Harding had been thinking about Life's Big Questions for years, but the Headless insight crystallized when he saw this "self portrait" by Ernst Mach: From The Analysis of Sensations, by Ernst Mach

One day Harding stumbled upon a drawing by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. It was a self-portrait – but a self-portrait with Physarum also shows evidence of memory. In their study of the Traveling Salesman Problem (requiring an optimal strategy for connecting regions in space), Zhu et al. (2013) found that when two individuals were created by dividing one individual, they remained correlated in their exploration even though they were spatially separated, suggesting the presence of a long-term memory in the intrinsic dynamics. Cognition in Plants And the start of the book is just like if you were there in the Himalayas - but it’s all downhill from here! It’s a great opening gambit - for a book and series of books and, in apparently, for his writing career - though Harding will always be, to the newcomer, so delightfully and disarmingly Off the Wall.This Way puts headlessness – alias seeing into Nothingness– at the very start of the spiritual life … Our overriding purpose is seeing into and living from Nothingness.” What about when I look in the mirror? Well, there's a head in the mirror. Is that... my head? Whoops, at Level Two, that question makes no sense. By calling the pixels in the mirror "your head", you're making inferences that you could test... but not at Level Two. Inferences occur in the little lab in your brain where you go to figure out what things mean. In the present, who cares what things mean? That's so Level Zero. An interesting kind of cognitive process is revealed by drug addiction. The increased tolerance with exposure is desensitization (one kind of basic memory element). Drug addiction reactions have been shown in somatic mammalian cells in culture ( Corssen and Skora, 1964; Manner et al., 1974; Higgins et al., 1978), suggesting that this form of memory is not always a body-level phenomenon that necessarily involves the brain. Slime Molds: Between Unicellular Life and Metazoan Bodies The first level involves realizing that when you get lost in thought, much of what you're reacting to isn't even happening right now. You're being assaulted with memories and getting lost in those, sure... but even the act of getting pissed off in traffic is an act of mild obsession with the past. The car cuts you off, and you freeze-frame the moment and start looping on it, even as the moment that annoyed you slips away. Everybody says these constructs are the thing itself. However, as Harding points out, they're not really, are they? If you look down your own face, you can usually 'see' your nose as a series of splotches and shapes. Is that your nose though, or just splotches?

It's somewhat of a winding path to get there, but Harding eventually points to the idea that consciousness is space in which reality is perceived. The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head. Budding yeast also keep a history which influences their future behavior – a memory of past events. They avoid pheromone-induced cessation of cell cycle after a deceptive mating attempt (failure to reach a putative partner cell within a specific time period). The mechanisms of this are beginning to be unraveled (driven by the dynamics of the maternally segregating G1/S inhibitor Whi3), and the authors term the macromolecular assemblies that mediate this memory “mnemons”, cellular structures that encode previous environmental conditions ( Caudron and Barral, 2013). With respect to the search for the molecular substrate of specific memories, this yeast work may be ahead of similar efforts in the brain ( Ungar, 1972, 1974a, b).

On Having No Head

The flexible and versatile responses of bacteria to their environment has drawn significant attention of synthetic, molecular, and evolutionary biologists, as well as those interested in unconventional computational media ( Miller and Koshland, 1977; Koshland, 1980; Ben-Jacob, 2009; Norris et al., 2011). Single bacteria are able to migrate toward beneficial targets, and away from noxious stimuli. The control algorithm for this behavior has long been the subject of investigation, with respect to the short-term memory needed for following gradients ( Vladimirov and Sourjik, 2009) as well as “infotaxis” policies that do not require gradient sensing ( Vergassola et al., 2007). Especially exciting are the recent findings that bacterial communities (biofilms) process information and make decisions about nutrient distribution and metabolism as an integrated whole, using ion channels ( Prindle et al., 2015) and a kind of volume transmission as occurs in the brain ( Agnati et al., 2006; Fuxe et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2013). Ciliates (protozoa) exhibit learning and a form of memory, which even survives loss of nuclei and some cytoplasm ( Gelber, 1962; Applewhite et al., 1969; Hamilton, 1975; Clark, 2013). The mechanism is unknown, but may involve electrical signaling ( Applewhite, 1972; Kunita et al., 2014). Is Stage (3) – this stretch of road so paved with delusion-based suffering – just a great mistake, an unnecessary loop which can and should be by-passed? Is it possible to leap – helped on by enlightened parents and teachers – from the childhood of Stage (2) to the true adulthood or seership of later stages, thus avoiding the worst of the troubles we have just listed? In other words, can one become a full member of this club called Human Society, and enjoy its inestimable privileges and facilities, yet without ever subscribing to the lie on which it is founded, without ever joining in the club’s non-stop Face Game, without ever becoming like them?” In the video Harding’s claim (and Harris agrees) is that we make the world, we are the source of consciousness. Or maybe it's the world that makes us? Or maybe it’s that old song: “We Are the World”? But it is best to experience the world fully and directly. It is possible through careful meditation, he says, to experience “headlessness,” where the subject/object distinction collapses and you are “fully present” in the world, closer to some kind of “pure” consciousness, where one is one-with-the-universe, a boundless openness to the whole world. So what’s not to like? Okay. I had trouble with this book at first, and I predict that you'll find it as hokey on a first reading as I did. But there is something special here. I'm going to try and describe what it was that I found so fascinating about the Headless insight, and why you should care about, and spend some time recreating, this insight for yourself. Being Present It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.”