Perception

The Self Illusion - Why There's No 'You' Inside Your Head - Prof Bruce Hood

“The self is an emergent property, an illusion.”

— Bruce Hood

“But whether we are distancing our self from the herd, or ingratiating our self as part of the herd, it is the existence of others that defines who we are.”
― Bruce M. Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity

Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the... See more

Maria Popova • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out.”
― Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

“There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about

"We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment."
— Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

"We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about."
— Robert M. Sapolsky

"The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained