Debbie Foster

The goal is to help patients integrate their notions of who they were before their sicknesses with who they are now. The task is to go back and find a thread of a story that can be pulled across the hospitalization or the psychotic break or the shock therapy, from then to now, from "her" to "me." It matters what stories you tell yourself about

For Grush, the specious present not only lets the brain get a jump on events, but also gives it time to sync up nerve signals arriving on different schedules from all parts of the body.

this can be viewed as a defining feature of Freud's modernity: his total engagement with compound meanings and contradictions; his continuous excavation of mental life, all the way down to its primal substances. We do not think logically like characters in a novel. The mind is messy and loose chains of association unravel in unexpected directions.

Real-world problems have three properties that make them especially tricky: they are open-ended, uncertain and temporally extended. Open-ended problems are those for which the possible alternatives are virtually limitless. ... Uncertain problems can be blown off course by random events. … So real-world planning demands contingency measures.

Some monks visualized not only their thoughts but also themselves thinking those thoughts, as a way to reframe their prayers and keep them from meandering.

Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form.

Finally, here was the world's constantly broken promise of transcendence, the cosmic wonder I'd chased impatiently ever since I was a child, rounding every corner with an eager smile that faltered just as quickly. I'd been waiting my whole life to find a feeling this big. It was a religious conversion.

The recurrent emergence of shamanism is not conjecture based on universality; it is informed by our understanding of human psychology and cultural evolution. Our desperation to control uncertainty, our suspicions that agents cause misfortune, our tendency to accept special powers when people move beyond humanness—all of them interact to produce a

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.