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On Meditation

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Research suggests that meditation can change brain structure, enhance mental abilities and work alongside traditional medicine to speed up healing. 

Certainly, when I learned Transcendental Meditation back in 1989 it was a life-changing experience, though I gradually moved away from the more cultish aspects of TM. Perhaps anyway, as the Dalai Lama put it, "sleep is the best meditation".

On Scientific Progress

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Imagining scientific concepts that could improve everyone's cognitive abilities. This is the challenge that some of the world's leading scientific thinkers tackled in answer to the 2011 Edge question.

The responses were various and imaginative. One good example came from author Michael Shermer, who wished we would understand that almost everything important in nature and society...

"...happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom-up, self-organised emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom-up, self-organised emergent property of organic molecules."

Adding this to their cognitive toolkit might e.g. let religious conservatives recognise the reality of evolution, says Shermer, and let political liberals see that "too much top-down design can interfere with market efficiency".

On Interplay


Inspired by the interplay between therapy, poetry, neuroscience and novels in Start the Week.


Forensic psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead talked about the lost natures of her Broadmoor patients, in whom she can still sometimes recognise the little boys they once were.

William Boyd explored how early talent can flourish suddenly and then fade slowly.

Craig Raine compared the "language on point" composition of a poem to the art of dress-making.

On the Self

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The Ego Trick looked at the 'bundle theory' of the self, and argued that we don't have a permanent essential self, but instead are a bundle of thoughts, sensations and impulses...doesn't feel like that though.


On Novelty

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Your head's like mine, like all our heads- big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was, big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over - Tom O'Bedlam (The Invisibles)

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