Rabbit Hole

Fifty million years ago we shared a common ancestor, a shared seed of mammalian sentience and emotionality. Then we split: one branch stayed on land, and one returned to the water. These two docs are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins?

Two CBC Ideas documentaries on sleep and dreaming. We spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deeply mysterious. The more you examine them, the stranger and more variegated they get.

Dreamy radio. Thirty minutes of craven lusty anguished interiority and writer Rodger Kamenetz’ “authentic self.”

In 2007 I spent 3 months traveling around California talking to various thinkers about the mind. Neurobiologists, developmental psychologists, philosophers, mystics and … Huston Smith, peerless perennialist.

Epigenetics has profound implications for what it means to be human. Not only are genes are not fate, it also seems as though their expression in life is shaped by the experience of our ancestors, who continue on inside us, their lived decisions echoing through the genome. Features interviews with McGill University’s Moshe Szyf, and Tel Aviv University’s Eva Jablonka.

Neurofeedback shows us we can learn to self-regulate our own mental processes using nothing but a few EEG leads and a computer program. It’s the late 20th century version of something meditators have been practicing for centuries…

For fun here is one the many satiric pieces I wrote and voiced for The Current. I play a neurotic Canada being psychoanalyzed about my unfulfilling relationship with the US.