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In one sense it’s not hard to quiet your default mode network: just do something that requires concentration. Do a crossword puzzle or try to juggle three tennis balls. Until you get to a point where juggling is second nature, you probably won’t be fantasizing about the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours. What’s hard is to abandon the default mode network when you’re not doing much of anything—like, say, when you’re sitting in a meditation hall with your eyes closed. That’s why you try to focus on the breath: the mind needs some object of focus to wean it from its habitual meandering.
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
IN BOTH PHYSICS and information theory, entropy is often associated with expansion—as in the expansion of a gas when it is heated or freed from the constraints of a container. As the gas’s molecules diffuse in space, it becomes harder to predict the location of any given one; the uncertainty of the system thus increases. In a throwaway line at the end of his entropy paper, Carhart-Harris reminds us that in the 1960s the psychedelic experience was usually described as “consciousness-expansion”; knowingly or not, Timothy Leary and his colleagues had hit on exactly the right metaphor for the entropic brain. This expansion metaphor also chimes with Huxley’s reducing valve, implying as it does that consciousness exists in a state of opening or contraction.
How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan
What really is and what we perceive can be very different. This is where physical laws diverges from psychological ones. And it is this very divergence which makes Alchemy possible.
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