Blissful Brain

The Blissful Brain is published by Gaia Thinking. For more information on how to order your copy, please click here.

Guardian G2: Mind over matter by Andy Darling

"Neuroscientist Shanida Nataraja has proven meditation does more than clear your head, it can put both halves of your brain to work, improving your concentration, memory, and decision-making...". To read more, please click here.

Upcoming talk: Yoga Ananda, Reigate, Surrey on Friday the 4th of June

Shanida Nataraja will be speaking at a seminar on The Blissful Brain on Friday, 04th June 2010 at 19:30 at Yoga Ananda Ltd. 46 Albert Road North, Reigate, Surrey, RH2 9EL. For more information, please click here.

Reductionism

Many centuries of scientific thought have been dominated by the belief that it is possible, and indeed crucial, that we analyse our physical world into independently and separately existent components. In the 16th Century, Isaac Newton pictured the Universe as a clockwork mechanism, in which these separately existent components interacted in a rigid and predictable matter, behaving in line with a set of universal laws. Like the Church before it, the scientific community sought refuge in the belief that all things were determined by a defined set of laws or rules. In the same way as different world religions proposed often overlapping moral codes of conduct, the scientific community presented physical laws that apparently defined and predicted behaviour. Since the Universe was viewed as a clockwork mechanism, it was assumed that much would be learnt from the systematic dissection of that mechanism, in the same way as taking a clock apart can reveal a certain amount about how and why it works. The mechanistic worldview therefore gave rise to a reductionist approach to scientific discovery, in which physical objects were dissected into their individual components in the search for the essential building blocks of matter.

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