Blog | Neuromythology

Darkness into Light: What is Sacred to Me

Darkness into Light: What is Sacred to Me

What liberal theologians, from Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich to Gordon Kaufman and Karen Armstrong, have to say about God provides a useful entrée to what I find sacred. Put simply, what I find sacred may be epistemic rather than ontological, about how we know rather than what is actually out there: The sacred is what is at the horizon of human subjectivity, in our reaching out of the darkness in ourselves toward some greater light, and we know not what. In doing so we transce

Passion and Ease

Passion and Ease

To understand what matters to us and what does not, we need to understand some pretty basic things about our emotional life. Most of our emotional life is not consciously decided. Though it may obviously result from how we act and what we intend, mostly emotions are experienced as outside our direct control. This is fine, and it is almost always reasonable to say that what makes you responsible is not how you feel, but what you do about it. That I feel like punching someone i

Disembodied Communication

Disembodied Communication

We live in a social world in which we are mimetically engulfed, constantly sharing and imitating the behavior and facial expressions of those around us. From the nonverbal synchronies we share with our caregivers, through the behavioral contagion of adolescence, to the empathy of shared emotion as adults, we feel comfortable and connected, or rejected and alien. The emotional pain of social rejection depends upon the same neurophysiology as physical pain, and our contemporar

Sophomoric Emotion

Sophomoric Emotion

I have long found it odd that most college curricula in psychology do not include a course on emotion, as the research on emotion has exploded over the last generation. I know there are historical reasons for this. In the behaviorist era, there was often a course on “learning and motivation,” but after the cognitive revolution of the 1960s, issues of emotion and motivation were often left to introductory coverage of basic motivations (the 4 “F”s of feeding, fleeing, fighting,

Supernatural Bones

Supernatural Bones

Glendower: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur: “Why, so can I, or so can anyone; But will they come when you do call them?” Henry IV, pt I, III, i. William Shakespeare “Let’s be clear. I don’t have a supernatural bone in my body.” I once said that to try to make clear that I am a naturalist. Nevertheless, despite the association of all sorts of thoughts about “haunting” with human bones, it strikes me as oxymoronic. Isn’t the whole point that the “supernatural