Sublime

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious

Life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body. As Paul John Eakin argues in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, "our lives in and as bodies profoundly shape our sense of identity" (xi). The ability to recover memories, in fact, depends upon the material body. There must be a body that per

If only we could get every one of those original neurons active in exactly the same way they were the first time, our recollections would be strikingly vivid and realistic. But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation tha

Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.

Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.

Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately register