Dreaming Reality: How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness

This tedious inquiry from Miskovic and Lynn (50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology), former psychology professors at Binghamton University, explores what spiritualism and religious practices might teach scientists about the nature of consciousness and reality. The authors argue that “our head is itself a kind of ‘organic’ virtual-reality apparatus” that doesn’t perceive the world so much as it contains a set of perceptions that the external world selectively elicits, effectively “dream[ing] our lived reality into existence.” Unfortunately, their evidence is less than convincing. For instance, they suggest that similarities in the “primordial” geometric patterns hallucinated by LSD users, subjects of sensory deprivation experiments, and Buddhist practitioners of Tögal yoga constitute “irreducible building blocks of meaning” that shed light on a deeper reality. However, the authors don’t specify what that meaning is or address whether the shared hallucinations might instead stem from human perceptual anatomy. Additionally, the jargon is nearly impenetrable (“Neuronal oscillations of this frequency are putatively involved in the perceptual binding of experience into the unity of the conscious self-in-world that we experience subjectively”), and some of the authors’ claims are so mystical they veer on unfalsifiable (“An experience of the numinous seems much more likely to occur in the subtle and more interior layers of consciousness”). This is tough going. (Feb.)