What was going on when I was born?

Senate Republicans will not call for a freeze in military spending in 1986, the majority leader said today. This means they will have to cut deeper into domestic programs to reach their goal of reducing next year's projected budget deficit by $50 billion. A freeze in 1986 on all spending, including the military budget, was the centerpiece of the Senate Republicans' plans when they began to discuss ways to cut the deficit earlier this year. Their leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, said today that the senators still planned to slow the growth rate in the President's military budget.

BRASILIA THE political map of Latin America changed dramatically last week when Brazil, the region's largest and most populous nation, joined the growing list of ''new'' democracies south of the border by electing its first civilian President in 21 years. Yet it did so in a surprisingly undramatic way. When Argentina held elections in late 1983 and Uruguay did so a year later, both countries exploded in glee at the imminent departure of heavy- handed military regimes. Brazil, in contrast, is displaying little of the excitement that normally accompanies a country's abrupt passage from dictatorship to democracy. The reason is that the change taking place here is different. Although a general will be President until March 15, Brazil has enjoyed considerable political freedom for six years. And the opposition candidate, Tancredo Neves, was swept to power by the 686-member Electoral College without the participation of the 60 million registered voters.

HOBOKEN STARTING tomorrow, 6 faculty members at the Stevens Institute of Technology here will begin a 2 1/2- year study of philosophical problems arising from the use of advanced computer technology. The project, Ethical Implications of Computer Networking in Science and Government, is being financed by a $150,000 grant from the Ethics and Values in Science and Technology Program of the National Science Foundation in Washington. The faculty members have been drawn together because of their common interest in the ethics of science, as well as their areas of expertise, according to Prof. Carol C. Gould, director of the project. The group comprises one philosopher, one political scientist, two computer scientists, one physical chemist and one physicist.

Sometime in the early 1980's, for reasons that are still being debated in Hollywood, the laughter dribbled out of television. The situation comedy, the 22-minute- and-37-second sequence of plot, of character discomfort and reassurance that represented one of television's few formal inventions, turned from a vital centerpiece in the medium to an endangered species, and nobody was exactly sure why. ''Comedy,'' the critic Gilbert Seldes had written in 1956, ''is the axis around which television revolves.'' By last season, many thought the situation comedy had spun out. In the past few months, however, the network situation comedy seems to have resurged and, perhaps, emerged stronger, maybe even with some esthetic purpose. This has happened for three reasons: One is ''The Cosby Show,'' a genuine hit that has reminded viewers and programmers of what they had forsaken. Another is the fresh esprit of a new generation of creative talent. And a third is the fact that television has found a new audience - the baby- boom Yuppies in their 20's and 30's - and, to cater to their 1980's tastes and sensibilities, has begun creating what has been termed ''the Yup-com.'' All of which is not to suggest that comedy is about to take over the airwaves, but the form is healthier than it has been for years.

The brass industry was thriving and the Naugatuck Valley was its capital when Jack Mayers's father went to work for American Brass in Ansonia, and he worked there all his life. But 15 years ago, when Jack went to work as a machinist at the Bridgeport Brass factory in Seymour, a few miles upriver, the industry - and the valley - had begun their decline. Mr. Mayers figured he, like thousands of other mill workers, would have enough trouble holding on to his job. He never thought he and his fellow workers would end up owning their mill.

LONDON Her Barbie Batchelor in Paul Scott's ''Jewel in the Crown,'' combined with her Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster's ''Passage to India,'' seem to be achieving what her performances as Juliet and Cleopatra and scores of other major theatrical characters never quite did. They're demonstrating to the television-watching, movie-going millions that they've been overlooking one of the century's major actresses. They're making Peggy Ashcroft, at the age of 77, an internationally known name and face. Mrs. Moore and Forster proved to be a challenge very different from Barbie and Scott. ''Forster is of course a much more established writer than Scott, but it's debatable if he's a better one,'' she said recently. ''If people in a hundred years want to understand a certain period of Indian history from the English point of view, they may find Scott the more satisfactory read. Forster is a very subjective writer, Scott a very objective one. There's a mystery in Forster's writing, which makes him interesting but also elusive. I found I could see Barbie very clearly, always wearing the same costume, with a pleat at the front and pleat at the back. Mrs. Moore is more of an enigma. Like most of Forster's women, she's in some way a question mark.''

THE county's representatives in Albany are facing their first major policy decision of the new legislative session: how to structure their 13-member delegation. Discussions, which have been heated, are expected to resume Tuesday, and the outcome could affect the county's ability to achieve its state legislative priorities, some of which were released late last month in a package prepared jointly by the County Executive and the Board of Legislators. ''We're trying to work something out,'' said Assemblyman Gordon W. Burrows, Republican of Yonkers, the delegation's senior member. ''Fairness is the key word.'' Mr. Burrows, acknowledging that there have been problems, added: ''I'd like to see us all working together as a team. I don't know why it's so hard to achieve.'' A number of factors appear to be involved in the current dispute, which was precipitated in part by the departure of State Senator Joseph R. Pisani, Republican of New Rochelle, who resigned his Senate seat last year following his conviction on Federal charges of embezzlement and tax evasion.

BRAIN AND PSYCHE The Biology of the Unconscious. By Jonathan Winson. Illustrated. 300 pp. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. $16.95. MIND, BRAIN, BODY Toward a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology. By Morton F. Reiser. Illustrated. 228 pp. New York: Basic Books. $19.95. STAR WAVE Mind, Consciousness, and Quantum Physics. By Fred Alan Wolf. Illustrated. 342 pp. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. $19.95.

Astronomers believe they have discovered several sources of cosmic rays, the penetrating radiation that bombards the Earth from all directions. The origin of these high-energy particles has been one of the most profound mysteries of the universe. One of the sources, Cygnus X-3, a two-star system believed to lie on the outer fringes of the Milky Way, has been found to produce so much of the higher-energy cosmic rays that it could account for the galaxy's entire production of such rays. A number of scientists who attended a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society believe the discovery is a landmark in astrophysics. Cosmic rays include the most powerful form of radiation known to science. In space, they consist primarily of high-energy protons, nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and when they strike the atmosphere they generate showers of secondary particles that reach the Earth.

The first secret military mission by an American space shuttle, set for launching Wednesday under a cloak of elaborate new security measures, will conduct a crucial test of a troubled Air Force propulsion system needed to keep the shuttle program on schedule for the rest of the year. Plans for at least 4 of the 12 shuttle missions scheduled for this year depend on the successful operation of the satellite-boosting rocket, according to the Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A fifth mission, another secret military flight carrying an undisclosed payload in September, may also require the propulsion unit. Eavesdropping in Space The presence of the rocket system, called an inertial upper stage, or I.U.S., as an integral part of the secret Defense Department payload is one of the few unclassified aspects of this week's mission. The rocket's solid-fuel motors are to boost the secret satellite, widely reported to be an advanced electronic intelligence-gathering unit, from the space shuttle Discovery's low orbit to a higher operational orbit.

''I believe in connectedness,'' says Jonathan Borofsky, ''but there is space between us.'' This view goes a long way toward explaining his disparate and riotous mid-career retrospective occupying the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum through March 10. In the installation, a surrealistic melange of drawing, painting, sculpture, aural work and written words, there is a multiplicity of references hammering home persistent themes. At the same time, the variety is dizzying. It attracts different levels of viewers. ''I can appeal to the hot-shot artist or to the kid who comes in with his mother,'' the artist says. Mr. Borofsky, 42, has had a major impact on the expressionistic attitude in art which has been the dominant mode of the 1980's. He began his career as a conceptual artist, but by the mid-1970's, he was defying the limits of conceptualism and assembling environments which have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and which typically feature an excessive imagery created out of unorthodox materials. This approach has made him controversial artist; but, he says, it allows him the freedom to express a gamut of themes, from personal feelings to world affairs.

OFFICIALS in New London and Bridgeport, along with Attorney General Joseph I. Lieberman, are opposing a move by New York City that could force the shipping of radioactive material from the Brookhaven (L.I.) National Laboratory through one of the two port cities. After a nine-year halt of the transport of the spent fuel, the laboratory is to resume transporting the waste this month. It plans to go through New York City, using the Clearview Expressway to the Throgs Neck Bridge, and then taking the bridge to Interstate 95 and going north through the Bronx. New York City officials, however, are asking in a report sent to the Federal Department of Transportation that an alternate route be specified. That alternate route would be to ship the radioactive material by barge either to Bridgeport or New London, then transport it across Interstate highways to its destination, the Federal Energy Department's reprocessing plant in Idaho.