Recent quotes:

The spotlight of attention is more like a strobe light -- ScienceDaily

"Our subjective experience of the visual world is an illusion," said Sabine Kastner, a professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). "Perception is discontinuous, going rhythmically through short time windows when we can perceive more or less." The researchers use different metaphors to describe this throb of attention, including a spotlight that waxes and wanes in its intensity. Four times per second -- once every 250 milliseconds -- the spotlight dims and the house lights come up. Instead of focusing on the action "onstage," your brain takes in everything else around you, say the scientists. Their work appears as a set of back-to-back papers in in the Aug. 22 issue of Neuron; one paper focuses on human research subjects, the other on macaque monkeys. "The question is: How can something that varies in time support our seemingly continuous perception of the world?" said Berkeley's Randolph Helfrich, first author on the human-focused paper. "There are only two options: Is the data wrong, or is our understanding of our perception biased? Our research shows that it's the latter. Our brains fuse our perceptions into a coherent movie -- we don't experience the gaps."
#synchronize #brain #rhythm #zen - sciencedaily.com

What Ultrarunners Think About When They Run | Outside Online

Christensen says runners who appreciated the social nature of the endeavor and those who were able to sit with—and not fight—their pain had the best days. “Thoughts of gratitude—realizing you’re a part of this broader ultrarunning community, that everyone is in it together—proved to be really common and important,” she says. “Also, this notion of radical acceptance: when a runner accepts their pain, it’s very freeing. You can be in pain without suffering. Pain is an objective sensation. The runners who are able to say ‘this dark spot won’t last forever’ do really well.”
#paleotherapy #running #community #ultra #gratitude #zen - outsideonline.com

Losing... everything

It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too—our own ultimate unbeing—is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.
#loss #zen - newyorker.com

Making life harder to live in the moment

Adam Gopnik in his “Paris Journal” who wrote, “The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.” And yet perhaps the only way to achieve this freedom, and therefore this ability to understand what it means to be alive, is to go somewhere entirely new and foreign, a place where even the most basic actions – a trip to the grocery store or the pharmacy, ordering at a restaurant, or even negotiating the language – become deeply fascinating, trying, difficult.
#meditation #paris #zen #expats - delistraty.com