Showing results by narrator "Bob Hurling" in All Categories

For centuries we've searched for the chooser. We've imagined a soul, a conscious self or some hidden decision-maker somewhere inside the brain. Modern neuroscience has searched for it too. Yet despite remarkable advances, the chooser remains elusive. In The Pattern That Chooses, psychologist and behavioural scientist Bob Hurling explores a simple possibility: perhaps we've been looking for something that isn't there. Choosing may not be performed by a hidden entity at all. Instead, it may simply be what sufficiently organised physical patterns do.

What if many of our most cherished assumptions are wrong? In Dark Thoughts, behavioural scientist and author Bob Hurling explores unsettling questions about free will, consciousness, morality, meaning and human nature. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, evolution and physics, he examines the evidence behind the stories we tell ourselves and asks what remains when those stories begin to unravel. This is not a self help book and it offers few comforting conclusions.

I have spent years in yoga classes being told to notice my breath, stand on one leg, fold forwards and occasionally attempt positions that looked considerably easier when demonstrated by somebody else. Over time I became interested in the thoughts that seemed to accompany these movements. Not grand spiritual insights. More the small observations that appear when the phone is elsewhere and there is nothing much to do except breathe, wobble and pay attention. Each poem begins with a posture, movement or sensation from yoga and drifts into something wider.