Zen and the art of Brain Scanning

The BBC has an article about a group of scientists who produced images of what the brain looks like during meditation.

I'm fascinated by this kind of thing, partially due to my fascination with the brain in general, and the advances that are steadily being made in understanding it, and partially because meditation is a particularly interesting topic.

There's a group of people in David Brin's book Earth who, through judicious use of EEGs have learnt to control bits of their brain to induce feelings of intense pleasure.

This kind of thing is being used to control ADD at the oment, and I've read a fair bit about people being able to consciously manipulate the levels of brainwaves through use of EEGs, but unfortunately I've never had the spare cash to get hold of one.

One of these days...

Bridge

Playing Bridge at the moment (I'm dummy, so I'm out for a couple of minutes). I get to play Bridge about 3 times a year, as nobody in Stirling plays. In fact, nobody in Stirling seems to play board games much at all. I remember we used to play lots of them about 10 years ago, but the number of people willing to has definitely reduced.

Anyway, what with playing so infrequently, my abilities have definitely gone down, fortunately nobody's playing very seriously, with overbidding, silly comments and the like taking place all over the shop.

Still, I'm partnered with Dad, who seems to be able to memorise the position of all 52 cars simultaneously, so we're still winning.