Neuroscience

the pregnant person body is not an ‘external environment’ within which the foetus is solitary and ‘confined’, waiting for the ‘lightbulb’ of consciousness to be switched on at a given timepoint when the neurogenesis is completed. Here I propose that both the easy and hard problem of developmental consciousness cannot be addressed without putting

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Roshi Joan Halifax tells a story about witnessing a conversation in the early 1970s between Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems theorist, about the mind. Bateson asked, “Where is the mind?” Salk pointed to his own head. Bateson chuckled, shook his head, and pointed to the space between... See more

When the mind searches for the future, it sees the past.

Memories are not a true or false picture of the past; they are a Monet lily pond.

We now know that the brain’s capacity to learn, to adapt, to change in response to experience is so fundamental that it strikes the wrong note to say that an activity (like meditation) ‘changes the brain’ as if such change is special or unusual. In fact, everything we do changes the brain on some level. Or rather, the brain is constantly changing,... See more