Sublime

One of the fascinating traits of our ancient brain is its negativity bias. To keep us safe, it’s far less interested in what’s positive in our environment and significantly more invested in letting us know what’s bad.

volitional

Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we “feel like ourselves.” However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.

we alter the cocktail in the brain through how we feel.

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

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. Att