Three years ago, when I was studying for a Masters in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, mindfulness was very much in the air. The Department of Psychiatry had launched a large-scale study on the effects of mindfulness in collaboration with the university's counselling service. Everyone I knew seemed to be involved in some way: either they were attending regular mindfulness classes and dutifully filling out surveys or, like me, they were part of a control group who didn't attend classes, but found themselves caught up in the craze even so. We gathered in strangers' houses to meditate at odd hours, and avidly discussed our meditative experiences. It was a strange time.

Raised as a Buddhist in New Zealand and Sri Lanka, I have a long history with meditation - although, like many 'cultural Catholics', my involvement was often superficial. I was crushingly bored whenever my parents dragged me to the temple as a child. At university, however, I turned to psychotherapy to cope with the stress of the academic environment. Unsurprisingly, I found myself drawn to schools or approaches marked by the influence of Buddhist philosophy and meditation, one of which was mindfulness. Over the years, before and during the Cambridge trial, therapists have taught me an arsenal of mindfulness techniques. I have been instructed to observe my breath, to scan my body and note the range of its sensations, and to observe the play of thoughts and emotions in my mind. This last exercise often involves visual imagery, where a person is asked to consider thoughts and feelings in terms of clouds in the sky or leaves drifting in a river. A popular activity (though I've never tried it myself) even involves eating a raisin mindfully, where you carefully observe the sensory experience from start to finish, including changes in texture and the different tastes and smells.

It's a trip how much mental energy people pour into arguments about world affairs while devoting almost none to the way their understanding and perception of those affairs is happening.

People will happily argue day in and day out about what political ideology is most correct or what should be done about a given problem, but it's rare for them to turn around and examine the sources of information that they've used to form those opinions. The fact that most of the information being circulated about what's going on in the world is owned by plutocrats who undeniably have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo rarely enters into mainstream awareness. Which is of course by design.

Even less common than people questioning the nature of the information they've received is for them to examine what happens to that information once it gets into their heads. Nearly everyone lives a life that is dominated by nonstop compulsive mental chatter which determines everything from one's emotional state to how their interest and attention moves, thereby creating cognitive biases and perceptual filters which shape how all future information will be interpreted. For most of us, thought serves not as the useful tool we evolved it to be, but as the writer, director and star of the entire show. As Ecknath Easwaran once said, "we don't think our thoughts, our thoughts think us."

The achievement of happiness, according to Aristotle, is the end goal of every man.

His reasoning is thus: All human activities are done in order to attain something that is good. We don't do something because we think it will be bad for us. In addition, most of these activities are not the main objective, but rather a means to a higher end. Consequently, the activity that is an end in itself, writes the prolific philosopher, is the highest good, and that good is happiness. We aim at happiness for its own sake, not because it will achieve something else. Happiness, therefore, is our greatest mission.

Supposing this to be our aim, Aristotle then proceeds in his Nicomachean Ethics to figure out how best to achieve this goal.

"Just one of those things." Sometimes you just can't find your keys. Sometimes you lose your TV remote. But sometimes, an object might fall from your grasp, never to be seen again. Sometimes objects might disappear from their usual home, only to reappear in the same place days, weeks, or months later - sometimes in a completely unexpected and implausible location. Sometimes a missing object will even be replaced with a poor facsimile. Psychical researcher Mary Rose Barrington calls these phenomena "jotts". Most will dismiss them as "just one of those things", but if you're paying attention, something more seems to be going on here.

Today we discuss Barrington's book, JOTT, in which she provides nearly a hundred case studies, and a wide-ranging theory of what's really going on, with reference to a range of parapsychological phenomena. Her proposal is expansive, original, and has parallels with many of the ideas we've been covering on MindMatters, from Whitehead to Carpenter to Kastrup. Tune in to find out where those missing keys of yours may have gone, and why they went missing in the first place.


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What happens in your mind when you share a dream with another person, or they share a dream with you? How does dream-sharing impact or influence the way you think?

Modern psychologists have developed many models of how dreams are formed and what functions they serve in the brain-mind system. But few have investigated the psychological dynamics of sharing dreams in natural, healthy settings (i.e., not in a clinical or therapeutic context).

This might seem like an insignificant topic. Don't most people get bored listening to other people's dreams? Many people never even remember their dreams, let alone talk about them. Isn't dream-sharing really just an obscure and esoteric practice?

In a survey Michael Schredl and I analyzed for a recent article in the International Journal of Dream Research, we asked more than 5,000 American adults about their attitudes towards dreams.

Our children and grandchildren are shaped by the genes they inherit from us, but new research is revealing that experiences of hardship or violence can leave their mark too.

In 1864, nearing the end of the US Civil War, conditions in the Confederate prisoner of war camps were at their worst. There was such overcrowding in some camps that the prisoners, Union Army soldiers from the north, each had the square footage of a grave. Prisoner death rates soared.

For those who survived, the harrowing experiences marked many of them for life. They returned to society with impaired health, worse job prospects and shorter life expectancy. But the impact of these hardships did not stop with those who experienced it. It also had an effect on the prisoners' children and grandchildren, which appeared to be passed down the male line of families.

While their sons and grandsons had not suffered the hardships of the PoW camps - and if anything were well provided for through their childhoods - they suffered higher rates of mortality than the wider population. It appeared the PoWs had passed on some element of their trauma to their offspring.

Humans may be hard-wired to feel at peace in the countryside and confused in cities - even if they were born and raised in an urban area.

According to preliminary results of a study by scientists at Exeter University, an area of the brain associated with being in a calm, meditative state lit up when people were shown pictures of rural settings. But images of urban environments resulted in a significant delay in reaction, before a part of the brain involved in processing visual complexity swung into action as the viewer tried to work out what they were seeing.

The study, which used an MRI scanner to monitor brain activity, adds to a growing body of evidence that natural environments are good for humans, affecting mental and physical health and even levels of aggression.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard famously observed that if everyone is a Lutheran then no one is a Lutheran. What he meant is that if you're born into a culture in which everybody has a similar worldview, you don't have an opportunity to develop genuine belief because your convictions are not subject to scrutiny.

Put another way, if you don't talk to people who hold different views, you will not know what they believe, and you won't even know what you believe. Having conversations with people who hold beliefs different from yours affords you the opportunity to reflect — and only then can you evaluate whether your beliefs hold true.

Immigration. Abortion. Gun control. The seemingly impossible issue du jour is irrelevant. What is relevant: To justify your confidence you must sincerely engage people who have solid arguments against your position.

Over the last few years, Americans seem to have convinced themselves that not speaking to people who hold different moral and political beliefs makes us better people — even on college campuses where intellectual sparring has historically been part of the curricula. It does not. However, it does make us less likely to revise our beliefs and more likely to convince ourselves that others should believe as we do.

Over time, failure to have conversations across divides cultivates a belief myopia that strengthens our views and deepens our divisions.

Whatever ails you — be it anger, depression, or wanting a career change — there is a book on how mindfulness and meditation can help you attain your goals while bringing about a sense of contentedness. Rooted in a centuries-old Buddhist meditation practice, mindfulness, like the religion it originates from, is based on the Four Noble Truths, the first of which loosely translates to "Life is suffering." What causes suffering? Things like desiring and craving the unattainable and humans' greed and drive for dominance. And yet the poster children of greed and dominance, corporations with ethically dubious track records, from Goldman Sachs to Google and Monsanto, have implemented mindfulness-meditation training programs across all their levels. In 2018, Google's mindfulness guru, Chade-Meng Tan, quietly stepped down from his role at the company after an investigation uncovered past inappropriate behavior.

Stripped of all ethical and religious tenets, mindfulness meditation has morphed into a market-friendly practice, adaptable into any context. Even the US military deploys mindfulness among its commanders and troops, teaching them how to focus on their breath as they pull the trigger.

The £3.4trn industry encourages a preoccupation with the symptoms of mental illness, rather than their social causes.

In December 2008, while forcibly evicting tenants from a concrete high-rise in south London, Southwark Council pulled off a remarkable feat of complacency. Though residents didn't know it at the time, every flat in the development that replaced the Heygate Estate would be sold to foreign investors, despite the council's repeated promises of new social housing.

Recognising that people were "stressed", councillors hired life coaches and "spiritual ministers" to run workshops teaching residents how to progress emotionally. The company behind the workshop, the Happiness Project, was founded by the British positive psychologist Robert Holden, the author of Shift Happens! The firm's motto was: "Success is a state of mind; happiness is a way of travelling; love is your true power."