New sarticles about developments in neuroscience (and “neuroculture”) from Slate magazine –
“How Smart Is Grandpa?: How much can you expect from a septuagenarian brain?” by Michelle Tsai. Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007.
“Cells That Read Minds?: What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the human brain,” by Alison Gopnik. Posted Thursday, April 26, [...]

BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.
If you have ever written about using psychedelics, you may be denied entry (or rentry?) into the United States
“Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray [...]

Visit bibliodyssey to see larger versions of this image and others… Bibliodyssey page on the Kalighat Pictures of Indian Gods

This is what the Voynich Manuscript is – a mysterious book, now believed to be a forgery created by John Dee to swindle a king out of $50,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
An older scientific american article By Gordon Rugg showing a method by which the VM might have been created by Edward Kelly (made famous by John Dee) [...]

Remembering U.G. Krishnamurti
“In 1939, when UG was 21 years of age, he went and met Sri Ramana Maharshi and asked him, ‘This thing called moksha, can you give it to me?’ Ramana reply, ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’ struck him like a ‘thunderbolt’ and set him up on a relentless search [...]

An interesting mp3, if you have the time, can be downloaded at RU Sirius’s website. There’s a few minutes of extraneous stuff at the beginning. It does kind of give you a sense of Jody’s take on this whole business. Some interesting descriptions of several gurus, mostly concentrating on their obvious flaws.
Nothing revolutionary, but I [...]

Doug Hofstadter of “Godel, Escher, Bach” fame has a new book about consciousness. I’ve not read it, I’m just referencing this review of it, which was rather low on actual detail. I found the mention of the death by brain tumor of Hofstadter’s love touching – it’s interesting how grief magnifies and shapes the consideration [...]

From New Scientist – one of the better science email newsletters, incidentally:
Ecstasy really does unleash the love hormone
“Clubbers who take the “love drug” ecstasy really might be “loved up”. Studies in rats suggest the drug causes a brain surge of oxytocin – the hormone that helps bond couples, as well as mothers to their babies.
Earlier [...]

This is a fairly shallow article, mostly interesting because it appears on the CNN website.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/04/04/neurotheology/index.html
“”When we think of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, we see a tremendous similarity across practices and across traditions.”
The frontal lobe, the area right behind our foreheads, helps us focus our attention in prayer and meditation.
The parietal lobe, located near [...]

What’s “memory-prediction framework”? Well, to oversimplify it, it suggests that the brain takes in information from the senses, compares it to memories of past experiences, and then tries to simulate, or imagine, likely future experiences. Sounds pretty obvious I suppose, but like a lot of things about the brain, it’s not well understood.
Jeff Hawkins, the [...]