Dreams Help You Mind-Read, Science Says

Dear CF,
Thought you might be interested in the following finding on dreaming, which I read today in Yahoo! News as I blearily sipped my tea:
A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest – specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – influences our ability to read emotions in other people’s faces. In the [...]

Read Full Post »

Brain Mirrors, Brain Motors

Brains, brains, glorious brains. I wrote about Sapolsky’s lecture on how an interest in religion might be neurologically motivated because I feel R.S. galumphs rather irresponsibly into dangerous ideological territory. As neuroscience creeps closer to the murkily catholic discipline known as cognitive science, critics often point to what they see as the sinister goal of [...]

Read Full Post »

Why Sapolsky’s Take on Schizotypal Personality Disorder and Religion is Problematic

Dear CF,
BoingBoing posted one of Robert Sapolsky’s (Stanford neurobiologist and author of Monkeyluv, The Trouble with Testosterone and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers) lectures on schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder today. It’s an hour long, but makes for pretty interesting listening if you have the time to give it. In this installment he starts off [...]

Read Full Post »

Schizophrenia, Hyper-Mentalism, and the Happy Puppet

Couldn’t stop thinking about it.
What to make of the Firecracker’s attraction to schizophrenia as a word and lifestyle, and why did it become the writer-singer-songwriter’s passport into a different kind of world? Schizophrenia, after all, goes beyond the mere desire for altered states of mind. Yeah, Coleridge loved opium, but this exceeds drugs, hallucinations, trumps [...]

Read Full Post »