Jill Bolte's Stroke of Insight  is a bit annoying. Jill had a stroke in her left temporal lobe. That shut down her ability to reason, talk or think in a conventional way. In the talk linked above, she uses this experience (complete with an actual demonstration brain) to bolster her theory that we are too "left brained". I assume that she is not recommending that we all have strokes like hers, but it's hard to see just *what* she's recommending. Her interpretation of her experience sounds pretty much conventionally Buddhist. Her stroke took her straight to Nirvana. This would be more interesting to me if I hadn't heard so many breathless accounts of brain damage resulting from LSD or mental illness. For me, Jill has done a lot to convince me that Zen's project of suppressing left brain activity amounts to little more than an artificial way of inducing a temporal lobe stroke. Zen "philosophy" is very useful I think, but I see no reason to let go of

This post will not make much sense to you unless you (a) know something about the bizarre math of Quantum Mechanics and (b) something about the way the brain works. I'm not sure I can even include myself in this rarified company. Quantum Mechanics talks about a "vector" of "state variables" that describe the state of a system. The system my be as simple as a proton or as complex as a chair (in principal). Each state variable describes things like charge, position, velocity, spin and so forth for *all* the particles in the system. The whole mess is usually referred to by the Greek Letter Phi. Phi *changes* over time, so the Phi function (in principal again) provides a way to *predict* the future state of the system, or, more precisely, what we would get if we made measurements of the system at a given time. One interesting feature of these state variables is that they often use "imaginary numbers" -- an individual property, such as a position, can be re

Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness  by James H. Austin This is the classic 800+ page "everything you always wanted to know" guide to both neurology and Zen. Its treatment of both topics is massive and exhastive. On the "Brain" side, you get a detailed tour of what neurologists now know about brain anatomy and function. This includes: Brain phyisical sub-systems, such as mid-brain, hypothalamus,  hypo campus … You will never speak of "the" brain again. There are dozens of different "organs" in your head with discreet structure and function. How neurones work in excruciating detail.  Signalling, activation, blocking Effects of chemicals such as nicotine, endorphins … learning and un-learning  Processes such as vision, hearing Austin's book should be the cure for people who think of the brain as somehow like a computer  or (conversely) that a computer is somehow like a brain. Nature has employed a host of

The latest issue of Scientific American raises a new challenge for those who think that we have out-grown our need for belief in things un-seen. It turns out that sub-atomic particles don't really exist -- Not in any way that we think of chairs and trees (apparently) exist. There is no such thing as a proton. Now, many of us have suspected that these types of things are rather fuzzy -- it's impossible to pin down both their position and velocity for example -- we get that. But it always seemed like a limitation of our measurement tools. Surely there is *something* there to be measured !! Apparently not. Suppose you have a box that you have determined is totally empty. No protons at all. However, somebody observing the *same* box from an accelerating frame of reference (say, a rocket whizzing by) will see the box full of warm protons !! In other words, the observation depends on who is doing the observing . We got used to this bizarre property of the Universe when it came to c