better living through brain damage

isn't it just like a dream
sirens and people and everything
the driver tried to swerve
but he just didn't see ya
now you're buried 'neath the wheel
just like a tortilla

beck - sucker without a brain

“JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.” Thus begins an article in today's New York Times titled A Superhighway to Bliss. Significantly, it's in the Fashion section. And appropriately so. She has spoken at TED. She was listed among TIME magazine's 2008 roster of The World's Most Influential People. She's been on Oprah, where it says that "her consciousness shifted away from reality... and into a place of inner peace and Nirvana." The intended inferences having been drawn, she's also been featured on What is Enlightenment?, the website of self-proclaimed enlightened master, Andrew Cohen. Here's a clip from that last one... Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke one day...and paid attention to what was happening every step of the way, including sensations and insights that could only be described as mystical. Her powerfully moving story raises important questions about the relationship between the mind, the brain, and the nature of spiritual experience. Thus, in Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, we have yet another book on neurotheology (or spiritual neuroscience), joining the likes of... The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul Our Spiritual Brain: Integrating Brain Research and Faith Development Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience, and the Transcendent ...and so on, ad nauseam. No less august a journal than Scientific American chimes in with an article titled Searching for God in the Brain. Though the image depicting this is now evidently missing in action, the first paragraph explains that... Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity. Oh wait... I think I found that missing graphic. I wrote this merely to go on record that I find Jill Bolte Taylor incredibly tedious and annoying... ("Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Singin' Scientist, performs The Brain Bank Jingle!") ...even if she did go to Harvard. "place the prepared brains in a medium-size saucepan..."

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