Sublime

Conscious experience takes two different forms, attention and peripheral awareness.

The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory,

While the trained mnemonists toiled away in geeky obscurity, Daniel’s medicalized condition had generated enormous popular interest.

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

Newberg has quite graphically shown that meditation and other spiritual practices strengthen the anterior cingulate while also calming the primitive amygdala.

It’s a point well illustrated by Michel Siffre, a French chronobiologist (he studies the relationship between time and living organisms) who conducted one of the most extraordinary acts of self-experimentation in the history of science. In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calen

The healthy ego—what Freud called “a coherent organization of mental processes”—is the part of us that can observe self, situations, and persons; assess them; and…

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