February 9, 2012

snippets, 2-9-12

From The Atlantic: How your cat is making you crazy.

There is a theory of mind floating around out there (not necessarily in the linked article, but bear with me) that our brains are more like radio receivers than, uh, thought factories, and that they spend most of their time tuning signals and sifting and interpreting a huge variety of inputs not only from our six or seven senses, but from all the different communities of bacteria that make us who we are. My feeling is that toxo, the bacterial subject of the article, is just one among many bacteria that influence "our" behavior. I mean, c'mon, those little dudes ruled the planet for 3.5 billion years before "we" came along. (Experienced meditators know that the deep center is a really quiet place; many of the voices we think of as ourselves, if you let them come and go, start seeming like they're coming from somewhere else. That's the little dudes talking.)

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