Greetings, Friendlies.:) Have you ever noticed how some parts of you want to deeply engage with the world—and other parts want to control it? Classically we might identify the one as a kind of Buddha-nature and the other as the work of Māra. McGilchrist’s view of hemisphere lateralization [1] suggests that these two views of […]
Tag: cognitive science
Greetings, Friendlies. :) For some Dhamma folk, discussions of “brain hemispheres” and “neural algorithms” elicits an instant—perhaps bodily—contraction. The resistance seems to come from a belief that the richness of human experience, the sacredness of being, is being reduced to mere mechanism. But that view is itself reductionist: “Either I must throw off the knowledge […]
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Tiny Book Club
Greetings, Friendlies! For years I’ve threatened to host a book club bringing Dhamma folks together to read non-Dhamma books. Particularly CogScience-y books. The dream is manifest. Behold: Tiny Book Club! Just two people, just one book. For the first iteration kalyana-Darrell and I will read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, a substantial tome […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Hemisphere Specialization. The idea that the left and right brain hemispheres have different structural and functional roles, and that these differences are manifest in our lived experience. You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before: “artists are right-brained, analysts are left-brained”. That’s actually not accurate, that artists are right-brained and analysts are […]
Greetings, Friendlies! I am so excited to be writing this post. Remember a gazillion years ago when I proposed the PPP series? It was this concept, Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Module, that was the spark that lit the whole thing off. And now I finally get to tell you about it. :))) We had the classic question […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Coming off the highs of irreverent pāli translations, we descend into the doldrums of cognitive explication. (Not for me. I LUV this stuff. But I get that it’s not for eveyone.) So. Modular Brains. This concept came up previously in the “Viññāṇa/Consciousness Of” post. But respecting our PPP Methodology it is here broken […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Last time we looked at some rather extraordinary examples of avijjā, of not understanding how our minds work. This time I’d like to share a case that struck me quite strongly, precisely because it was so much closer to home than the others. This case covered a former Johns Hopkins (JHU) student. She […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Following on from Pile of Provisional Positions 3, about the Classical View of Humanity, and the idea of Avijjā as not understanding how our minds work… In the two semesters I studied Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins, the course that most blew my mind (and this is a high bar) was Cognitive Neuropsychology. […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Episode 7 is ready to go. I’m super excited about this one because two things: Thing one, this is the _final_ in Peacock’s series Buddhism Before the Theravada. Can you believe it? The end of an era. Thing two, I’m excited because we are finally starting to talk about taṇhā, upādāna, and models […]
Dharma PhD podcast Episode 5, hit the airwaves this morning. Yay! Come and have a listen while Co-host and I talk about John Peacock’s “Buddhism Before the Theravada, Part 4”. We talk about how, in Buddhist traditions (and maybe our own psychological traditions?) human experience is playing out on a backdrop of misunderstanding how our […]
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