The following article is quoted in full: By Anil Ananthaswamy “Thanks to unconscious processing, most of us instinctively know where our limbs are and what they are doing. This ability, called proprioception, results from a constant conversation between the body and brain. This adds up to an unerring sense of a unified, physical ‘me’.” “This […]

One reason NDT is hard to propagate is that it requires seeing the evidence through an unfamiliar lens, what I call an immediate-moment manner of analysis. Some mistakenly think the shift required is metaphysical, others think it’s mechanical. Some say my interpretations are too simplistic, and then at another juncture they say it’s too complicated. (I […]

I have been expecting that “How Dogs Work” would spur a great debate throughout Dogdom. Yet the only discussion I’ve found is a review posted by Dr. Bekoff on his Psychology Today blog. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201511/how-and-why-dogs-play-revisited-who-s-confused Beckoff challenges Coppinger and Feinstein’s thesis that play, specifically the play bow, represents a state of conflict, i.e. an emergent behavior […]

The why of dog play has been the subject of some recent research. Yet the fundamental question is not being asked: How does a “play bow” indicate an invitation to play? Yes dogs often play thereafter, but not always. In fact, fearful and aggressive dogs misconstrue the enthusiasm invested in a play bow as a […]

PBS this week featured two excellent shows on animals. One was a Nature episode about the Turkey man, Joe Hutto, who grafted himself into a flock of wild turkeys and learned their ways. In this new documentary he makes contact with mule deer simply by being among them for two years. http://www.wgbh.org/programs/Nature-26/episodes/Touching-the-Wild-51073 {It seems to […]

http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2013/09/24/study-explains-why-women-want-to-eat-babies/ “The researchers concluded: ‘These results show that the odor of newborns undoubtedly plays a role in the development of motivational and emotional responses between mother and child by eliciting maternal care functions such as breastfeeding and protection.” Researcher Johannes Frasnelli said: ‘What we know now and what is new is there is a neural […]

Consciousness is energy, its interface with nature is emotion, and like energy consciousness as emotion moves as a wave. These waves are physically embodied as emotional affects (butterflies in the stomach, chill up the spine, queasy feeling, wobbly in the knees, shortness of breath, sense of weightlessness, flow, resonance, etc., etc.); affects that evolved in […]

A dog gains awareness of its “self” from an awareness of its body. It gains an awareness of its body by being acted on by external forces, such as gravity. This awareness is framed by a bilaterally symmetrical anatomy configured around a physical center-of-gravity. A dog’s sense of its self begins with a subliminal beam of […]

“On this day of July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of consciousness.”   “We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent […]

Olympic athletes do it, lovers do it, and now we know even Hermit Crabs do it. What is it they all do? Emotional projection, i.e. extending a sense-of-self beyond the limits of their body. “Abstract A flexible body image is required by animals if they are to adapt to body changes and move effectively within […]