the brain

Neuroscientists and cutting edge computer developers are in the first stages of building a “bridge between flesh and chip.” Chillingly, promoters speak of a “brave new world” of thought-controlled machines–in…

How can a single, beautifully written sentence affect one’s entire being? Early this morning, as the sun rose, a line from Hamlet stopped me in my tracks. The beauty of…

A reader wrote to say she “doesn’t have a clue” what I’m talking about when I speak of the movement of negation. Since I’ve come to feel that no one…

Instead of scaring up a couple of ducks as I coast down the dirt path to the creek, I surprise a man standing in the middle of the stream. He’s…

The word and work of consciousness have two very different meanings to me. They are so different the two states should have different names–conscious activity, and conscious awareness perhaps.

Fifteen meters upstream, a merganser mother preens on the rocks as her three chicks play in the shallows of the creek. Out of the water she appears quite large, irrespective…

The fog had begun to burn off, then returned to wrap around the hills and linger over the fields. As it began to lift again, the mist refracted the light…

Now that computers are replicating and recapitulating the functions of thought, we are faced with the questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the human brain for?