We either don’t know or don’t care about the rich inner lives of the creatures we share this planet with. Yet, from people who share their homes with pets to researchers, wildlife conservationists, zoologists, and everyone who works with animals have no doubt that the range of emotions in varied species is diverse and constant.Continue reading “How Animals Grieve”
Category Archives: biology
My Age of Anxiety
“Fear sharpens the senses. Anxiety paralyses them” – Kurt Goldstein. Is anxiety a medical illness or a cognitive mis-wiring, a philosophical or a spiritual problem or a cultural condition explored by poets? Scott Stossel explores how anxiety is a function of all of these. It can be measured physiologically, it can be measured as aContinue reading “My Age of Anxiety”
Four Thousand Weeks
“We treat everything we’re doing- life itself, in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.” What a revelatory, life-affirming book! It examines our relationship with time, how we perceive it, use it and try to outrun the knowledge that it is so limited for us – anContinue reading “Four Thousand Weeks”
The Code Breaker
Never has a science conference sounded so fun and dramatic! This is an accessible and fast-paced biography of Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 Nobel laureate in chemistry, and the army of scientists who uncovered the many steps to make gene editing possible. At its heart, The Code Breaker celebrates how life-changing scientific discoveries come from allContinue reading “The Code Breaker”
Endure
Endure is full of stories of individual athletes, coaching teams, scientists and corporate studying the nexus of the mind, brain and body to help humans break barriers on limits that seem impassable. Each chapters covers an element like pain, muscle, oxygen, heat and thirst, and how a belief in our own abilities enables us toContinue reading “Endure”
Move
What a delightful and light book. Williams explores types of movement from walking to dancing to stretching, fighting, breathing and so on and how each of these influences the body and mind. We obviously know that movement is good for us but this book dives into genes, genetics, how the brain communicates with organs andContinue reading “Move”
The Worm at the Core
This book makes a compelling argument that we are driven on an individual and societal level by our need to stave off our awareness of the inevitability of death. It’s not a depressing book; rather, it made me much more aware of my thought patterns and gave me a sense of peace – knowing thatContinue reading “The Worm at the Core”
The Science of Meditation
There’s a useful distinction between ‘the deep path and the wide’ when it comes to meditation. Most of us may not become deep meditators but even the toe we dip in the water brings benefits. Results can be seen in short meditations of five to ten minutes. The more regular one is even with theseContinue reading “The Science of Meditation”
Entangled Life
This book took me on a breathtaking, life-affirming and inspired journey into the astounding interconnectedness of fungi and the role they play in the world around us. Sheldrake writes with compassionate understanding and vivid prose, and asks questions that shake the core of our self-centred definitions of intelligence, cognition and sensory perception. We need notContinue reading “Entangled Life”
Pandemic
Shah weaves personal experiences with intense research that reads like a storybook. She takes us all the way from the early cholera epidemics of the 1800s (with far-too-vivid descriptions of shit-lined streets of New York City!) to the wet markets of China and explains exactly how new viruses evolve that otherwise never would if itContinue reading “Pandemic”
Ayesha Anna Ninan 