Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience Taoism/Tai Chi

If you want a fresh self, a right-brain one is worth considering

One of the reasons I'm so attracted to modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism is that each discipline agrees that the unchanging Self most people believe they have is an illusion -- the reality being that we have multiple selves popping into existence all the time. Cognitive neuropsychologist Chris Niebauer speaks about this in his book, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, which I wrote about a few days ago. Here's a compelling passage from his "Pattern Perception and the Missing Self" chapter. Noting just how many "yous" appear in a day works to dismantle the…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

Obvious, but needs repeating: our conceptions may seem true, but often aren’t

It had been a while since the Great God Amazon blessed me with another book about how our usual conception of the self is an illusion. But after prayerfully searching for "neuroscience" titles, my faith was rewarded with No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, by Chris Niebauer. This won't be my favorite book is this genre, but I'm enjoying the first part of it. I did peek ahead to a later chapter on consciousness and was disappointed to see positive mentions of Rupert Sheldrake. That's an annoyance. However, what I've read so far seems neuroscientifically…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

As an idea, the immaterial soul is dead

As I noted in my previous post about how belief in a human "essence" is almost certainly wrong, Julian Baggini goes on a search for such an entity in his book The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean To Be You? Everywhere he looks, using a blend of neuroscience and philosophy, the search comes up empty. He persuasively argues that an unchanging essence can't be found in the body and it can't be found in the mind -- since both body and mind are changeable with no sign of an essence. Then Baggini expands the search to include the religious…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

Belief in a human “essence” is strong, but almost certainly wrong

On the whole I agree with Amit Sood's view of things. He's an M.D. who has written a book about a more modern approach to mindfulness that I enjoyed reading. I decided to buy a recent book of his, It Takes You to Tango: Leverage the Science of Loneliness to Master the Art of Connection. It's turned out to be sort of a disappointment. I'm liking the book, but so far it hasn't really done much to inform or interest me. And when I came to several chapters about what Sood calls the Esse, an essence in every person deeper…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Violent crimes have much to teach us about fast and slow thinking

In 2011 I bought, read, and enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." In a blog post I wrote about the book, I included some passages from Kahneman about System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) modes of thinking. Some years ago, the psychologist Timothy Wilson wrote a book with the evocative title Strangers to Ourselves. You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it. System 1 [the fast brain] provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs,…
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Posted inNeuroscience

You can feel better by giving yourself the advice you’d give someone else

Subjectivity is what separates us from other people. Meaning, each of us knows our self as a subject, a person we know from the inside, while we know someone else as an object, a person we know from the outside.  I recall that Sartre discussed this at some length in Being and Nothingness, a book that I devoured as a college student during my existentialism phase, but which, when I looked at it fairly recently, gave me more of a headache than inspiration. Still, Sartre was on the right track when he spoke about being the Other to a friend…
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Posted inNeuroscience Radha Soami Satsang Beas

We humans are good at making illusory magic

Almost everybody enjoys a good magic show. I sure do. But hardly anyone actually believes in magic. We understand that when a magician does something that appears to violate everyday laws of nature, that trick is based on illusory magic, not genuine magic. An article in the April 12, 2025 issue of New Scientist, "Magicology," talks about how psychologists are looking to magic tricks to better understand how our brains make sense of the world around us. I found this example fascinating. A classic deception known as the “vanishing ball illusion” – already well-known when Binet discussed it in 1894…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Emotions aren’t good or bad; they are just information

The title of this blog post is a quote from a book by psychologist Ethan Kross, Shift: Managing Your Emotions -- So They Don't Manage You, that I've just started reading after seeing a mention of it in a recent New Scientist article about emotions. I'll have more to say about the book after I get further into it. So far, I'm enjoying some fresh insights about emotions, which obviously are key to how we experience the world. Everything outwardly can be going fine with us, but if we feel sad, disappointed, listless, or are under the sway of some…
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Posted inMindfulness Neuroscience

I like the idea that who I am is competing brain modules, not a distinct self

UPDATE: If you want to get the gist of Kurzban's book in a 17 minute video, rather than buying and reading the book, here's Kurzban explaining some central concepts about the brain that cause us humans to be hypocrites.  Having finished Robert Kurzban's book, Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind, it's time to share some (possibly) final thoughts about the book before it gets shelved away. The basic notion of brain modules has grown on me. Though computer analogies are risky when discussing how the brain works -- the human brain is what it is,…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Often I seem to be conscious, but not aware

I go back and forth, trying to decide whether being conscious and being aware are the same thing, or different things. Sometimes I equate the two. But I recall someone (Ron E.?) expressing a different opinion in a comment on one of my posts.  At the time I discounted that idea. But after what happened to me in my Tai Chi class yesterday -- which wasn't all that different from what has happened to me many times before -- I'm more inclined to believe that being conscious and being aware are indeed distinct mental processes. We were doing a form…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Pressure is off, according to neuroscience: there’s no “real you” to be found

For about 35 years, during the religious phase of my life, the Eastern philosophy I'd embraced had a sort of mantra: self-realization before God-realization.  Meaning, first we disciples needed to discover our true self as Soul, a drop of the spiritual ocean. Then we could proceed to the next step, becoming one with the ocean of God. Or at least as close to oneness as is possible for a soul-drop.  The basic notion, which is shared with other spiritual approaches and also some psychological theories, was that there's a "real you" hidden inside each of us. Through meditation, prayer, introspection,…
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Posted inAtheism Consciousness Neuroscience

More reasons why I’m liking the modular mind theory

As I continue reading Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, I keep coming across ideas that make me pleased I forked out $16.97 to Amazon. The book is well worth the money. Here's some additional points from Kurzban that appealed to me. Press Secretary versus President. Most of us like to think that basically we're in charge of our thoughts and actions. Maybe our emotions also, though they seem more out of our control. In other words, we're the President of the entity we call "myself." Kurzban has a different view. He…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The conscious “you” isn’t your self any more than unconscious parts are

The good news keeps on coming from my reading of Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.  In my previous post I talked about how Kurzban persuasively argues that the modular view of mind shows that there isn't a singular "I" inside our cranium, just a multitude of "We's." This makes our human nature hugely more interesting than if each of us were a single entity.  As the poet Walt Whitman said: Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) Most of us try so hard to…
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Posted inNeuroscience

The modular view of mind says there is no “I”, just a contentious “We”

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the being each of us calls "I" didn't really exist, at least not in the way most people think it does, as a coherent unified self?  I think so, though I realize this is a disturbing thought to those who depend on the "I" hypothesis to give their life meaning. Given my Buddhist proclivities, I view the situation much differently.  The way I see it, the "I" I've considered myself to be for most of my life is the cause of many problems. For example, anxiety, because "I" wants things to go the way "I"…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Human cognition is amazingly slow, about 10 bits per second

I came across a fascinating article in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Brains produce thoughts surprisingly slowly." (Online title: "The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace.") You can read the article via this PDF file.Download The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace | Scientific American Often you hear that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe with its 80 billion or so neurons tied together with trillions of interconnections. That may be, but this impressive product of evolution works much slower than the smart phones most of us carry…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

AI, artificial intelligence, points to the mystery of how the mind works

Religiously-minded people like to invoke mystery as a reason for believing in God and the supernatural. They adore how holy books teach that the workings of divinity are beyond human comprehension, you know, the whole man proposes and God disposes thing.  But it isn't necessary to go anywhere outside of the closest entity any of us has to ourselves to come face-to-face with a gigantic mystery, because that entity is the mind that experiences both mystery and everything else from our birth until our death. In my previous post, "No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity,"  I included a passage from Ross…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

No, neuroscience doesn’t support religiosity

A trend is evident. With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing. Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Great Vox article: How meditation deconstructs your mind

Recently I came across two articles on the same subject -- how mindfulness is just the tip of the meditation iceberg, and how advanced meditation approaches can be described scientifically. Here's the introductory passages from "Beyond Mindfulness" by Matthew Sacchet and Judson Brewer in the July/August issue of Scientific American. Millions worldwide practice mindfulness meditation, not just for their mental health but as a means to enhance their general well-being, reduce stress and be more productive at work. The past decade has seen an extraordinary broadening of our understanding of the neuroscience underlying meditation; hundreds of clinical studies have highlighted…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Your brain has three gears. Gear 2 is the best.

Buddhism has the middle way. There's a saying, "Everything in moderation." The fable of Goldilocks and the Three Bears involves three choices where "the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, in the middle, is just right." So it isn't surprising that, according to a recent article in New Scientist, Take control of your brain's master switch to optimize how you think, the human brain has three gears that are coordinated by a small bundle of cells called the locus coeruleus, Latin for 'blue dot."Download Take control of your brain's…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience Universe

Doty’s book, Mind Magic, made sense to me. With one glaring exception.

Well, today I finished reading James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. I started off liking the book more than how I ended up liking it.  The general thrust of Mind Magic is hard to argue with. The human mind is like an iceberg: the conscious tip, which we're aware of, is much smaller than the subconscious bulk, which we aren't aware of. Yet thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such mostly bubble up from the subconscious rather than our conscious awareness. We all are familiar with thoughts that appear unbidden and depart without a…
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