How to Change Your Mind

between subject and object? Or to the morphing in my mind’s eye of Mary into María Sabina? Put another way, wha ...

be the most parsimonious hypothesis. Yet it is a long way from being proven, and a number of neuroscientist ...

thirtysomething neuroscientist named Robin Carhart-Harris has been working since 2009 to identify the “neural cor ...

build a foundation of hard science beneath the edifice of psychoanalysis. “Freud said dreams were the royal ...

hole in the middle of her forehead with an electric drill. (She documented the procedure in a short b ...

empirically the risks of various psychoactive substances, both legal and illegal. He had concluded from his ...

Harris got a surprise: “We were seeing decreases in blood flow”—blood flow being one of the proxies for brai ...

the self or ego), moral reasoning, and “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others, as w ...

sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature. Self-reflection can lead ...

between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insi ...

(David Nutt puts the matter bluntly, claiming that in the DMN “we’ve found the neural correlate for repre ...

both the data of our senses and the models in our memories. Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly trans ...

the flower; depleted of nectar, it’s probably not worth a stop.) Then there is the world according to an ...

get through the filter. But when all that sensory information threatens to overwhelm us, the mind furiously gener ...

ambition, his affect is strikingly self-effacing and does little to prepare you for his willingness to venture out ...

brain but rather stem from an excess of order. When the grooves of self- reflective thinking deepen and ha ...

by chemistry or religion—return us to the psychological condition of the infant on its mother’s breast, a stag ...

• • • SO WHAT DOES a high-entropy brain look like? The various scanning technologies that the Imperi ...

wishes and fears, prejudices and emotions, begin to inform what we see— a hallmark of primary consciousness ...

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