Neuroscience

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it

many of the quant-ities related to suffering are based on perceptions and similar uncertain infer-ences. The uncertainty will necessarily increase frustration since it means the predictions of reward often go wrong . More fundamentally, the computed reward loss can be uncertain, even illusory .

Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.

“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

Scientists have demonstrated that, as the years go by, much of what we think we remember is false. It seems our brains can't store every detail we experience, so we recall the gist of events — enough to create a story that makes sense to us. Every time we recall a story or tell it to others, we change small bits depending on whether our audience... See more