Surprise! It’s all interconnected. (The Guardian)
Is the body key to understanding consciousness?
Category: Neuroscience
When Mindlessness Is Better Than Mindfulness
Sometimes, don’t pay so much attention (Scientific American).
Democratize Enlightment
Let’s Do This Thing!
This is Your Brain on Nature
Why Reading Books Is Important for the Brain
Rupert Sheldrake. Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work. 27.02.19
Hopkins researchers recommend reclassifying psilocybin, the drug in ‘magic’ mushrooms, from schedule I to schedule IV
Although psilocybin is relatively less harmful than other drugs and not prone to compulsive abuse, the researchers don’t recommend releasing psilocybin into patients’ hands even with a prescription. “We believe that the conditions should be tightly controlled and that when taken for a clinical reason, it should be administered in a health care setting, monitored by a person trained for that situation,” says Johnson. The researchers foresee that the process for psilocybin use in the clinic would be similar to how an anesthesiologist prescribes and administers a drug, minimizing the potential for abuse or harm.
Well apparently people have been doing this wrong for 10,000 years and now it needs to be handed over to “pharmaceutical professionals.”
Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem
The conventional wisdom is that morning people are high achievers, go-getters, while late risers are lazy. But what if going to bed in the wee hours is actually an advantage?
COME ON LUCKY SEVEN!!!!!
According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”
Tell me more …
And I have it fairly bad. My body naturally wants to go to bed around 2 a.m. and rise around 10 a.m. Whenever I try to adjust to an early schedule, my brain is like mush. Conversely, I light up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree around 9 p.m., and for the next few hours I am my most me: alert, clever, inspired to create.
Me too, but writing peaks about 11.
“Here’s to all 180 million of you late risers, night crawlers and can’t-get-to-sleepers,” the voice-over says, as Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” swells in the background. “Because the ones who truly change the world are the ones who are still at it when everyone else is fast asleep.”
I like how this ends.
Michael Pollan On How to Change Your Mind
A Brain-Boosting Prosthesis Moves From Rats To Humans
If you want to get technical, the brain-booster in question is a “closed-loop hippocampal neural prosthesis. Closed loop because the signals passing between each patient’s brain and the computer to which it’s attached are zipping back and forth in near-real-time. Hippocampal because those signals start and end inside the test subject’s hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region of the brain critical to the formation of memories. “We’re looking at how the neurons in this region fire when memories are encoded and prepared for storage,” says Robert Hampson, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and lead author of the paper describing the experiment in the latest issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering
Dean’s List 