Zen and the Brain Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness

"This singular book, clearly a work of love undertaken over many years, may well become something of a landmark in both behavioral neurology and consciousness studies. For one thing, it is a compendium of almost all the available scientific literature on meditation. For another, it is a first-rate in-depth introduction to functional neuroanatomy, provided in an imaginative and readable way. It is also a personal narrative of a Zen training It is a long, dense book, a full 697 pages, with a 112 page bibliography, but it seems to stand off to the side from all the clamoring about the Hard Problem and the explanatory gap. It offers many testable ideas about the nature of spiritual experience as a brain state, and it offers a clear theory of how some altered states of consciousness come into being."Austin, James H. is the author of 'Zen and the Brain Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness', published 1999 under ISBN 9780262511094 and ISBN 0262511096.