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News Philosophy Psychology

Two Guided Meditations from Sam Harris

Click through to grab the MP3s or listen in the page. Tre, Henry and I all tried the 9-minute version, and I was proud of Henry for lasting at least 7 mintues without fidgeting.

The Mirror of Mindfulness : Two Guided Meditations : Sam Harris

I wrote an article on meditation two years ago, and since then many readers have asked for further guidance on how to practice. As I said in my original post, I generally recommend a method called vipassana in which one cultivates a form of attention widely known as “mindfulness.” There is nothing spooky or irrational about mindfulness, and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. Mindfulness is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and nondiscursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Developing this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. I will cover the relevant philosophy and science in my next book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, but in the meantime, I have produced two guided meditations (9 minutes and 26 minutes) for those of you who would like to get started with the practice. Please feel free to share them. – See more at: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/mindfulness-meditation#sthash.KTahDfYn.dpuf

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News

Handwriting recognition added to Gmail

You can turn on handwriting recognition in Gmail now. Go to settings, general tab. Enable input tools. Go back and start writing an email. There’s a new button on the upper right, between the pagination and settings gear. Click it and a window appears for you to draw in.

Official Gmail Blog: Handwriting input comes to Gmail and Google Docs

Gmail and Docs offer wide language support, however in some cases using the keyboard is less than ideal. Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.

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Entertainment News

Steam Family Sharing

This will make it a lot easier for me to introduce PC games to my two boys. And it will be one more reason to put a Linux box in the family room.

Steam Family Sharing lets users share games with unique saves

Steam Family Sharing enables users to share their entire library of games with up to 10 other Steam members – Steam suggests “close friends and family members.” Users request access to a friend’s library, and if their computer is authorized, they have access to all of the games in that friend’s library, complete with the ability to earn their own Steam achievements and save their own progress to the Steam Cloud.

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News Philosophy Politics

Peikoff on the Snowden Issue

Great, fiery analysis of the NSA spying from Peikoff. For someone who’s already pessimistic about the decline of civilization it’s remarkable that given this information he’d downgrade his outlook.

Episode 283 « Itunes Podcast « Peikoff

Date: August 23rd, 2013
Duration: 27:41
Categories
News Philosophy Psychology Science

The Bicameral Mind Theory

I recently read Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and really enjoyed it. You need nothing more to recommend it than the following quote from Richard Dawkins.

“It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.”

Wikipedia offers a fine description of bicameralism, Jaynes’ theory of a human consciousness split into two parts. He argues in the book that ancient man may have experienced the world in what we would consider an unconscious state. Instead of an integrated consciousness we take for granted, he suggests until perhaps 2000 BCE, people’s left and right hemispheres communicated indirectly through auditory hallucinations similar to those of schizophrenics.

It’s fascinating how this theory is nearly forty years old, not widely accepted but still hanging in there.

Julian Jaynes Society | Exploring Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind Theory Since 1997

Why are gods and idols ubiquitous throughout the ancient world? What is the relationship of consciousness and language? How is it that oracles came to influence entire civilizations such as Greece? If consciousness arose far back in human evolution, how can it so easily be altered in hypnosis and “possession”? Is schizophrenia a vestige of an earlier mentality? These are just some of the difficult questions addressed by Julian Jaynes’s influential and controversial theory of the origin of subjective consciousness or the “modern mind.”