Debbie Foster

There are three basic systems at work, two enabling us to be ON, one enabling us to switch OFF. Both of the ON systems manage and direct our energies and attention towards or away from things in our world in anxiety, fear, reward or pleasure.

Prove

I let a thought prove in my head overnight.

In the morning I check to see what's risen.

I try to expect nothing, which is exactly

what I deserve. What kind of woman

demands her head deliver? But sometimes

I wake to a thought doubled, tripled in size

and as good sour as anything grown in the dark.

Freud declares that there is 'something innate underlying perversions', but 'it is something innate in everyone'. Children are not born pure and corrupted by the world. In fact, they are born perverse and checked by the world's civilising influences. Freud's theory of sexual development reverses a way of thinking about children that dates back to

All quality is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation. One implication is that consciousness is nonalgorithmic; it is not (Turing) computable.

The joy of being free from pain is like a picture that vanishes when you try to look at it

The inability to switch off, to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, is a hot topic in medicine and psychology right now. It is measured by heart rate variability (HRV). Which should, if you are well balanced, be high: your heart rate should vary a lot. If you can gear up when you have to, and then switch quickly and comfortably

The nature of user-generated content means that anyone can have a platform, removing agency from the prescriptive powers that be and kick-starting an entirely new decolonization of language.

It’s natural to experience some level of distress when faced with disruption. The best course of action is to process the emotion with curiosity and self-compassion so you can calmly deal with the consequences.

There are good evolutionary reasons why strong emotion might play an important role in precognition (or James Carpenter’s “first sight”): It needs to orient us to new information relevant to our survival so that we can update our knowledge about the world in a fruitful way.