Psychology in Singapore Issues of an Emerging Discipline edited by Tan Ai-Girl, Michael Goh.

The force of character : and the lasting life by James Hillman.

Colourful Myanmar by Khin Myo Chit. (NLB Singapore)

Kimchi and IT: Tradition and Transformation in Korea by Kim Choong-soon. (Seoul Selection) (partial)

Related: 'Kimchi and IT' Sheds Light on Korea.

Buddhism Religion in Korea by Choi Joon-sik. (Seoul Selection)

Going to Pieces without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein.

Contentment: A Way to True Happiness by Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl.

Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the...Second Half of Life by Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl.

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson. (partial)

Wherever You Go There You Are Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Taming the tiger within : meditations on transforming Difficult Emotions by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Miracle of mindfulness : A manual of meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Related: Meditation on Interdependence.

The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Luminous Mind The Way of the Buddha by Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche.

The Silk Road Journey With Xuanzang by Sally Wriggins.

Holy Places of the Buddha (Crystal Mirror 9) by Elizabeth Cook. (partial)

Related:

Books Read in 2007.

• How is information coded in neural activity?

  It is likely that mental information is stored not in single cells but in populations of cells and patterns of their activity. Although traveling bursts of voltage can carry signals across the brain quickly, those electrical spikes may not be the only—or even the main—way that information is carried in nervous systems. ­

• How are memories stored and retrieved?

  Almost all theories of memory propose that memory storage depends on synapses, the tiny connections between brain cells. When two cells are active at the same time, the connection between them strengthens; when they are not active at the same time, the connection weakens. Out of such synaptic changes emerges an association.

  There is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly. Moreover, the act of retrieval can destabilize the memory. When you recall a past event, the memory becomes temporarily susceptible to erasure.

• What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?

  Some of the baseline activity may represent the brain restructuring knowledge in the background, simulating future states and events, or manipulating memories. Most things we care about—reminiscences, emotions, drives, plans, and so on—can occur with no external stimulus and no overt output that can be measured.

  The awake state may be essentially the same as the dreaming state, only partially anchored by external stimuli. In this view, your conscious life is an awake dream.

• How do brains simulate the future?

  Many neuroscientists have suggested over the past few decades that perception arises not simply by building up bits of data through a hierarchy but rather by matching incoming sensory data against internally generated expectations.

  Your memories about your life may come to be understood as a special subtype of emulation, one that is pinned down and thus likely to flow in a certain direction.

• What are emotions?

  Emotions are measurable physical responses to salient stimuli: the increased heartbeat and perspiration that accompany fear.

  Modern views propose that emotions are brain states that quickly assign value to outcomes and provide a simple plan of action. Thus, emotion can be viewed as a type of computation, a rapid, automatic summary that initiates appropriate actions.

  One goal of emotional neuroscience is to understand the nature of the many disorders of emotion, depression being the most common and costly. Impulsive aggression and violence are also thought to be consequences of faulty emotion regulation.

• What is intelligence?

  Recent experiments explore the possible relationship of intelligence to the capacity of short-term memory, the ability to quickly resolve cognitive conflict, or the ability to store stronger associations between facts; the results are not yet conclusive. Many other possibilities—better restructuring of stored information, more parallel processing, or superior emulation of possible futures—have not yet been probed by experiments.

• How is time represented in the brain?

  Your notion of the smooth passage of time is a construction of the brain. Clarifying the picture of how the brain normally solves timing problems should give insight into what happens when temporal calibration goes wrong, as may happen in the brains of people with dyslexia. Sensory inputs that are out of sync also contribute to the risk of falls in elderly patients.

• Why do brains sleep and dream?

  In humans, continuous wakefulness of the nervous system results in mental derangement; rats deprived of sleep for 10 days die.

  There are at least three popular (and nonexclusive) guesses. The first is that sleep is restorative, saving and replenishing the body’s energy stores. However, the high neural activity during sleep suggests there is more to the story. A second theory proposes that sleep allows the brain to run simulations of fighting, problem solving, and other key actions before testing them out in the real world. A third theory—the one that enjoys the most evidence—is that sleep plays a critical role in learning and consolidating memories and in forgetting inconsequential details. In other words, sleep allows the brain to store away the important stuff and take out the neural trash.

  Dreaming is akin to an off-line practice session.

• How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?

  While the brain’s ability to do parallel processing is impressive, its ability to rapidly synthesize those parallel processes into a single, behavior-guiding output is at least as significant.

  There is no special anatomical location in the brain where information from all the different systems converges; rather, the specialized areas all interconnect with one another, forming a network of parallel and recurring links. Somehow, our integrated image of the world emerges from this complex labyrinthine network of brain structures.

• What is consciousness?

  The mechanisms underlying consciousness could reside at any of a variety of physical levels: molecular, cellular, circuit, pathway, or some organizational level not yet described. The mechanisms might also be a product of interactions between these levels. One compelling but still speculative notion is that the massive feedback circuitry of the brain is essential to the production of consciousness.

Suppose you have a lot of information and you want to put it together so it makes sense. Here’s a suggestion from psychologists at Harvard Medical School — sleep on it.

“But remembering lots of facts is not the only or even the main function of memory,” says Walker, a sleep expert who works at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “The key to solving problems and generating new ideas involves how those facts are put together into a bigger picture, one we’ve not seen before.”

Walker suspected that big-picture work, too, is best done on the back of sleep, at least one purpose of which is to consolidate information. He got together with Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a sleep neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and other colleagues to test the idea.

“Our results strongly imply that sleep is actively engaged in the cognitive processing of our memories,” Ellenbogen adds. “Knowledge appears to expand both over time and with sleep.”

Walker says he likes the idea of meditation as a state “when different kinds of information cocktails are being mixed in the brain, another way of brewing new generalizations and ideas. If this is true, it opens the exciting possibility of manipulating brain states to help us solve problems and learn.”

Other research has shown that memories seem to be consolidated both during dreamless sleep at the beginning of the night and during dreams that usually occur later. How does this tie in with the conversations between hippocampus and cortex? One idea is that new memories move out of the hippocampus and into the cortex during dreamless sleep earlier in the night. When new and old memories meet, they mix in bizarre and novel ways we call dreams.

My experience seems to affirm this.

I also caught a glimpse of my dream later with monsters chasing me around in a modern environment. Perhaps, as a result of playing Battle for Wesnoth! :)

I have to suppose our mind does a lot of thinking during our sleep and perhaps more so in certain ways than when we are conscious during the day. Dreams then is perhaps one way in which our unconscious helps in personality integration.

I am in a toilet with my mum in one sequence and I am spraying my urine over the bowl. ..

In another sequence, my mum transforms into an animal. Now, I don't know what animal is that! She is happily feeding on some insects! :) We will then sleeping outside somewhere (there is a mat), there must be quite a lot of ants and my mum must have been bitten by quite a number and I found myself busily hitting and killing the ants! Just a Dream :roll:

mum's remembrance