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.

The Times: Calm down dear by Angela Pertusini

"Claims by the neuroscientist Shanida Nataraja regarding the benefits of meditation have been backed up by rigourous scientific research and are explained in her acclaimed book The Blissful Brain: Neuroscience and Proof of the Power of Meditation". To read more, please click here.

Just this Day event: A Day of Silence and Stillness at St Martin's in the Field on 23rd of November 2011

Shanida Nataraja will be participating in this exciting event that aims to explore the power of silience and stillness in our busy world. For more information, please click here or visit the Just This Day website.

Mindfulness in the Workplace: Brain based approaches to improving employee resilience and productivity at Robinson College, Cambridge on 10 February 2012

Shanida Nataraja will be speaking at this day event that brings together leading experts in mindfulness to discuss how it could help organisations improve productivity & resiliance. Speakers include Professor Mark Williams, Michael Chaskalson, Ruby Wax, Margaret Chapman, and more (for more information, please see 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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