Abstract Many spiritual traditions employ certain mental techniques (meditation) which consist in inhibiting mental activity whilst nonetheless remaining fully conscious, which is supposed to lead to a realisation of one

By studying how people think about three different types of abstract entities

Your ability to control thought and behavior relative to your peers - a set of capacities known as "executive functions" - is almost entirely genetic in origin, according to a newly in-press paper from Friedman et al.

So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant. Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.

The intersection of science and contemplative practice presents the most radical and beneficial force for transformation.

A physicist claims to have come up with the first successful use of quantum theory to explain features of consciousness in research hailed as a landmark in efforts to bring mathematics to bear on the mysteries of the human mind.

The brain stem may orchestrate the basics of awareness - Animal studies and observations of children born missing most of the brain's outer layer, or cortex, suggest that the brain stem generates a fundamental form of conscious thought.

In philosophy, the issue of personal identity concerns a number of loosely related issues, in particular persistence, change, time, and sameness. Personal identity is the distinct personality of an individual and is concerned with the persisting entity particular to a given individual. The personal identity structure appears to preserve itself from the previous version in time when it is modified. It is the individual characteristics arising from personality by which a person is recognized or known. John Locke considered personal identity (or the self) to be founded on consciousness, and not on the substance of either the soul or the body.