Sublime

The brilliant psychologist and author Kay Redfield Jamison has said that bipolar disorder—an illness from which she herself suffers—“benefits mankind at the expense of the individual.”

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror.