Note – this article contains spoilers for the 2019 RPG Disco Elysium.

Where does a thought go once it’s been had? What happens to the multitude of information the human mind generates each day? Does any of it persist somewhere, or does it vanish? Emotions, thoughts and imagination – if energy can’t be destroyed, then the residue of the human mind must accumulate somewhere.

For example, where does the love I feel for my wife go once she’s left for work? I still love her in her absence, but I don’t actively feel it as I trudge through spreadsheets during my workday like I do when we kiss goodbye.

If my reservoir of love is like a pot of water, and kissing my wife is like putting a flame to it, causing steam to rise – what happens to the steam once I’ve cooled off? Actual steam changes states as it cools. Does something similar happen to my emotions, ideas and thoughts once they’ve left my head? Do they linger in some unseen form, condensing like the steam from a boiling pot somewhere?

If so, where do the byproducts of thought collect?

There are, of course, scientific explanations for this philosophical line of questioning. Emotions exist as states within people that rise and fall given external or internal stimuli, and thoughts get etched into the brain via neural pathways and synapses.

The UCL gives this shorthand explanation for memory creation and function:

“One of the potential mechanisms through which memories are stored in the hippocampus and neocortex, is via the co-activity of neurons across different areas. Information between neurons is passed through electrical impulses called action potentials.

These action potentials are propagated across different neurons at particular junctions called synapses. When memories are being formed, the synapses between neurons that are active at the time become stronger, while other synapses may weaken. This prioritizes the storage of memory details in the brain by this ensemble of neurons that strongly connect to each other.”

When this happens in the brain, the thought or idea is essentially encoded into memory. However, this leads back to the question, what happens to the original thought after “encoding?”

When a computer encodes information, the original data is either retained in some form or discarded. For example, if an image is encoded into a JPG, some information will be discarded in the process. If a file is encoded for transmission, the original information is retained. Either way, the original information does not entirely disappear upon encoding. Even discarded information is retained until it’s overwritten with other data.

So then, if information in the brain and mind works similarly, where is the junk heap for the discarded data of thought? Does the waste byproduct of thought get recycled in the universe, or does it accumulate like a pollutant?

If we turn to fiction, we can find an answer to some of these questions.

In the universe of Disco Elysium, the waste byproduct of human thought is a world-destroying anomaly called Pale. And while Pale is fictional, aspects of it may apply to our world and its strange phenomena.

Thought Pollution

Disco Elysium is an isometric detective RPG where you play as Lieutenant Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, who has lost all his memories from either alcohol-induced encephalopathy or exposure to the Pale. The game does not make it clear which is the cause of Harry’s amnesia.

As the game progresses, Harry can eventually re-learn about the Pale – the most prominent feature of Disco Elysium’s world. The Pale is as enigmatic as it is disturbing; Harry is encouraged by one character not to learn about the Pale as they fear it is too disquieting for him to handle in his amnesiac state. Pale is described as the antithesis of matter, slowly consuming the planet and possibly the entire universe.

According to the game’s wiki: “The Pale does not have a perceivable appearance. It is achromatic, odorless, and featureless, the ‘enemy of matter and life’. Therefore, it can only be measured through the matter that surrounds it.”

There is more lore and other nuances to Pale and its impact on the world of Disco Elysium. What’s important for this piece is its origin. There are two theories presented in the game for the Pale’s origin. It’s either pockets of anti-matter or manifested information.

The game provides more evidence for the latter theory, as near the end of Disco Elysium, Harry encounters the Insulindian Phasmid, a large, insect-like cryptid rumored to inhabit the region. If the player has met certain checks with the cryptozoologists hunting the Phasmid earlier in the game, Harry can speak with the creature – although whether the conversation is all in Harry’s head or not is up for the audience to decide.

Regardless, the Phasmid tells Harry that Pale didn’t exist prior to humans, stating, “The moral of our encounter is: I am a relatively median lifeform — while it is you who are total, extreme madness. A volatile simian nervous system, ominously new to the planet. The Pale, too, came with you. No one remembers it before you. The cnidarians do not, the radially symmetricals do not. There is an almost unanimous agreement between the birds and the plants that you are going to destroy us all.”

The Phasmid compares the coming Pale apocalypse to the oxygen holocaust that wiped out anaerobic life when organisms first started breathing. Harry’s conceptualization of what the Phasmid tells him is, “Instead of air, you exhale thoughts. There are no trees that eat thoughts.”

In essence, the world of Disco Elysium is being destroyed by the anomaly of human thought and the buildup of its waste byproduct, Pale.

Luckily, our world doesn’t suffer from something like the Pale. However, that’s not to say the entire idea of a buildup of human thought waste byproduct is without merit. The notion has intriguing implications for our world’s anomalous phenomena.

It’s All Outside Your Head

In my recent profile on Wisconsin UFO researcher Allen R. Utke, I detail how the scientist was fascinated with human thought. Particularly, Utke was stricken with how out of all the organisms on Earth, humans have a mind like no other. We can think forward and backward in time, analyze the universe and more. As far as we know, this makes humans the only part of the universe able to study the universe. For Utke, this suggested the universe wanted to be able to know itself, and thus consciousness and matter were created hand-in-hand when the universe formed.

This uniqueness of the human mind is precisely what generates Disco Elysium’s Pale as suggested by the Phasmid. So, when we marry Elysium’s fictional elements with the human mind’s real-world properties, is there a point where the two overlap?

What if our thoughts do produce a waste byproduct, but rather than destroying the world, it fills it with anomalous phenomena? UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot and the rest could all be the result of this waste byproduct.

This could explain why these phenomena sometimes seem to have autonomy while other times appear to have no control over their actions – they’re wayward scraps of thought, some more formed than others.

Ghost hunters have already accepted this possibility on some level with the stone tape theory – the notion that strong emotional events can leave an imprint on their surroundings that replay, resulting in hauntings. Would that not be a waste byproduct of human emotion? It’s hard not to see a stone tape haunting as the condensed steam of an emotion left sticking to the environment.

The UFO phenomenon may be the ripest area to apply this line of thought, as it’s the phenomena that most interacts with humans. Indeed, Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious and Greg Bishop’s co-creation hypothesis of the phenomena share shades with this idea. Yet, the differing aspects may be that if these phenomena are the byproducts of ideas, their agency is called into question.

For example, Jacques Vallée puts forth in his book Passport to Magonia that the UFO phenomenon has worn different masks throughout history to influence humanity. Yet, if the phenomenon is a byproduct of thought, then it’s not wearing masks by choice but forced into a form created by the zeitgeist’s waste.

This is not to say these phenomena have zero agency. In fact, they could be trying to influence humanity to fill the junk heap of thought in specific ways.

Consider the innumerable number of different creatures found occupying UFOs throughout the centuries. The variances in saucer occupants were once so great that it ruled out the possibility of these creatures all being from other planets. Yet, in recent years, the image of the UFO occupant has been largely limited to one kind of entity – the grey. Why? We likely have Whitley Strieber’s Communion and its infamous cover art depicting the creatures he encountered to thank for it.

So, suppose you’re a waste byproduct of humanity’s thought, and when you return to interact with the world, you’re forced into an image you have no choice over. It could be anything from sci-fi stories to a child’s drawing; imagine the body dysmorphia and frustration of never having any say in how you look. Wouldn’t you crave to unify your image and find a way to put it into the minds of every person, so whenever the idea of what a UFO occupant is reached the junk heap, it would be you? What better way to accomplish that goal than by getting your face used as the cover of a bestseller.

Equally frustrating must be the technology that surrounds these entities, which is extraordinary but nearly unusable, since the writers and artists who imagined it never detailed how it works. When Han Solo tells Chewie to “punch it,” he doesn’t first break out the schematics of the Millennium Falcon and detail the physics of jumping to hyperspace. He just shouts, “punch it,” and they go. What does one do with that when it reaches the junkyard of thought?

This could explain why UFOs maneuver in such strange ways – they’re being piloted by creatures whose control over the machine amounts to up, down and punch it. Perhaps it’s why they sometimes impart mathematics and other scientific knowledge to those they visit; it’s a desperate attempt to advance the partially finished technology at their disposal. They can use a warp drive but can’t control it until a real-life, actualized one passes through an engineer’s mind.

This is all fun to think about, but impossible to say for certain one way or another. Though, while listening to Jeremy Vaeni’s re-release of the podcast Paratopia, the late Jeff Ritzmann has spoken a few times about hearing from people of supposed official standing that the only way to stave off an alien invasion is to quit thinking about them. If there is any truth to what Ritzmann was told, it lends credence to the waste byproduct hypothesis. If people quit thinking about them or think about them in only specific ways, it limits what thought byproducts these creatures have at their disposal.

It’s a line of thinking with unsettling implications, but as the Insulindian Phasmid tells Harry:

“You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing – just by accident.”

So, perhaps the residue of our thoughts persists, accumulating somewhere into something beyond our comprehension.