neuroscience Archives - Journal of Contemplative Studies

Review of Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative Landscapes

This review explores how urban green spaces can promote mental well-being through intentional design informed by neuroscience, as discussed by Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo in Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative
Landscapes, published in 2023. The book introduces the Contemplative Landscape Model, a framework identifying seven features that enhance contemplative experiences in built environments. Mayse discusses why the book is a significant contribution to the field of Contemplative Studies, and what more there is to be done.

No Attainment, Nothing to Attain: A Buddhist Reflection on Psychedelics

The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. Hershock presents a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism, makes a Buddhist case for seeing that changes in subjective experience are at best provisional goals of these alterations, and draws some challenging inferences regarding the dynamics of contemplative practice, and more.