like everyone else, I have the absurd tendency to regard “my body” (including “my head” and “my brain”) as something my conscious will inhabits—when in fact everything I think of as “me” is dependent on the functioning of my brain. Even the slightest neural changes, via intoxication, disease, or injury, could render “me” unrecognizable. Yet I can’t seem to shake the false intuition that I could even choose to leave my body (if I could only figure out how) and everything constituting “me” would somehow remain magically intact. It’s easy to see how human beings across the globe, generation after
...more
