Debbie Foster

Experiences that fundamentally change the way we see the world provide clues about consciousness. I learned that the experience of self is optional. Even the feeling of having a body is not necessary for subjectivity. Transformative experiences are deeply personal and can profoundly impact lives. They are living proof that nervous tissue, under spe

trend away from describing natural phenomena in terms of causes and effects to instead describing them in terms of information and its transformations.

Anxiety and depression are not abnormal. They are not pathologies or aberrations. They are just one end of a spectrum of normal experience playing out on the same mechanisms that allow us to survive.

The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the "true self," the "real me."

I suggest that our most meaningful connections to others and to ideas traverse the Not Yet, made possible by the 4-D nature of our meaning-making brain.

Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don’t need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder; just stand on a street corner and look around for a while.

Religion is, I believe, essentially metaphysical.

Memory is shown to be not so much a library but more a repository of ready-to-run routines that enable our daily living.