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Can Mysticism Help Us Solve the Mind-Body Problem?

By John Horgan — 2019

I just spent a week at a symposium on the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries. The mind-body problem--which encompasses consciousness, free will and the meaning of life--concerns who we really are. Are we matter, which just happens to give rise to mind? Or could mind be the basis of reality, as many sages have insisted?

Read on blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Beyond Death: The Science of the Afterlife

This question is more than a mind-bender. For thousands of years, certain people have claimed to have actually visited the place that, Saint Paul promised, “no eye has seen … and no human mind has conceived,” and their stories very often follow the same narrative arc.

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What Happens if Your Mind Lives For Ever On the Internet?

It may be some way off, but mind uploading, the digital duplication of your mental essence, could expand human experience into a virtual afterlife.

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A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved

Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology.

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Largest Ever Psychedelics Study Maps Changes of Conscious Awareness to Neurotransmitter Systems

In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec...

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Inside Silicon Valley’s New Non-Religion: Consciousness Hacking

I saw spiritual attainment and I thought, ‘That does not need to be religious. That can be scientific.’

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Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over

When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, they found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures.

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Do We Have Minds of Our Own?

The strange, startling, and competing explanations for human—and possibly nonhuman—consciousness.

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Is It Time to Give Up on Consciousness as ‘the Ghost in the Machine’?

Science has not yet reached a consensus on the nature of consciousness–which has important implications for our belief in free will and our approach to the study of the human mind.

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Brain Mechanisms that Give the Iceman Unusual Resistance to Cold

Dutch adventurer Wim Hof is known as ‘The Iceman’ for good reason. Hof established several world records for prolonged resistance to cold exposure, an ability he attributes to a self-developed set of techniques of breathing and meditation—known as the Wim Hof Method.

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The Science of Healing Thoughts

A growing body of scientific research suggests that our mind can play an important role in healing our body — or in staying healthy in the first place.

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EXPLORE TOPIC

Mind-Body Connection