neuroscience
Hello. I am an independent researcher with multiple Master degrees. My research is mainly in toxicology (especially neurotoxicology and mechanistic aspects of toxicology), neurodegeneration, neuroscience, infectious diseases, and microbiology.... What is God?: Mystics
The thing that happens We are not going to argue about it. We are going to describe it. You are sitting — or walking, or washing dishes, or in one documented case being struck by lightning — and the boundary between you and everything else dissolves. Not metaphorically.... Is everything a projection?: Materialists
The hallucination machine In 2013, Anil Seth told a TED audience: "We’re all hallucinating all the time. When we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality." He was summarizing thirty years of computational neuroscience into a sentence, and the sentence landed because it... Is everything a projection?: Psychoanalysts
The template We have watched the same shadow material project onto three relationships in the same patient. Mother onto boss, father onto lover, sibling onto colleague. The precision is uncanny. The patient is not inventing a new response to each person.... Is everything a projection?: The Story
The patient, the monk, the scanner In 1895, Freud sat across from a patient who was convinced her doctor was in love with her. He was not. But the conviction was total — she had assembled an airtight case from materials that existed only in the space between her history and his... What is enlightenment?: Skeptics
The epistemological problem In 1901, the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness, cataloguing thirty-six cases of higher awareness. His evidence consisted entirely of first-person reports. The book was a bestseller.... What is enlightenment?: Neuroscientists
Off the chart In 2004, we put Matthieu Ricard in a scanner. A molecular biologist who left the Pasteur Institute to become a Tibetan monk, 50,000 hours of practice.... What is consciousness?: Panpsychists
Following the math In 2008, Giulio Tononi followed the math past where most neuroscientists get uncomfortable. Integrated Information Theory arrived at a conclusion he stated flatly: consciousness is a fundamental property of any system with nonzero integrated information.... What is consciousness?: Materialists
The iron rod In 1848, Phineas Gage survived an iron rod blasting through his frontal lobe and became a different person. Responsible Gage became impulsive, profane, unable to hold a job. His skull is in a museum at Harvard.... What is consciousness?: The Story
The bet In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch wagered philosopher David Chalmers that within twenty-five years, science would discover the neural mechanism producing subjective experience.... Journal Submission: How to Change Oneself
How To Change Oneself: Why Rational Control Fails and Emotional Understanding Works Abstract At first glance, personal change appears straightforward: identify an unwanted behavior, decide to act differently, and implement the new behavior.... Your brain does not just see the world. It edits it.
Your brain does not just see the world. It edits it. Sometimes those edits turn into full blown illusions. See my article on how bias snowballs change perception and why that matters for situational awareness.... PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS
This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it.... I could be wrong here, but does this assume that the bigger / harder part of grieving is cognitive / cerebral? My perhaps-not-super-informed take on grief, or at least my experiences of it, is a lot more like a set of embodied predictive processing errors.... It doesn't feel invalidating to me, I think we're looking with curiosity at a topic that isn't backed by hearty public research. The more I think about the way I experience and have healed and explored very intense (mostly traumatic) childhood experiences, the more convinced I... I've had similar experiences. I still don't believe that trauma is stored in the body. I think it's in the brain, but connected to patterns of body activation. Parts of the brain which are not the pure cognitive mind.. the brain is much more than verbal ideas and beliefs.... - onlooks like I've been wrong and spreading misinformation about the disproven "triune brain theory"by
I'm not sure yet the implications of recognizing instead that "all vertebrates possess the same basic brain regions, here divided into the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain;" in some ways it seems like a nuance, but in other ways I think it'll shift how I see things and talk... - onlooks like I've been wrong and spreading misinformation about the disproven "triune brain theory"by
Thank you. I thought about it some, and I can see how Polyvagal theory has been helpful for me, for tracking where my nervous system is at subjectively, even if it makes some wrong predictions or doesn't match what we know from bio....