synapse is a phone call, fast and precise. But the same activity radiates, generating a field present everywhere at once. A synapse is specific; a field is a broadcast.

This book asks the harder question: has the brain learned to listen to its own broadcast?

In The Broadcast Self, Azhar Feili pushes beyond the evidence to explore whether neural populations might tune into the brain's ambient electric field—not just as a coarse detector of global states, but as a genuine receiver of structured patterns. Grounded in real biological precedents, from ephaptic coupling and crickets' innate song-detectors to the rhythmic broadcast of the human heartbeat, Feili builds a provocative hypothesis. But this is a book that argues itself down. By its closing chapters, the boldest claims give way to a quieter, more defensible one: not a message, but a modulator—a field that quietly stabilises the brain's own rhythms.

Written with extraordinary intellectual honesty, The Broadcast Self leaves its weak joints exposed on purpose. It is a speculative hypothesis for readers who demand rigorous thinking about consciousness, offering a rare combination of scientific curiosity and disciplined self-scepticism.