Depending on the duration and intensity of what one had involved oneself in, emergence from an Immersive Experience will be accompanied by a Cognitive Transformation Period, lasting hours, days, perhaps weeks. To be clear, the associated neural reconfiguration should be thought of as occurring in addition to rather than instead of the ever-present ebbs and flows characteristic of the always-in-flux brain.

It is the malleable nature of this organ that is responsible both for creating the niche filled by the CTP and for enabling it to exercise its impact, thereafter extinguishing from existence. While it’s active, we can be made aware of the CTP’s presence only when there has developed a chasm–of detectable dimension–between the shape our mind took as a consequence of the IE and the shape it would’ve taken had the experience never occurred. To reconcile these dissimilar states of mind, the real with the hypothetical, is the CTP’s raison d’être, and one mechanism by which this objective is achieved is through interpreting the post-IE world in terms of the IE, and vice versa.

For example, a marine biologist who spent their summer on the ocean, scuba diving various locales to document certain aspects of an aquatic ecosystem, if witness to, upon their reunion with land, an autumnal leaf skittering along a street by dint of a chill wind, may find themselves considering the dry, auburn petal a land-based analogue of a jellyfish, its itinerary determined largely by currents of air. Similarly, a medical student whose IE was an evening lecture on the circulatory system, may liken, while driving home from campus, the city highways to veins, and view the opposing lines of head and tail lights as representative of blood cells with, or lacking, oxygen.

Analogies of this sort, parallels between the IE and not-IE, are bridges across the chasm, needle & thread suturing the two sides together, shrinking the divide until seamless, all of this facilitated by the malleability of the material, and the entire process concluding with the passing of the same landmark-in-timeline that set it in motion: the CTP.

In this vein, someone with a book of fiction in hand may come to view as stories conversations they have with others. This is probably more true of laconic readers, who would likely find in the typed dialog a careful, deliberate manner of expression, substantiating the clear communication ideals they espouse. When a conversation is distilled to the extent that it could reasonably appear as dialogue in a book worthy of being published, the IE of reading a chapter can initiate a CTP provoking “real life” conversations to be thought of in terms of fictitious dialog. This can lead one to adopt the controversial position of approaching a conversation as would a writer, who intends to formulate the utterances of each character involved. By extension, one would begin to consider the literary merits of handling a conversation one way or another. Soon, it would be clear that, given N number of independent things one wished to express to another, the number of unique sequences by which the sum could enter the conversation would equal N factorial, and only one of these sequences could be expected to result in a Pulitzer.