A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes; depression, anxiety, obsession, and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in...
A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the...
The grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.
There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three q...
The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)
The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.
There are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.
The critical influence of set and setting. Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.
Our everyday waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely differen...
Noetic
Felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most peo...
Farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.
Change our understanding of the links between our brains and our minds.
As the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you've got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with.
A .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells’ nuc...
What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence—a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, medi...
Some scientists have raised the possibility that consciousness may pervade the universe, suggesting we think of it the same way we do electromagnetism or gravity, as one of the fundamental building bl...
Paracelsus’s grand project, which arguably is still going on today,* represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan...
Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary ro...
Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabino...