I would not have predicted the biggest cut to oil production would come from the producer countries taking each other out 🛢️
Electric Brain by R. Douglas Fields
How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better
In Electric Brain, neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields explores the hidden electrical dimension of the human brain. The book explains how rhythmic patterns of neural activity—known as brainwaves—shape 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. Berger’s 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 bands—delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma—are 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 oscillations—particularly excessive beta activity—play a role in disorders such as Parkinson’s 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 system—a constantly shifting landscape of synchronized rhythms and interacting signals. By revealing the brain’s electrical language, Fields argues, neuroscience may gain deeper insight into consciousness, neurological disease, and the future integration of human brains with emerging technologies.
Not Digital Sovereignty, but Autonomy and Resilience
Rethinking Strength in a Post-Global Order
Since Donald Trump began speaking openly about Canada as a potential “51st state,” a phrase has begun circulating more widely in Canadian discussions of technology: digital sovereignty. The term often arises when considering the growing dependence on cloud infrastructure and digital platforms owned by large American technology companies such as Microsoft and Google.
At first glance, the concern seems straightforward. If a country’s digital infrastructure is owned or controlled elsewhere, then its independence may be compromised. Many organizations and institutions understandably want reassurance that their information remains under Canadian control.
Technology vendors are quick to offer that reassurance. Microsoft, for example, operates Canadian data centres and promotes data residency as evidence that Canadian information remains safely within Canadian borders. Yet the company also acknowledges an uncomfortable reality. As a U.S. corporation, it remains subject to American law. If the U.S. government demanded access to certain data, the company could be compelled to provide it, regardless of where the servers physically sit.
Encryption can mitigate risk, but even that is not a complete guarantee. Control over key management, platform architecture, and operational access can still introduce dependencies. And residency itself is only part of the picture. Increasingly the deeper dependency lies in compute. Data may sit in Canada, but the systems that analyze it, particularly AI models, are often developed, trained, and controlled elsewhere. The intelligence applied to the data may remain outside the country even when the data does not.
These realities have helped fuel the growing language of data sovereignty. Yet the phrase itself can feel somewhat overblown.
Mark Carney made a related observation at Davos. Canada is not a “first power.” It does not dominate the global technological order in the way the United States or China might aspire to do. That reality does not imply weakness. It simply describes the scale at which Canada operates.
Consider Carney’s announcement of Telesat Lightspeed, often framed as Canada’s $7-billion rival to Starlink. The language of sovereignty suggests a head-to-head contest for technological dominance. But that is not really the point. Lightspeed will not replace Starlink globally, nor does it need to. Its value lies elsewhere. It strengthens Canada’s capabilities, improves resilience, and ensures that critical infrastructure is not wholly dependent on foreign systems.
That is not digital sovereignty. It is something more modest and perhaps more realistic.
I would call it digital autonomy.
Sovereignty implies ultimate authority, usually tied to the nation-state. Autonomy, by contrast, exists at many levels. An individual can maintain autonomy over personal data. Communities can build and operate their own digital infrastructure. Companies can reduce dependence on external platforms. Nations can cultivate strategic capacity in critical technologies. None of these actors possesses total sovereignty, but each can strengthen its ability to act independently.
Seen this way, digital resilience emerges not from absolute control but from distributed autonomy. Political institutions, commercial organizations, geographic infrastructure, local communities, and individuals all contribute to the system’s stability. The goal is not domination but balance: reducing fragile dependencies while accepting that modern networks are inherently interconnected.
There is also a certain humility in this perspective. Canada does not need to control the global digital order in order to function well within it. What matters is the capacity to operate, adapt, and endure within a system shaped by larger powers.
Digital autonomy recognizes the world as it is: interconnected, asymmetrical, and dynamic. Rather than promising sovereignty we cannot fully possess, it focuses on the practical work of building resilience across the many layers of our digital lives.
Training the Brain for a Lifetime
What meditation research suggests about alpha, gamma, and long-term cognitive health
Meditation research often searches for dramatic findings. Exotic states. Rare neurological signatures. Yet the most consistent observations are quieter and perhaps more consequential.
Across many studies, regular meditation is associated with stronger alpha rhythms. The brain settles into a state of relaxed, attentive stability. In long-term practitioners another pattern sometimes appears: distinctive gamma synchrony, the fast oscillations linked with large-scale coordination across brain networks.
These patterns appear often enough that they begin to look less like curiosities and more like markers of training. The nervous system seems to learn how to quiet internal noise while maintaining clarity, and how to coordinate widely separated regions of the brain with unusual precision.
If sustained over years, such changes may reflect deeper biological effects. A brain operating with greater coherence may manage energy more efficiently, support mitochondrial function, encourage neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, and assist the brain’s own waste-clearing systems. These mechanisms are increasingly studied in relation to long-term cognitive health.
The conclusions must remain measured. Meditation is not a cure-all, and research continues to evolve. But one implication is difficult to ignore.
Just as the body benefits from lifelong physical exercise, the brain may benefit from lifelong training of attention. People who neglect cognitive health often experience decline earlier than they expect. Practices that stabilize and integrate the mind may help preserve clarity longer.
Seen this way, meditation is not merely a method for occasional calm. It is a discipline that may support the long-term maintenance of the brain itself — a quiet investment in cognitive health over the course of a lifetime.
Intelligence on Twenty Watts
Comparing the energy of the human brain and artificial intelligence
It is often remarked, sometimes with unease, that artificial intelligence consumes enormous amounts of energy while the human brain runs on little more than the power of a small light bulb. The contrast is striking. But before we marvel too quickly at the efficiency of the brain, we should pause and ask whether we are making a fair comparison.
What exactly is the human equivalent of an AI system answering a question?
The simplest comparison would be a single answer. You ask a question and either a person or an AI replies. But that framing quietly hides a large part of the machine’s cost. An AI answer depends on a vast training process that took place earlier in large data centres. The electricity used to train the model does not appear in the moment of answering. If we compare a human reply with a single AI response, we are ignoring the energy required to build the machine’s knowledge in the first place.
Another possibility is to compare a trained AI model with a trained human expert. A PhD, for example, represents decades of learning. The AI equivalent is its training phase, during which the model absorbs enormous amounts of text and data. Both systems require a long investment before they are able to produce sophisticated answers.
We could widen the frame further. AI models are trained on the accumulated output of millions of people: books, research papers, code, and conversations. In that sense an AI model resembles a compressed form of collective knowledge. The human comparison might not be a single expert at all, but something closer to a research community.
There is an even deeper perspective. Human intelligence itself is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. If we tried to account for the energy required to evolve brains capable of language and reasoning, biological intelligence would hardly look inexpensive.
For practical purposes, however, the clearest comparison is this: a trained AI model and a trained human expert.
Once we make that comparison, the numbers become interesting. Training a frontier AI model today can require several million kilowatt-hours of electricity. The cost is paid up front during training, after which the model can generate answers at relatively low additional cost.
The human brain, by contrast, runs on about twenty watts of power. Over a full day that amounts to roughly half a kilowatt-hour. Within that modest energy budget the brain performs perception, memory, learning, language, and reasoning.
The real puzzle is not that AI systems use a great deal of energy. Modern computers were built for speed and scale, not for metabolic thrift. The deeper puzzle is why the brain is so efficient.
Evolution had a strict energy budget. Brains that wasted energy did not survive. Neurons fire sparsely, meaning most of the brain is quiet most of the time. Memory and computation happen in the same place, reducing the need to move information around. And the brain relies heavily on prediction, focusing effort on what changes rather than recalculating everything continuously.
The result is a form of intelligence that runs steadily on the power of a small light bulb.
Perhaps the real surprise is not that artificial intelligence consumes so much energy, but that human intelligence runs on just twenty watts.
The term, meditation, sticks
I’m creating a new taxonomy for my meditation series and writing after years of careful study and analysis. I have no sentimentality, and am dropping long-favored terms like mindfulness and awakening. The basic term, meditation, however, denies change. I know it has too many meanings and uses, and is prey to misuse by charlatans, but it is still the best term for the modern practice I describe, grounded in traditional Buddhism, bolstered with neuroscience and neurotech, and creatively expressed with sound art. I think the term, meditation, sticks. I remain open to your thoughts.
Join the NDP by Jan 28 to Vote for its New Leader
Friends, like many Canadians, I was delighted to see Mark Carney defeat Pierre Poilievre and the MAGA Conservatives. I was also impressed by his recent speech at Davos, where he called out the collapse of the rules-based order and the need to align with middle powers of goodwill. Carney is a strong fighter for Canada on the international front.
On the domestic front, however, I am concerned. Today’s Liberals are indistinguishable from the old Progressive Conservatives, sidelining climate policy and the health and community issues the NDP once kept firmly on the agenda. There is now a gap in the political centre that the NDP are well positioned to occupy.
Unlike the U.S., Canada’s third parties have historically exercised real leverage at key moments, preventing extremism and helping to keep Parliament and the country balanced. For these reasons, I have joined the NDP and will be voting for Avi Lewis as its new leader. I encourage you to join as well, so you can make your choice for leader. The deadline is January 28.
Meditation as Nervous System Training
How attention, awareness, and repetition gradually reshape the mind
Announcement
The next Meditation Community series will be themed as the Neuroscience Edition. It will add a layer of neuroscientific explanation to traditional Buddhist meditation. The series will launch in autumn 2026.
Meditation is not about emptying the mind or achieving special states. At a basic level, it is a way of gently training the nervous system. Modern neuroscience helps explain why this works.
Attention is trainable
Attention is supported by networks in the front of the brain that help us focus, choose, and inhibit impulses. Each time you notice your attention has wandered and bring it back, you are exercising these networks. This is not a mistake. The moment you notice distraction is the moment of training.
The mind wanders by default
When we are not deliberately focused, the brain naturally activates what is sometimes called the default mode network. This network supports self-talk, memory, and imagining the future. Meditation does not stop thinking. It changes our relationship to thought, so thoughts are seen more clearly and held more lightly.
Emotion regulation comes from awareness
Strong emotions are generated in older parts of the brain. Meditation does not suppress emotion. By staying present with sensation and feeling, without immediately reacting, the nervous system gradually learns that emotions can be experienced safely. Calm often appears as a side effect rather than a goal.
The body is the gateway
Breath, posture, and bodily awareness influence the nervous system directly. Slow breathing and grounded posture support stability and recovery. Returning attention to physical sensation is one of the most reliable ways to steady the mind.
Repetition matters
From a brain perspective, meditation is training. Short, regular practice produces more lasting change than occasional intense experiences. Consistency matters more than depth.
In simple terms
Meditation trains us to notice without immediately reacting, steady attention, regulate emotion through awareness, and inhabit the body more fully. It is the slow education of a living nervous system.
Canada Went Along With the Rules-Based Order Because It Served Our Prosperity
What Václav Havel Would Ask Mark Carney About Power and Truth
Mark Carney’s speech at Davos this past week, heard around the world, was unusually clear-minded about the moment we are in. Speaking to an audience fluent in the language of global cooperation, Carney stripped away the comforting myths that have long sustained the rules-based international order and named its quiet collapse. The unresolved question his speech leaves hanging is whether Canada and the middle powers will repeat this failed pattern of power among themselves and at home, or take the harder lesson and change how power is shared.
The rules-based international order was the postwar system meant to replace raw power with shared rules and institutions, underwritten by U.S. leadership. It relied on bodies such as the UN, global trade rules, and international financial institutions to create predictability, limit the use of force, and give smaller states some protection from great-power coercion. In theory, disputes were settled by process rather than pressure, and economic openness was balanced by collective security.
Carney argues that for decades countries like Canada went along with this order even though we knew it was only partly true. We knew the strongest states exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and that international law was applied unevenly depending on who was accused and who was harmed.
We accepted this unevenness because we prospered under the arrangement. But the bargain no longer holds. We are now in the midst of a rupture. Carney did not name the United States, but his meaning was clear. The U.S. is using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit.
Carney said that we tolerated the system’s inconsistencies because it served our own prosperity. Canada went along with the unevenness, discrepancies, and injustices because it worked for us. It worked for us. Don’t miss that.
This makes Carney’s invocation of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless especially interesting. Havel argued that the power of a system often rests on shared rituals and unspoken compliance, and that late communism endured partly because people acted as if they believed in it. The rules-based order functioned in much the same way. But Havel would have insisted that naming the lie is only the first step. The real test is whether those who benefit from a system are willing to stop performing belief in it themselves. For Havel, truth was not a rhetorical insight but a lived risk. He might have asked whether Carney’s use of the story leads to genuine relinquishing of power.
The hard question is what this rupture means in practice, both among middle powers and at home. Have they learned the lesson of failed rule-based orders, or will they reproduce the same dynamics in a new alignment?
Carney declared that Canada was among the first to hear the wake-up call. Will Canada emerge as a leader of the middle powers, offering yet another convenient fiction of cooperation for as long as it suits us? Or will we fundamentally change how we cooperate with other nations?
And what lesson does Carney bring home to Canada? Renewal should not come through further concentration of federal and prime-ministerial power. It means finally moving forward on electoral reform toward proportional representation. It means sharing power more widely by strengthening local governments and communities. If this sounds complicated in an increasingly complex world, it is. Difficulty is not an argument against doing it.
Peer-Led Meditation
On facilitation, letting go, and sitting together
When I started a meditation group at my workplace in 2019, I suggested to my two colleagues that it be “peer-led.” What I meant at the time was that I did not especially know much about guiding meditations, and their quick embrace of the idea suggested they did not either.
It turns out it is not hard to guide a meditation. Sit, relax, breathe, meditate in silence for a while, thanks for coming. Of course, there are many kinds of meditation. As our meditation group caught on, hundreds of people have attended, many of whom shared their own meditation knowledge, from music and visualization to yoga nidra and vipassana. I believe it was the peer-led quality of our organization that made so many people feel welcome, not only to join us but to share what they knew.
Meditation has not always been associated with this kind of peer-led or decentralized organizational structure. For much of its history, it has been transmitted through formal lineages, hierarchical institutions, and clearly defined teacher–student relationships. Authority was conferred by training, ordination, or proximity to a tradition, and the role of the teacher was to preserve and pass on a specific form with fidelity. Access to meditation often depended on geography, culture, language, and permission. In that context, meditation was not something one casually offered to others, but something one received carefully from someone authorized to give it.
In the meditation community in which I participated at work for the past seven years, and continue to participate, being peer-led was always treated as an essential quality. I understand now that this was not incidental. It may, in fact, have been the defining quality of the community itself.
That quality expressed itself in many ways. While a small number of people led most meditations, myself included, this is true of most volunteer organizations, and for familiar reasons. Still, there was always room for movement, and movement did happen. At different times, I and other active leaders were away from work for various reasons, and others stepped in, changing how things ran, along with the style and tone of the group.
Being peer-led also meant that sometimes nothing happened at all. No one signed up to guide a meditation. People showed up and improvised, or simply drifted away. At times it seemed as though everyone had lost interest and the group might fold. More often, it turned out to be just ebb and flow. With the turn of a season, the group would surge back into life again.
I intend this peer-led quality to guide more explicitly the design of this public meditation community, something like the prime directive of Star Trek. While there is a program design, I invite anyone who is interested to guide a meditation. Whether it fits a designated topic or not, we will make it work. Future phases of the program will offer opportunities for participants to join design sessions, as we explore research and artistic applications of meditation. Finally, while this community operates on my digital platform, I think of it as an open-source model, available to be branched should someone wish to start their own meditation community. I would assist and support this.
One last thing. I mentioned in the last sitting that, despite my best efforts, there may be an occasion when my power is out, my phone is down, and I cannot join a scheduled meditation. In that case, I invite anyone who is able to take the lead and guide a meditation. Perhaps only to say: sit, relax, breathe, meditate in silence for a while, thanks for coming. Such is the way of a peer-led meditation group.