Debbie Foster

the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly,

In short, it is not that there is a right way and wrong way to learn. It’s that there are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a particular type of information. A good hunter tailors the trap to the prey.

In the 1970s, Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued that these same basic principles underlie the regularities of social existence too, up to and including the cultural symbol systems used by humans to encode meaningful information and guide our behavior.7 Today, quantum information theory, discussed in the last chapter, is also being

She had outshone at puzzles and abstractions her entire life, and still she had not learned a single thing about how to live.

I begin my writing time by reading, pen in hand, because I know what is likely to happen: A word, phrase, sentence, or idea will open a door for me. Behind that door, if I'm lucky, might be a poem or an essay of my own.

is a delayed-choice version of the double-slit experiment in which the experimenters seem able to dictate what happens it the past by erasing (versus not erasing) quantum information in the present.

The time-symmetric, retrocausal framework advanced by Aharonov and his colleagues is sometimes called the two-state vector formalism

The take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.

Innocence is an illusion. We come into this world a bundle of disordered drives and desires, some good, some not. We are neither pure nor impure, we are only somewhat educable. There is an art to transforming raw youths into decent mature adults, and its tools are experience and knowledge. Some of it is pleasant, some less so. And for every gain in