Author: Mary

Last week I wrote that science enriches rather than impoverishes my worldview. I thought it might be useful to describe more precisely what I mean by this. It&#...

Well, it’s spring (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and new life is bursting out everywhere you look, but again I’m going to talk to you about mo...

A few weeks ago, I posted about a study that looked at how mindfulness affected people’s reactions to thoughts of their own deaths. Thanks to a good-heart...

I wrote recently about the adaptation of various Eastern spiritual practices by Westerners, and how in the process these practices became more or less belief-fr...

I’m reading Philip Goldberg’s American Veda, and I’m noticing some interesting things about the ways that Westerners think about the Eastern s...

This article from Science News Daily uses the lovely phrase “sleep fragility” to describe the unlovely phenomenon of sleep that is vulnerable to dis...

Although I do not believe in any of the gods proposed by the world’s religions, I do have feelings of wonder, awe, connectedness, and transcendence that m...

I’m interested in some of the mental constructs that thinking meat has created, like science or art or religion. I’m particularly interested in area...

Steven Pinker, in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proposes an explanation of how human intelligence evolved. He begins by...