Mary Martin

Many of the predictions that structure human experience concern our own internal physiological states. For example, we experience thirst and hunger in ways that are deeply anticipatory, allowing us to remedy looming shortfalls in advance, so as to stay within the correct zone for bodily integrity and survival. This means that we exist in a world... See more

Based on all this, we suggest that the function of dreams resides in their waking use – how they enable self-disclosure, for the benefit of the group, even if it can sometimes be uncomfortable for the individual. The remembering and telling of dreams is thus essential to their evolved function.

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

intelligence has inadvertently become a ‘human success’-shaped cookie cutter we squish onto other species. Switching from baking to sports metaphors, we could say that everyone else – animals, amoebas, AIs and aliens – has to play the game on a field that we have laid out, according to rules that we have established and proven ourselves extremely... See more

Comparing VR to non-VR breathing interventions, there were no significant differences in overall mental health, stress, anxiety or mood, nor in HR or HRV. There was no evidence that participants liked VR breathing interventions more than non-VR, nor would use them more in the future. These results suggest that there is no evidence that VR breathing... See more

our preoccupation with facts – the information that links us to each other – perhaps causes us to disregard other ways of understanding meaning in our relationships, such as touch, intuition and facial expressions.