The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.

Our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded

‘beauty’ in nature is for us alone: for the human eye alone. Without our consciousness it doesn’t exist

My own accidental answer arrived long ago, when I began noticing that my morning workout provided the most fertile hours for reading and thinking.

The question of whether we are minds in bodies or bodies with minds has animated philosophers for millennia.

In his meditation on the complementarity of how art and science reveal the world, Schopenhauer likened science to “the innumerable showering drops of the waterfall, which, constantly changing, never rest for an instant,” and art to “the rainbow, quietly resting on this raging torrent.” Two centuries later, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her splendid case for subjectifying the universe: “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.”

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight

There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy.

Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Rachel Carson wrote in reflecting on our spiritual bond with nature shortly before she awakened the modern environmental conscience.

In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction

“This is a participatory universe,” physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who popularized the term black hole, wrote in his influential theory known as It from Bit, asserting that “physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics” — an assertion he could not have made without Einstein’s theory of relativity and its groundbreaking insight into how the laws of physics appear to different observers with different frames of reference.

“people ought to pay more attention to their instincts” — a countercultural idea in a mechanical age, amid the mid-century boom of blind consumerism and industrialism

to listen, linger, and think about what they saw.

You're missing a potentially vital opportunity to practice essential survival skills.

That's the theory explored by a recent report from Nautilus, which focuses on the science of dreaming. For a long time the general consensus has been that dreams, be they delightful or terrifying, are useless: a mish-mash of experiences, impulses, memories, and that random episode of The Walking Dead that you watched just before bedtime, all distilled into a surreal nightmare in which you're being chased through the halls of your old high school by zombies … and for some reason, you're not wearing pants.

Though not formally researched, anecdotes abound from people who've dreamed of a frightening experience only to then live through it in real life

Humans are notorious for overestimating themselves

the difficulty of the task has to do with a battle between two cognitive systems triggered by the word choices of the question. One system tends to take mental shortcuts, because it’s faster and easier, while abstract reasoning, the second system, is harder.

According to Yale psychologist Oriana R. Aragón, we might shed tears to regulate particularly intense feelings.

people who exhibited negative responses to positive things (like crying at a graduation) were able to moderate strong feelings more effectively than others.

People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions

Psychologists working with young toddlers say the kids are capable of recognizing when someone else is pretending, cheating, or straight-up lying.

Psychologists use a test called the false-belief task to gauge whether a person knows that other people’s thoughts are different from their own.

Psychiatrists have suggested that Milligan had as many as 24 personalities

The first jury to hear this case could not reach a consensus on the murder, and the prosecution eventually gave up those charges.

Rather than choosing among already well-researched options, the assessment-focused maximizers will just keep adding and researching new ones, prolonging the decision-making process even further.

Boundaries can also help us from falling down a rabbit hole of online reviews and pro and con lists. It’s all about recognizing the value of your time and energy.

An account of another alleged “sonic attack” has surfaced, this time from a U.S. government employee in China. The employee reported “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure,” according to a U.S. Embassy health alert. The episode mirrors reports from American diplomats in Cuba in late 2016, and fuels the debate among scientists about what, if anything, is actually happening.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well, and seeing with the brain is often called 'imagination,' and we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our 'inscapes,' we've lived with them all our lives.

Neuroscience has traditionally been classed as a subdivision of biology. These days, it is an interdisciplinary science that liaises closely with other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, engineering, computer science, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, and medicine.

The ancient Egyptians thought the seat of intelligence was in the heart. Because of this belief, during the mummification process, they would remove the brain but leave the heart in the body.

Behavioral neuroscience - the study of the biological bases of behavior. Looking at how the brain affects behavior.

Dreams are a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep

There is no cognitive state that has been as extensively studied and yet as misunderstood as much as dreaming.40,42

Neuroscience offers explanations linked to the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep as a pinpoint for where dreaming occurs.28