The article is from 2012 but I’m honoured by the mention, especially since my name is cohabiting space with Amy and Jimmy Carter.
You are the first to know: an update is coming to Slow Reading this year, with new chapters by myself and two literary colleagues.
Veganism makes a compelling claim: that humans do not need to eat animals. I am largely in agreement. I eat increasingly vegan, and I object, deeply, to the scale and anonymity of violence in factory farming. And yet, I still eat meat. Not often, and not casually. When I do, it is usually local. It comes from a place I can name, from a life that was part of the same landscape I inhabit. I also respect Indigenous practices of hunting, where the act is not hidden but understood as part of a relationship.
A vegan friend challenged me on this inconsistency. The argument was simple: if we do not need to kill animals, why do it at all? My answer felt insufficient at the time, but it has stayed with me. I countered that animals eat animals. Life feeds on life. The question is not easily resolved by declaring ourselves outside of that pattern. Are we so separate, so superior, that the rules no longer apply? Of course, it is not a perfect symmetry. We industrialize death in ways no other species does, and we distance ourselves from it. That distance may be the real ethical rupture.
Still, I live close enough to the edge to feel the older pattern. On my rural property, my dogs keep watch, barking and keeping coyotes and wolves at bay. Bears come to the apple trees. My house is not just a home but a fortification. When I camp, I hang my food to protect myself. I am not outside the food chain.
The boundary dissolves further when I look closer. Bacteria live on and within me, entire ecosystems sustained by my body. At death, the exchange becomes more visible. Worms, insects, and microbes will do their work. We resist this with coffins and chemicals, as if permanence were an option, but it isnât. Nature takes us back, slowly and completely. For my part, I find myself wanting to accept that exchange, not as something abstract, but as something literal: to return what I have taken, and to allow my body, in the end, to feed the same world that sustained me.
This does not resolve the ethical tension of eating animals, and it doesnât make the question go away. But it places it in a wider frame. We are not outside the cycle. We are participants in it, whether we acknowledge it or not.
It is now widely accepted that Western neuroscience has something meaningful to offer the modern practice of meditation. By identifying neural correlates of attention, awareness, and emotional regulation, it has helped clarify mechanisms that practitioners have long described from within. What remains less clear is how this same lens might extend to other cultural practices, such as Indigenous storytelling. If meditation has been understood as a disciplined training of attention, storytelling may reveal a different but equally structured mode of mind, one that binds attention to memory, identity, and relationship. I am not Indigenous, but I offer these reflections with care, with the view that neuroscience can provide meaningful insight into aspects of this practice, even if it cannot fully account for it.
With meditation, the science has largely focused on the regulation of attention and self. Studies often point to changes in the default mode network, the prefrontal cortex, and the insula. These correlate with reduced rumination, steadier focus, and heightened awareness of the body. The practice is often solitary, deliberate, and method-driven. The brain findings map neatly onto that structure.
With Indigenous storytelling, the experience is less about directing attention inward and more about being drawn into a shared field of meaning. Neuroscience suggests several overlapping processes at work. When we listen deeply to a story, the brain enters a state of narrative absorption. Sensory and associative regions activate as if we are partially living the events. The usual analytic voice softens. This begins to resemble meditative immersion, though reached through story rather than breath.
At the same time, storytelling strongly engages memory systems, especially those linked to identity. The hippocampus helps bind narrative to place, lineage, and personal meaning. Repetition deepens this encoding. What is being trained is not just attention, but belonging.
There is also a social dimension that meditation research is only beginning to touch. In group storytelling, listenersâ brains can synchronize with each other and with the speaker. Rhythm, tone, and pacing entrain attention across the group. Emotion is co-regulated. The experience is not confined to one mind. It is distributed.
Imagery and metaphor add another layer. Stories guide attention through images rather than instructions. The brainâs perceptual systems engage as if encountering the world directly. In this sense, storytelling becomes a way of training perception itself, shaping how reality is noticed and interpreted.
So where meditation trains attention to stabilize and observe, storytelling may train attention to participate, remember, and relate. Neuroscience does not reduce one to the other, but it shows that both are structured ways of shaping mind and experience. One clarifies the mechanics of focus and awareness. The other reveals how identity, community, and world are carried and renewed through attentive listening.
Seen this way, the contribution of neuroscience is not to explain storytelling away, but to quietly confirm that something real and trainable is happening there too.
I study the brain
and see a pattern reflected
Entropy gathers matter into planets
slow collisions, quiet accretion
Evolution gathers matter into mind
layer by layer, folded inward
The universe continues
and begins to notice
What is the name of the universe?
Its name is John
Its name is Amina
Wei, Mateo, LĂŠa
Red, Blue, Node-17
yours
đđś Driving an all electric car is like driving a cell phone. The software drives the experience. The windshield is lined with sensors. And Iâm always minding the battery. Range is the new signal strength.
Watching Artemis II brought home the sheer complexity and danger of rocket science. This is no Star Trek. Humanity has a long way to go before it is ready for the stars, even at the level of engineering.
There is something humbling in that realization. A real mission strips away the mythology we have built around space travel. It is not smooth or inevitable. It is loud, fragile, and unforgiving. The capsule returns wrapped in fire, heat shields taking the full violence of re-entry, parachutes blooming at precisely the right moment or not at all. For a critical stretch of descent, there is nothing to see or hear. Only an animation stands in for reality, a quiet admission of how thin our visibility remains at the edge of survival.
By contrast, Star Trek imagines a future where the engineering has receded from view. The ship hums. The systems work. The drama is human. That vision assumes we have already solved thousands of problems we are only beginning to understand.
Even a mission to Mars, far closer than those imagined frontiers, exposes how wide that gap remains. Months in deep space, no quick return, exposure to radiation, closed life-support systems that cannot fail. Every small uncertainty on a lunar mission becomes a compounded risk on a Martian one. What feels like progress today still sits at the edge of feasibility.
Rocket science remains a discipline of margins. Every component matters. Every failure cascades. We stack controlled explosions beneath human lives and call it progress. It works, but only just. When it fails, it reminds us how little tolerance nature has for error.
And, in a more troubling register, we have learned to deliver rockets with far greater reliability when the destination is terrestrial, guided with precision to fixed targets, striking infrastructure and coordinates with a consistency that our space missions still struggle to achieve.
The deeper gap is cultural. A future like this would require sustained global cooperation over decades, shared standards rather than competing systems, trust in institutions that outlast political cycles, and patience for slow, cumulative progress. These are not conditions we reliably achieve, even on Earth. Behind the smiling images of a US-led return to the Moon sits a world still shaped by conflict, including US-led war in Iran, where resources might otherwise advance education, engineering, and communication.
We are not ready yet. Not just in propulsion or materials science, but in how we choose to live and work together as a species.
As publisher of Snail Books, I am thrilled to announce the Official Legal Deposit Receipt from Library and Archives Canada for The Divine Mind: A Theological Fantasy and the Mysterious Game of Dasmark.
Legal deposit is a system that mandates Canadian publishers to submit copies of their publications to Library and Archives Canada (LAC). This program is intended to build a national collection that reflects the country’s cultural and intellectual heritage. It allows LAC to preserve these works for future generations and make them accessible to the public.
The Divine Mind was the first publication of my small Canadian press last year. While my press is not strictly required to submit for legal deposit, I wanted to build my credibility as publisher and make my works accessible.
You can tell from the following link that The Divine Mind is available from the LAC website.
no:1574024552 | Search | Bibliothèque et Archives Canada / Library and Archives Canada
Notice how you can view the epub version of the book online using the LAC epub reader â very nice! You can also download the epub and pdf versions. I gave permission to access the books for free. They will be available long after my Snail Books site goes down. Enjoy.
As todayâs oil crisis unfolds, Douglas Couplandâs Player One (2010) feels less like fiction. He gathers five strangers in an airport bar as an oil shock ripples outward. Flights stall, systems falter, and the world begins to slow. Over a few hours, their lives intersect in moments of confession, doubt, and fragile insight, while a mysterious âPlayer Oneâ figure hovers at the edge of meaning.
If todayâs oil tensions deepen, prices will rise sharply enough to force changes in behaviour. Supply chains falter. Travel narrows. Some goods become unreliable or simply unavailable. The system continues, but with visible gaps and mounting pressure. Politically, governments will be forced into hard choices, divisions will sharpen, and public trust will begin to fracture.
Couplandâs prescience lies in the interior shift. âPlayer Oneâ is never fully explained. It may be God, an observing intelligence, or the mind reaching for coherence under stress. As the external world frays, so does certainty. The deepest impact is psychological: a thinning of confidence, and a search for meaning as familiar structures begin to feel less real.
I would not have predicted the biggest cut to oil production would come from the producer countries taking each other out đ˘ď¸
In Electric Brain, neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields explores the hidden electrical dimension of the human brain. The book explains how rhythmic patterns of neural activityâknown as brainwavesâshape perception, thought, emotion, and consciousness. Rather than being simple by-products of neural firing, these oscillations help organize communication across the brain, synchronizing networks of neurons so that information can move efficiently between regions.
Fields traces the scientific discovery of brainwaves back to the early twentieth century, when German psychiatrist Hans Berger performed the first human electroencephalogram (EEG). Berger demonstrated that the brain produces detectable electrical signals that change with mental activity. Opening the eyes, concentrating on a task, or experiencing emotion all alter the rhythm of these electrical oscillations. Bergerâs work revealed for the first time that cognitive and emotional states could be directly monitored through measurements of brain activity.
The book explains how different frequency bandsâdelta, theta, alpha, beta, and gammaâare associated with different mental states. Delta waves dominate deep sleep, alpha waves appear during relaxed wakefulness, beta waves accompany active thinking, and gamma oscillations are linked with complex cognitive integration. These rhythms coordinate neural circuits much like sections of an orchestra playing together and separating again as needed. Through this synchronization, the brain binds information from different regions into coherent perception and thought.
Fields also examines the growing technological ability to measure and influence brain activity. EEG recordings, quantitative EEG analysis (qEEG), and neurofeedback techniques allow researchers to detect abnormal electrical patterns associated with neurological or psychological conditions. In neurofeedback therapy, patients receive real-time feedback on their brainwave activity, allowing the brain to gradually adjust its own patterns without drugs or surgery.
The electrical nature of the brain has also opened new possibilities in medicine and technology. Techniques such as deep brain stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can modulate neural activity by applying small electrical currents to specific brain regions. Research suggests that abnormal oscillationsâparticularly excessive beta activityâplay a role in disorders such as Parkinsonâs disease, and modifying these rhythms may reduce symptoms. Brain-computer interfaces are also emerging that allow people to control prosthetic devices or computers directly through neural signals.
At the same time, Fields emphasizes that the science of brainwaves remains incomplete. Many observed relationships between oscillations and mental processes are correlations rather than proven causal mechanisms. Scientists continue to debate whether brainwaves actively drive neural computation or simply reflect the underlying activity of neurons.
Ultimately, Electric Brain portrays the mind as a dynamic electrical systemâa constantly shifting landscape of synchronized rhythms and interacting signals. By revealing the brainâs electrical language, Fields argues, neuroscience may gain deeper insight into consciousness, neurological disease, and the future integration of human brains with emerging technologies.