Debbie Foster

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.

Common to many transformative experiences is the dissolution of the self, including loss of ego and the body it is chained to.

So language is meaningful not just because of the way it refers to external physical objects that you can pick up and hold, but because its own internal structure mirrors that of the external world. LLMs can 'think' and 'reason' because titanic computational power allows them to encode that structure in their weights, via a series of mental

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as the author Terry Tempest Williams says, is “a conversation between what is broken.”

The brain is not just a passive observer in the experience of pain. It shapes pain, amplifies it, echoes it. Brains exposed to prolonged periods of pain become more sensitive to it, the neurons that receive the signals of pain firing more readily, recruiting their neighbors to sense pain, too: pain begetting pain, a relentless cycle of suffering.

The record player was, by definition, the thing on which records were played but it was also an insidious portal to a world of unrestrained expense. Long before the term 'mission creep' entered military parlance my dad had an unerring eye for what might be called purchase creep.

Dreams feel as real as life—the primary distinction between dreaming and waking consciousness is an absence of a sense of self, insight, self-reflection. You aren't surprised that you can fly, walk through walls, or meet long-dead animal companions, lovers, parents, or siblings. You are along for the ride, watching a movie that someone else is

In patients with functional weakness, these imaging studies show that the structures that suppress unpleasant memories of traumatic experiences are overactive. Perhaps the neurons of the motor cortex are suppressed, too, collateral damage from a haunted brain struggling to quiet itself. In patients with functional tremors--not the circumscribed

we are creeping towards the slightly discomforting idea that what we call our mind or consciousness is constructed by an integrated set of brain structures that models selves and worlds, provides more or less clarity and insight, and can induce both lucid dreams and OBEs.