« Thich Nhat Hanh and especially Matthieu Ricard - as passionate about neurology as his friend the Dalai Lama. For them, consciousness is the ultimate nature of reality and the brain can momentarily channel it into a temporary self... »

« However, access to consciousness does not guarantee its maintenance in adults. Philippe Presles draws up a list of obstacles to our lucidity. Some seem obvious: become insensitive and rationalizing, prejudge the thinking of others, be trapped by excitement or personal success, or compare themselves to others. But other pitfalls can surprise, especially the most common: neglecting one's health. Philippe Presles: "Everything happens as if we forget that our consciousness is our brain, and that our brain is our body." This opens us up to an approach we are not used to in the West: our consciousness is first and foremost physical. »

« Is consciousness produced by the brain, or does it exist in itself? Two famous experiments suggest conflicting answers. The first one has caused a lot of ink and passionate controversy, but it remains unresolved a quarter of a century later: it is that of neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, of the University of San Francisco. Libet wanted to know if it was the decision of a gesture, such as bending a finger, that initiated this action. By measuring the action times of the various cortical areas concerned at a thousandth of a second, he discovered that the brain always sent its orders three to four tenths of a second before the subject consciously made his decision. All sorts of conclusions have been drawn. For example, consciousness is able to go back in time - to give orders retroactively! Or that consciousness is in an out-of-time dimension... But the most common conclusion of neurologists is that the brain makes its decisions "alone" and that our consciousness, produced or not by neurons, is not much: just a way to observe, after the fact, their action. The second experiment was conducted in 1998 by neurologist Matthew Botvinick of Princeton University. Imagine hiding your right arm under the tablecloth and placing a false right rubber hand on the table, someone is caressing, while under the table you also caress your hidden hand. After a while, you feel like the rubber hand is yours — to the point of feeling something when you only caress it. Better yet: On December 6, 2011, Australian Lorimer Moseley of the University of Adelaide revealed that this illusory feeling caused the immunity of the hidden arm to drop, in other words that it was no longer considered by the brain as a part of the body! Our ability to differentiate the self from the non-me, the basis of our consciousness, can therefore be influenced by a trompe l'oeil. But, if pure subjectivity can deceive the brain, isn't consciousness independent of it? »