Mindfulness-based Strategic Awareness Training Comprehensive Workbook

This comprehensive workbook provides training based on new findings in computational neuroscience. It will enhance your decision-making skills by increasing the precision of your perception and mental processing. This training will enable you to navigate these disruptive, uncertain times skillfully, and in good emotional and mental health. Part 1 provides a conceptual introduction into understanding the brain as a predicting organ. Part 2 leads you through 8 systematic training sessions to enhance your decision-making skills by enhancing your strategic awareness and belief updating capabilities. The practices are designed to fit in the busy schedules of active people. Mindfulness-based Strategic Awareness Training (MBSAT) has been tested by practitioners for over 10 years and is widely acclaimed. The government of Singapore, known for its outstanding commitment to the education of its population, has included MBSAT in its official skill-building program and subsidizes participation in MBSAT training. This is a remarkable book. On one reading, it is a scholarly and pragmatic guide to self-understanding and realisation--through making the right kind of decisions as embodied creatures in a social world. On another reading, it naturalises--or perhaps socialises--the free energy principle: an account of self-organisation and sentience grounded in statistical physics and applied widely in theoretical biology and computational neuroscience. This book liberates the fundaments of the free energy principle by applying them to the delicate practice of living in the 21st-century. This is achieved by starting from the academic foundations and artfully scaffolding the readers journey with intuitive, lived examples; sometimes, touchingly personal examples. If you commit to the epistemic program offered by this book, not only will you become a fluent practitioner of embodied Bayesian inference and decision-making, you will be able to answer Einstein's existential question: "Is the universe friendly?" Karl J. Friston, MBBS, MA, MRCPsych, MAE, FMedSci, FRBS, FRS -- Scientific Director Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging -- Professor Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London Honorary Consultant The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery