Lives on Earth

mind

  • Time and Again

    Time goes by. The future comes towards us—or, to some, we move towards it. The future arrives in the present and then both settle into the past, gone but not forgotten. Or so it seems. Here’s another possibility: there is… Continue reading

  • Six Interesting Ways That Cars Are Like People

    Cars are a favorite metaphor and mirror for us humans, from their vroom for the young to the creaks and breakdowns for the aging. The comparisons would seem to have been exhausted, but I keep running into new ones. Here… Continue reading

  • The Brain Speaks Out

    Good Morning. I’m pleased to see so many members here today. I’ll be speaking about the basic functions of my department, Head Quarters. It’s my belief that many current descriptions of the so-called “mind”—expressions such a “self-aware,” “highly intelligent,” “imaginative”—point to… Continue reading

  • Forgiveness and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

    The Second Law of Thermodynamics has seemed depressing to me. It states that anything left to itself, without new energy to sustain its structure, will become increasingly disordered. Molecules of different gasses in a container will move around until they… Continue reading

  • “The Mind Is Mainly Drawn to the Future”

    “The mind is mainly drawn to the future.” So write Martin Seligman and John Tierney in “We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment” in the New York Times on May 21, 2017. The article is based on the book… Continue reading

  • Our Talky Mind

    Stream of consciousness is a common term for it. Mind wandering and daydreaming are others. More narrowly, self-talk refers to our constructive or negative mental judgments of ourselves. Default mode network, from neurology, names the interacting regions of the brain that… Continue reading

  • How Consciousness Might Have Evolved

    Human consciousness. Our mad, prodigious mind. Our personhood. Where did consciousness come from? How did it become part of us? How did it become us? Michael Graziano, a neuropsychologist I’ve posted about before, writes in the June 2016 Atlantic about… Continue reading