My first car was my grandpa’s 1986 Chevrolet Celebrity. It had a lot of character. About 25% of the time, if you stopped at a red, the car would stall, and I became adept at putting it in park, restarting the ignition, and getting back into drive before the car…

We are semantic apes. We love categorizing things. Even in Genesis, God seems to be amused by Man’s propensity to name things, bringing “all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky” to “see what the man would name them.” We love to classify and differentiate. But it’s…

Okay, I admit that my title is meant to be a bit clickbaity. But with clickbaity gusto, I’ll double down and begin by reminding you that Aristotle, who many well-educated people regard as a pretty smart dude, believed that the conscious mind resided in…

Over the past year or so, I have found myself developing opinions about meditation. I am not an expert meditator or a meditation teacher. I acknowledge and respect the long and ancient histories of meditative practice. Even so, I think about meditation a lot, and I believe that modern neuroscience…

“Their brains lit up!” Most people will be familiar with the hot yellow and red blobs superimposed on beautifully high-resolution brain images to show brain activation. These images give the impression that the brain is switching modules on and off as needed to complete its arcane computations, but the typical…