Debbie Foster

We want to rush past our bitter moments, to a place of facility and ease, we want to be old at this new thing, but rushing won’t do it. Only time and repetition bring ease. Then it’s second nature, a walk in the park.

it is individuals at the top of social hierarchies who set cultural agendas. As such, the Viennese preoccupation with the allure of nerves was not a trivial phenomenon. It was a glimpse of the future. A prophecy concerning the shape of the modern mind.

maybe it wasn’t true that her family was chaotic and his family was proper, the biggest difference seemed to be the story, Hector’s family always had a story, a perfectly neat, organized story, with a beginning, middle and end, with a main character and an obstacle and an enemy, with a complicated Before and a happy After, and in their presence,

The shock of the new has been replaced by the shock of the ephemeral. Even if material and social conditions of life improve over time, those improvements cannot but seem just as improvised and tentative as what preceded them. All this can leave us feeling like exiles without our having crossed a single border, without even walking out the front

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

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.

He felt like the disappointing outlier on a Venn diagram, forgotten, eliminated when the data was collected and the average calculated. He didn't exist.

Susan Engel... has written “We are who we are by virtue of what we have experienced, but part of who we are is determined by what we imagine.“ Through her work with children, Engel has been able to identify five phases of increasing sophistication in childhood storytelling.

First, toddlers learn they have an extended self .(connecting to memories)

If instead language is shaped by idiosyncratic forces that vary with contextual and cultural variables, then no simple set of hard-and-fast rules exists to be discovered. Instead, the only way to model language is with a large and expressive neural network, such as an LLM, that can capture both the basic principles and their exceptions in their