From The Ghost Wars- on the concept of the Torah as ancient science fiction. “Take the story of the fall of the tower of Babel. Let’s say this represents not an act of God, nor a metaphor for this planet’s diverse linguistic heritage; but a cat...
In order for our minds to comprehend something, there must be an appropriately structured neural structure called a 'frame' that makes it possible to contextualize, make proper sense of, and mentally 'see' the thing. Our understanding of the world is...
As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered co...
The process of applying Mindfulness Burnout Prevention (MBP) in the workplace or any environment has a much more far-reaching effect than simply accessing equanimity throughout the vicissitudes of life. Continuous learning helps us to stay youthful, ...
The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic p...
Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking por...
John Connor: Can you learn stuff you haven't been programmed with so you could be... you know, more human? And not such a dork all the time? The Terminator: My CPU is a neural-net processor; a learning computer. But Skynet presets the switch to read-...
Borg Queen: Brave words. I've heard them before, from thousands of species across thousands of worlds, since long before you were created. But, now they are all Borg. Lieutenant Commander Data: I am unlike any lifeform you have encountered before. Th...
Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billio...
It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structur...
In the end, what I love most about contemporary yoga is its ability to synthesize the everyday with the extraordinary, the practical with the visionary, the mundane with the sacred. I love that yoga can work to release my tense muscles, negative emot...
People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it d...
Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of th...
If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet th...
After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a li...
The Happiest Man in The World The French interpreter for the 14th Dalai Lama, former academic and dedicated meditator Matthieu Ricard, came into the spotlight in the field of neural science after being named “the happiest man in the world”. Natur...
The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, ...
Ecco: adesso la Luna mi parla. È un volto freddo e luminoso che galleggia là fuori nel buio, e queste sono le sue prime parole, un segnale limpido e sintetico di fredda, incontaminata intelligenza che giunge alla mia consolle attraverso l’etere. ...
