Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman is one of my favorite science authors and has been ever since I read his novel, Einstein’s Dreams back in 1993. His most recent book (Jan, 2014) is The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. [He is also the author of A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and … Read more
Cool video, posted at Mind Hacks (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License). About the film: Info: facebook.com/narcosebluenery Deep water freediving exposes its practitioners to a form of narcosis, which induces several symptoms, among which a feeling of euphoria and levity that earned this phenomenon its nickname of “raptures of the deep”. The short film relates … Read more
This is an interesting article on schizophrenia from The American Scholar. The author seems to throw all of the prevailing theories against the wall the see what sticks, to find some way to make sense of how her sister died. One of the pieces missing, however, is the fact that an extremely large percentage of … Read more
Dissociation, derealization, and depersonalization have always been a coping mechanisms the human brain can employ when reality is too intolerable. Occasionally, this can result in the experience of seeing one’s double, or doppleganger. But what happens when it’s not part of mental illness, and not organic (often the insular cortex)? Can the experience of an … Read more
[NOTE: I originally posted this in August of 2012. However, I am seeing clients who would fall into the definition Atwood uses for “madness.”] I am reading George Atwood’s The Abyss of Madness (Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series) (2011) as part of an intersubjective, relational psychoanalytic study group I have been a part of for the last … Read more
This is an interesting post on the nature of consciousness and dissociation in psychosis. Mental Experience and Dissociation in Psychosis By Ann Reitan, PsyD | Brain BloggerDecember 1, 2013 The experience of our minds may be shaped by belief. The idea that our minds are whatever we imagine them to be may seem like an … Read more