Does the Brain Filter out a Wider Awareness?

Dr. Marjorie Hines Woollacott has been a neuroscience professor at the University of Oregon for more than three decades and a meditator for almost four. She also has a master’s degree in Asian studies, which she began on a teaching sabbatical and completed at the UO while a full-time professor.  Her master’s thesis was the foundation for her latest book, Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind, which is both a scientist’s memoir and a research survey on human consciousness. As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire world changed. Woollacott’s journey through years of meditation has made her question the reality she built her career upon and has forced her to ask what human consciousness really is.