I think I had my gallbladder removed the other day. My surgeon says he took it out but instead of bringing it to the office afterwards as “proof of extraction,” he says he sent it to the lab. I don’t know what the lab did with it. But then where gallbladders are concerned, it [...]

Not for nothing is it called neuro-linguistic programming (“NLP” to the cognoscenti). And while he isn’t necessarily viewed as one of NLP’s gurus, one of the leading postmodern brain-oriented linguists came to Texas the other day to remind us just how practical some of the suppositions of the brain-as-spokesperson inquiry have become.
George Lakoff has [...]

A reader in the U.K. writes:
Dudley, I read The Mother of All Minds over the past week or so. Obviously it struck many chords with me. I share many of your observations and perhaps have experienced some similar experiences. I am not so sure about the evolutionary aspect of Mind, however. I often feel [...]

Over the holidays, Sherry and I traveled to Florida to visit the grandson (and his parents and our other daughter, too). Once again, I was transfixed by how magically and effortlessly the grandmother can influence the behaviors of a four-year-old often hell-bent, like most four-year-olds (not to mention Frank Sinatra, Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Sid [...]

Listening to myself—talking with my children about (grand)children or the neighbors about the (neighbor)hood or my friends about (geo)politics or my colleagues about where “descent with modification” (Darwin’s definition of evolution) has brought us—I hear myself opining more and more these days:
We need to break the cycle. Or,
We need to break the spell.
I usually use [...]

A visitor to the Brain Technologies office the other day requested a deeper understanding of the model of human thinking levels I explore in, among a number of places, my latest book, The Mother of All Minds.
For an author, what’s not to like about such a request?
So I sat my guest down in front of [...]

Sometimes I’m bemused at the question, sometimes a little exasperated: Can people really change?
I suspect the reason that anyone would ask the question has to more to do with the nature of consciousness than anything else. Consciousness appears to be the paragon of immediacy. “We” may have trouble staying in the here and now, but [...]