Before we wade into the topic that “we each create our own realities, ergo, we can each recreate the actual working materials of our brain,” you need to know a bit about my own self-created reality.
Basically, I’m a skeptic on most matters in the so-called “woo-woo” department of human inquiry, ranging from religion to UFOs [...]

In the world of ideas, there’s a battle currently underway between, No. 1, forces that believe the brain is often best left with a minimum of interference to figure out what’s in its own best interest and, No. 2, forces that believe the brain needs to experiment with better ways to intervene and shape what [...]

“Bush Derangement Syndrome” (BDS) is the derisive way that Washington Post’s op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer refers to psychologically oriented analyses of George W. Bush’s brand of presidential decision-making. (The Bush family itself styles such analysis as “psychobabble.”)
While it’s no secret that I generally find this President’s mental performance ranking somewhere between the ludicrous and the [...]

Remember the mentats in Frank Herbert incomparable Dune books?
A mentat was a citizen especially trained to think. And think, as the late John Wayne might have drawled, “Damn well!” If Herbert’s mentats understood anything, they understood that thinking is the art and science of understanding what leads to consequences and how to produce—or avoid—them. Mentats [...]