On Having No Head

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Memory, and often the intermediate processes of computation, requires that “stimuli produce a permanent record written on the irritable substance” ( Semon and Simon, 1921). What underlying mechanisms have been implicated in non-neural memory and related processes?

If you can get out of the lab and just notice, and you try to notice what direct experience is available in the spot where your body-map tells you your head should be... you won't find a head. Instead you'll find an oval-shaped thing that contains, in fact, the entire world on view. At Level Two, the world itself is right in the center of things, right where your arms terminate. Your face is itching? Great, that's a nice thing to notice. You want it to stop? Boom, lost in thought. You've taken your mind off of the itch, and you're now anticipating the next itch you'll feel. you're in your head again, ignoring external input, looping away. In the video Harding’s claim (and Harris agrees) is that we make the world, we are the source of consciousness. Or maybe it's the world that makes us? Or maybe it’s that old song: “We Are the World”? But it is best to experience the world fully and directly. It is possible through careful meditation, he says, to experience “headlessness,” where the subject/object distinction collapses and you are “fully present” in the world, closer to some kind of “pure” consciousness, where one is one-with-the-universe, a boundless openness to the whole world. So what’s not to like?translate the actually-quite-ambiguous sense data into the much more abstract thought — "my forehead is itching". was 21 he left. He could not accept their view of the world. What guarantee was there that they were right? What about all the other spiritual Just a guess at level three, since I haven't been able to get here myself. The third level is probably — for the visual field — the machinery of object detection itself, the translation of the two dimensional pixel map in front of your face into what feels like a virtual reality landscape populated by objects. (Isn't the sense of distance so odd? You feel how far away something is. How? Spatial sense is an emotion.) I look down. I see hands and arms coming up toward... well, out toward the edges of some big field of vision, the movie screen on which everything is playing. Is there a head there? (Whoops, I'm not present anymore!)

It’s not for nothing that the enlightened are called seers and not hearers or smellers or touchers – and certainly not thinkers.” much larger original manuscript in 1998. Visit the bookshop.) In this book Harding explores, tests and makes senseIt felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever or too scared to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face – my utter facelessness.” How much the Void currently includes, and excludes, is unimportant: for I see that it remains infinitely empty and infinitely big regardless of the scope or importance of the finite objects it’s taking care of. It makes no real difference whether it’s dissolving my head (as when I look down), or my human body (as when I look out), or my Earth-body (as when, out-of-doors, I look up), or my Universe body (as when I close my eyes). Everything there, no matter how tiny or vast, is equally soluble here, equally capable of coming and showing me that I am no-thing here.” This seeing goes deep. The clearest and most distant of views out is found to be shallow – a view down a cul-de-sac – compared with the view in, to the headlessness which plainly goes on and on forever.” Instead of his head, Harding realizes, in his first satori experience, he has the world. So, as I understand it, we make the world with our consciousness. Are you behind your face? No! What is a self? What is consciousness? Where are these things?! Is there a soul, and if so, where does it exist? What I learned in grad school is that there was no essential self, but we were made up of multiple selves. Each of these selves, this consciousness, is made up with the “only tool available to us,” Harris says: Our mind.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. The book is a long look at an insight that blew Harding's mind — from the first-person person, as a matter of subjective experience, there was no evidence around that he had a head. Put another way — if you try not to read into what you're seeing, and just describe exactly what's in front of you, not only is there no head on display... but the whole picture of who you are, of the person doing the looking, looks quite strange indeed. In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest to

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Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face - my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden. The method is quite simple and the same throughout. It consists of ceasing to overlook the looker – or rather, the absence of the looker.” A long history of work implicated bioelectric events in patterning ( Jaffe, 1981; Nuccitelli, 2003; McCaig et al., 2005). Recent advances in molecular physiology have revealed that gap junctions, ion channels, and neurotransmitter pathway molecules – workhorses of cognitive processes in the CNS – are broadly expressed throughout the body, beginning prior to fertilization. Analogously to the brain, non-neural tissues continuously regulate resting potential (V mem) and local field potentials (extracellular electric fields), as well as regulate the movement of neurotransmitters among cells ( Pullar, 2011; Bates, 2015).