Quantcast
Channel: neuroscience – Heroes Not Zombies
Browsing all 130 articles
Browse latest View live

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Partitive and aspective

Here’s a quote from a book entitled “Neuroethics“. This is from an essay by Nancey Murphy. While Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the...

View Article



Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

An Integral framework of psychological development

In Ken Wilber’s integral map of development, he describes an evolution from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric. By this he means an initial focus on “me”, to an identification with others...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Reducing pain with your own brain – love

Here’s an interesting piece of research. Viewing pictures of a romantic partner can stimulate the “reward” parts of your brain and reduce your experience of pain. In this trial the researchers compared...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Reducing pain with your own brain – meditation

Here’s another study showing how pain can be reduced without using drugs. In this particular study, the researchers had the subjects do one 20 minute focused attention meditation session daily for 4...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The Empathic Brain

I am he as you as you are he as you are me and we are all together. We’re still in the midst of a highly atomistic society, as Mary Midgley describes so clearly in books like “Science and Poetry” and...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The space within

  Once in a while, I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness – it feels so free! Then I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Out of Our Heads

Alva Noë’s “Out of Our Heads” [ISBN 978-0-8090-1648-8] makes a strong case for understanding consciousness as a phenomenon, not produced by the brain (in the way that the stomach produces gastric...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Hug more – it’s good for you!

Nice little article on the School of Life site about the relationship between compassion and circulating levels of oxytocin. It references Paul Zak’s talk on TED.COM. It appears that there’s a...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Love from the beginning

Last year I studies Interpersonal Neurobiology with Dan Siegel, whose book, Mindsight, I highly recommend. He teaches around the essential triad of brain, mind and relationships and understanding the...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The Divided Brain

Iain McGilchrist has released a short Kindle book entitled The Divided Brain and The Search for Meaning [ASIN:B008JE7I2M]. In it he presents an excellent precis of the ideas and findings he presents so...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The meeting of the three lizard minds

Well, these little guys got me thinking. They just sat there doing this motionless three way meeting thing in the sun. I thought look at the three lizard minds meeting! And of course that set me off...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

How we see….making it up

When I was a little boy I thought that vision was like a kind of projector, casting images from the outside world up into my brain. As I got a little older I thought the eye was like a prism, which...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

poetry

David Suzuki writes (in “The Sacred Balance”) Definition identifies, specifies and limits a thing, describes what it is and what it is not; it is the tool of our great classifying brain. Poetry, in...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

MEAMs

Hmmm…..haven’t come across this acronym before but its an exciting one! It stands for Music Evoked Autobiographical Memories. This interesting study used “No. 1 songs” to stimulate autobiographical...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Half a brain…..

Take 20 minutes to watch this brilliant TED talk by Iain McGilchrist.   I agree with everything he says in this, but I was especially struck by his mention of the gene which codes for eyes. It’s the...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Straight or round?

No straight lines are to be found in the natural world……..Leonard Shlain has pointed out that the only apparently straight line in the natural world is that of the horizon, but of course that too...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

A whole brain is better than half a one

When I learned neuroanatomy at Medical School I was taught that the two cerebral hemispheres were symmetrical. There was no mention at all that they were in any way different. But look at this image...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

What can you fit a mind into?

In the wonderful “The Republic of Tea” Mel says The whole problem with Western civilisation is that ever since the Greeks we’ve been trying to squeeze the mind into the brain and it won’t fit....

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Who are you?

It’s very common for us to say something like “My head is sore”, or “My stomach aches”, or even “I have a rash” when we experience one of those symptoms. So who is it who has this head, stomach or...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The great leap

  It seems we didn’t evolve into human beings in a smooth, seamless way, but more with a pattern of great leaps and long, slow changes. One of these great leaps was in the growth of the size of the...

View Article
Browsing all 130 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images