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Whenever you blank out and forget where you are, you are reproducing the experience of those identical yous in a multiverse, unsure who is who.

We form new concepts without limit by stringing together what we already know or nesting one concept within another. In fact, some suggest that consciousness evolved precisely to allow for open-ended learning.

There's no return once self-awareness has distinguished appearance from reality, our words from the motives underlying them. This is the meaning of the expulsion from paradise, our departure from the state of nature with its innocence and violence, to something far more ambivalent: it is the parable of our guilt, of inward shame, in moving from awa

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to surviv

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.

Our experience as readers is very much like witnessing magic: we are presented a reality in which things happen free from the chains of cause and effect, in which things happen because they have a purpose.

According to Friston's way of thinking, which he calls active inference, the brain is not the body's helmsman or puppeteer, but its dreamer. Brain and body are bound up in a mutual project to predict the world successfully. Sometimes the brain does the work, sometimes the body.

There is ample scientific evidence to show us that the most fulfilling lives are the ones that maximize feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.