Annaka Harris

Meditation and Reality

In three paragraphs, my new “short” explains why meditation practice might give us a more accurate window onto reality:

Meditation entails the difficult task of cultivating concentrated attention on one’s moment-to-moment experience—the endless stream of feelings, thoughts, and perceptions—without judging or interpreting them, or allowing them to take immediate control of our actions. In its simplest form, meditation is a skill that undercuts all our evolved drives: planning for the future, learning from the past, following our desires to eat, drink, avoid pain, etc…

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My Interview with Adam Frank on BigThink

Growing up, Annaka Harris had a restless, inquisitive mind — and terrible migraines. Which is how she developed an interest in the subject that would captivate her for most of her career: consciousness. “I was really focused on space and time and the distorted perceptions of things,” she says. “I started doing a kind of meditative practice on pain, like trying to get closer to it, and I realized I couldn’t really locate it in space.”…

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Consciousness All the Way Down: The Next Scientific Revolution?

My new article, featured in the final chapter of LIGHTS ON, is available now!

Almost a century after the paradigm shift caused by Nicolas Copernicus’s radical suggestion that the Earth orbits the Sun, our scientific grasp of the universe was once again revolutionized when the proverbial apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Newton opened our eyes to a deeper reality when he described gravity as a pervasive force with laws that govern the attraction of objects in motion. Albert Einstein then came along and ignited yet another mind-blowing paradigm shift for humanity to grapple with. Einstein described gravity not as a force, but as a warping of four-dimensional spacetime where spacetime is the fabric of the universe. Once more, humanity was afforded a slightly more accurate window onto the universe…

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B&N Best Audiobooks of 2025 (So Far)

From B&N Reads:
Only available as an audiobook, LIGHTS ON is an audio documentary that explores the unknown corners of consciousness and the cosmos. A journalist who specializes in neuroscience and physics, Harris makes a complex subject universally accessible by structuring it as a Q&A with other deep thinkers in the fields of science and philosophy. A soothing soundscape adds to the easy listening experience about something almost unfathomable. We agree with well-known author and psychologist Adam Grant, who raves, “You’ll never think about what happens between your ears in the same way again.”  

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Starred Booklist Review for LIGHTS ON

Harris has been grappling with the idea of the conscious mind for years through her work in meditation and mindfulness spaces (and in her 2019 book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind). Part of what makes this inquiry so compelling is that the answers are so elusive…

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