What is agitation in the brain?

I feel like it's starting to be the right time for me to ask the question: what processes in the brain are mental agitation (i.e. non-spontaneous, non-True, self-protecting thoughts; illusion or Samsara)? Here are a few possibilities:

1) It's not a feature of the physical brain. It's something spiritual that can't be reduced to mechanistic processes.

2) It's any neural activity at all. Any manifestation is inherently dual; the richer the manifestation, the more pronounced the duality. When the manifestation goes away, what's left is the Self.

3) It's neural activity that is out of sync with reality. I see a tree, but for some reason my representation of a fish is activated instead. (This example is a sensory-level misrepresentation; maybe what would correspond in Wilber's framework to psychosis. Most practical examples would be much more subtle, like lying to oneself about motivations.) Interestingly, this could help explain development. The lower levels of representation have to be in sync with reality before higher levels can form, because otherwise the conflict with reality agitates the lower-level representations to the point where the higher-level structures are unstable.

4) It's recursive neural activity. When the flow of information is somehow circular in a network or system of networks, the brain is no longer representing reality and instead representing "itself", which isn't really anything. The internal dynamics of that circular network are the self. Those dynamics are not really a representation of anything, although some other system could represent them. This is surprisingly similar to Benoit's analogy of a short-circuit. If you hooked the output of a thermostat up to its own input, it might go into an oscillation (if there were a time-constant), or an unbounded growth, which would be the internal dynamics of the recursive system. Strangely, if all manifestation arises from feedback processes, could all manifestation be a kind of agitation; self-creating unreality? But what does that mean for it to be unreality? We started with the idea that the recursive activity in the brain was unreality because it didn't represent the outside reality. But there's no outside reality to all of reality. What the hell?