My latest read is a double biography of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (It’s titled, rather creatively, “Freud & Jung.”) Currently, I’m in the Freud section. Freud was known to be an atheist and rather dismissive of religion (hence my warm feelings for him.) Freud even wrote an entire book dismissing […]
I’ve reported several times here about my reading of the book “My Stroke of Insight” by a neuroscientist who had a stroke and was able to provide a thorough description of the experience. Her stroke knocked out a significant part of her left brain, and she reported a feeling of losing her sense of physical […]
In my various adventures in reading about the brain and mind, I’ve come across a few mentions of Eckhart Tolle. He’s a spiritual guru who claims to have achieved a kind of inner peace overnight. He’s described the experience as follows… I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without […]
A couple weeks ago, I was meeting a friend at a train station. Before she showed up, I was wandering around and noticed this little kid being pushed by his father in a stroller. He was probably around three or four and was just bawling his head off. I mean, he was emitting agonized screams […]
As mentioned, “I’ve been reading “My Stroke of Insight” in which the author describes feelings of spiritual transcendence after suffering a serious left brain stroke. She describes feeling liquid, connected to the universe, and at some points incapable of delineating where her physical self ends and the rest of her environment begins. Today, I find […]
I’ve much discussed John Sarno’s theories of psychosomatic pain. His Freud based arguments is that we have a child within us — our id — who is in a state of rage a lot of the time. And this child never matures — it remains a needy self-centered brat throughout your entire life. Now, recently […]
You know, I just had a profound insight into psychology and the brain that I am sure will radically alter mankind’s understanding of such things for the rest of its history. One challenge of understanding how we sense the world has to do with what I would call unity of perception. We know we have […]
This is an interesting TED talk I watched recently. The speaker is a neuroscientist who had a stroke in her left brain that significantly altered her perception of reality. (She ended up writing a book on the subject.) As she explains it, and as I think is generally understood, the left brain is the more […]