The Mystery

Every night you go insane. You enter a world where the laws of physics do not apply. Where the dead are alive. Where you can fly but cannot run. Where buildings rearrange themselves as you walk through them. Where time collapses and expands without warning. and where the most bizarre, the most terrifying, and the most profoundly beautiful experiences unfold with a vividness and an emotional intensity that often exceeds anything you experience while awake. You inhabit this world for approximately 2 hours every night. You have spent approximately 6 years of your life in it. And when you wake, the world dissolves, leaving behind fragments, traces, and the lingering sense that something important happened that you cannot quite remember. Dreams are the most universal, the most frequent, and the most poorly understood altered state of consciousness that human beings experience. Every person dreams, every mammal dreams, every bird dreams. And the dreams are not random noise, not the meaningle...

Arguably, for science to progress in a way that allows scientists to tackle the complex problems that are the reality these days, researchers need to transcend ordinary understanding. Thus, scientific understanding comes through a melding of different explanations from many disciplines. Individuals who transcend the ordinary understand many different things, not just one, implying something has to be added into the equation for scientific discovery to move forward. The mind as a fundamental entity without beginning or end with infinite potential is not entirely conceivable. Nevertheless, through infinite potential existing, the mind causes change to occur as the potential energies: dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. These are potential energies because of their relationship to the mind. Arguably, the mind can be explained in part by an abstract idea, the law of conservation of energy: the mind cannot be created or destroyed, but potential energies convert or transform from on...

It’s like if we had some two dimensional creatures that were living on this piece of paper right here on the table, and one of those creatures figured out that he can smoke some DMT and that somehow enabled us to peel this two dimensional creature to where it could see in three dimensions and see everything in this room. That’s DMT. You’re getting peeled out of reality into some other realm. And the weird thing is, every scientist that I know that’s studying DMT, not one of them thinks it’s a hallucination. I think the more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell’s going on. But everyone, literally everyone who uses DMT pretty much goes to the same exact places and they all meet the same entities, the same seven or eight different types of entities. And it’s been the same for 4,500 years of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It’s an endogenous chemical. It’s so much more real than this reality. It’s so ineffable,...

It’s common knowledge that our brains—and, specifically, our brain cells—store memories. But a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also perform a memory function, opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to enhance learning.  “Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study , which appears in the journal Nature Communications.  The research sought to better understand if non-brain cells help with memory by borrowing from a long-established neurological property—the massed-spaced effect—which shows that we tend to retain information better when studied in spaced intervals rather than in a single, intensive session—better known as cramming for a test. The scientists replicated learning over time by studyin...

Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin reveals how consciousness evolved out of the natural world, from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds. Science says that you are nothing but a chemical reaction—a collection of atoms and molecules, like rocks, paperclips, and everything else in the physical universe. But if that’s so, where is the place in this world for your consciousness? In a word, why does it feel so special to be you? Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable—the sound of a single hand clapping— 'One Hand Clapping' asks the seemingly unanswerable question of how the human mind came to exist within the material world. In search of an answer, neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey through time from the roots of our existence to the advent of Homo sapiens, reimagining the story of our evolution. The result is an exhilarating book that embeds our consciousness within a single, unified story of life on Earth. Il...

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's 'Analytic Idealism' is 'a consciousness-only ontology' that has refocused attention, within the philosophical community and more broadly, on metaphysical idealism, that is, an idealism that is grounded in philosophical argument as opposed to promoted by religious tradition or spiritual belief. How to explain, under idealism, the correlation between inner experience and brain states? According to Kastrup, the brain and its patterns of neuronal activity are not the cause of inner experience, but the image, the extrinsic appearance of inner experience. In other words, brain activity is what inner experience looks like when observed from the outside. As such, he says, the correlations ordinarily observed between patterns of brain activity and inner experience are due to the trivial fact that the appearance of a phenomenon correlates with the phenomenon. And when this correlation is broken, as observed in the psychedelic state, the reason i...