Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

“Seeing That Frees” — a great book about Buddhist emptiness

Shamil Chandaria's talk on the Bayesian Brain and Meditation that I wrote about recently is a gift that keeps on giving. For on one of his slides there was a small image of a book by Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. I recall that Chandaria mentioned it briefly, but he certainly didn't dwell on the book. I figured, correctly as it turns out, that the book was in line with the ideas about the brain that Chandaria was talking about, so I decided to order a copy from Amazon. It took a while to…
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Posted inAwareness Neuroscience

Phenomenology can deconstruct religious dogma

While I said in my last post that I'd be moving on from the subject of predictive processing, I'm only going to go halfway there. Because I want to explore something that stood out for me in one of the slides I shared in that post from a talk by Shamil Chandaria about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." This is how I described the blue box with various terms for Non-Dual Awareness and its associated orange'ish note in my previous blog post. Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, is one of the spiritual notions (in the blue box) that Chandaria says…
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Posted inNeuroscience

A summary of Shamil Chandaria’s “The Bayesian Brain and Meditation”

Don't worry, Church of the Churchless visitors who aren't as interested as I am in the hot new neuroscience theory of predictive processing by the brain, which is why I've been writing about Andy Clark's book The Experience Machine recently. I'll be on to other topics soon. But not quite yet, since I want to share some of what I learned by watching Shamil Chandaria's talk on YouTube about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." I heard Chandaria and Sam Harris engage in a fascinating conversation on Harris' Waking Up app.  That led me to watch Chandaria's talk, since he's knowledgeable…
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Posted inNeuroscience

How to hack your brain with predictive processing tips

Well, I've finished the book I've been writing about recently, Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. I enjoyed it a lot. In this post I'll share some tips from the final chapters about how we can use the theory of predictive processing to improve how we experience life. This is a leading theory of modern neuroscience, with references to it popping up in many places. For example, here's how a review of The Experience Machine in a recent issue of New Scientist starts out. On a building site, there is a scream of pain.…
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Posted inComments Neuroscience

For those following the comment game, Spence Tepper lost

For those who have been following the interesting exchange of views about consciousness and the brain in comments on a recent blog post, I'm pleased to present the final score on a debate about whether there's evidence that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. Commenter Spence Tepper ended up without scoring a debate point due to his religious dogmatism. Commenters Appreciative Reader and myself scored numerous debate points because we used facts and logic. Tepper never actually played the debate game, choosing to ignore calls to produce evidence for his assertion. Bottom line: you can't win a game…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Here’s a brief overview of how the brain works by Anil Seth

I realize that some people don't resonate with Andy Clark's writing style as much as I do. So for those who find the excerpts I've been sharing from Clark's book, The Experience Machine, to be unduly confusing, here's a blog post I wrote in 2021 about the views of a neuroscientist, Anil Seth, with views similar to Clark's. Everybody's brain is producing a kind of hallucination
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it’s dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note. I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from. It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious…
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Posted inNeuroscience

How the brain makes predictions come true

Before discussing the subject that's the title of this post - how the brain makes predictions come true -- I'll shoehorn in a related personal story about my check ordering saga. Recently Columbia Bank, which my wife and I use for a checking account, was bought by Umpqua Bank. For many years I've ordered checks for our Columbia Bank account when the supply ran low. Last month was the first time I'd ordered checks with Umpqua Bank on them. Balancing our checkbook about a week ago, I noticed that we'd been charged on May 17 for the cost of mailing…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Here’s a fresh way of looking upon attention

I'm continuing to read and enjoy Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. It's one of the best books about modern neuroscience that I've ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of them. My first post about the book laid a foundation for these subsequent posts, as I get deeper into The Experience Machine. This is a one sentence summary of the Big Idea discussed in the book -- which makes a heck of a lot of sense. Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain,…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Our brains don’t see reality as it is, but as it’s predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences. Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Slow deep breathing and smiling — two ways to feel better fast

Recently I listened to a guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my Calm iPhone app where she led listeners through an interesting exercise that taught me something new about breathing. First Levitt had me breathe for a minute, using my usual breathing. I recall that no counting was done with this first exercise. Then she asked listeners to breathe more slowly, and to count those breaths for a minute that she timed. I had six in and out breaths during that minute. Then Levitt said to breathe slowly again, but to extend the duration of each in breath by inhaling…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Truth-Default Theory explains a lot about religious belief and disbelief

A friend gave me his unread copy of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. Since I'd heard of some of Gladwell's other books, like Blink and The Tipping Point, but not this one, I started reading Talking to Strangers with fairly low expectations.  I was wrong. I ended up being fascinated by the book. It's full of examples of people being fooled by other people who were lying, even though there was considerable evidence about the deception being foisted on them. So Gladwell delves into the reasons why Neville Chamberlain…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Important truth: what we need isn’t God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying. I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way. Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life. Here he describes his…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Gut-directed hypnotherapy: example of the mind-body connection

In one way, the whole idea of the mind-body connection doesn't make sense. After all, it isn't as if the mind is one thing and the body is a different thing. The mind basically is the brain in action. The brain is part of the body. So obviously there's a connection between the mind and body, since they're different aspects of the same entity.  But most people, me included, do view the mind as something more ethereal than the cruder body. Our thoughts and emotions seem to be distinct from the flesh, blood, and bone of the body. Even though…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Mind-blowing idea to start 2023: thoughts aren’t about anything

Might as well make my first churchless blog post in 2023 about a subject that first caught my attention back in 2011, which was the first time I read Alex Rosenberg's book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.  It's the notion that our thoughts aren't about anything at all. That link leads to a blog post where I did my best to describe why Rosenberg says this. I won't repeat most of what was said in that post, so I invite you to read it if you want to have your mind blown so early in the…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Paradox: loss of self becomes deeply meaningful to our self

Recently I picked up Kevin Nelson's book, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience, after reading it quite a few years ago. I first heard of Nelson, a leading researcher in near-death experiences, via a New Scientist article that I blogged about in 2010. Not surprisingly, in his book Nelson concludes that spiritual experiences are decidedly physical. In his Epilogue, he writes: We have placed fragmented consciousness at the heart of many of our spiritual experiences and stripped away the illusion of the seamlessly integrated self. Odd as it may seem, we have shown…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Often we know, but don’t understand how we know

I used to be in love with mysticism, where hidden secrets of the cosmos supposedly are revealed in a mysterious fashion.  I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life. This is one of the fascinating messages of Blink, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell that a friend gave me, along with two other books by Gladwell that I'd never read before.  Its subtitle is "The Power…
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Posted inNeuroscience

We need to try not to overdraw our body budget

Recently I've been writing about a book that I'm enjoying a lot more than I thought I would, Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. It's dawned on me that in the course of sharing ideas from various chapters I found compelling, I've largely neglected to make clear the importance of a key concept in the book: that of our body budget. This was a new notion to me, and I don't claim to fully understand it even after reading Barrett's description of it. But here's some quotes from her book that give a good…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

The self, like emotions, is constructed by the brain

I'm continuing to make progress on reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.  As noted in a previous post about the book, I'm glad that I decided to read it straight through, even though some chapters seemed more appealing than others. Barrett is a good writer. She organized her book well, with interesting topics in every chapter. Before I get to how she views the self, which is pretty much how I also see it, as something constructed, not a given, I want to briefly mention her wise words about jumping to…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

Feelings are an unreliable guide to reality

Thanks to a Church of the Churchless commenter who mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett's book about how emotions are uniquely fashioned out of our experiences and environment, rather than appearing ready-made the same way in every human brain, I've been reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain with increasing enjoyment now that I'm past the initial introductory chapters. Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist, makes a strong case for her admittedly out-of-the-mainstream view of what emotions are and how they come to be. She cites lots of research, both her own and that of others, as she systematically…
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