Debbie Foster

A fascinating fact is that the syntax center of the brain is in the part where we process music, not in the part responsible for vocabulary acquisition. So making beautiful sentences is a musical endeavor.

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr, underscored that observation not only brings the world into being but actually shapes it—an idea known as the “participatory universe.”

Memory and imagination are closely linked. One reconstructs based on the gist; the other builds on whatever desire or dread is fuelling your image of the future. Both are essentially creative activities; where they differ is not in form but in their source of inspiration.

'you could say stories are an especially useful storage format, a type of compression, and consciousness is the program that unpacks it.'

The Aztecs would argue that luck plays a much larger role in our successes and failures, even in our moral successes, than most of us in the "West” generally recognize. The world is simply too complex and too unpredictable for luck not to play a significant role. We come into life "unbalanced," unprepared to avoid falling. It is for this reason

[Samuel] Delany prefers the term "given world" to "real world," since in his view it better explains the construction and fictionalization of reality: this is just the world we have been given to believe in as real.

We increasingly live in our maps of reality instead of in reality itself. The territory has been replaced with towering layers of abstractions: sovereign nations, states, counties, personal properties, deeds, mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, mortgage-backed credit default swaps, and so on.

During sleep or quiet downtime, memories that have been buffered in the hippocampus get replayed over and over - creating the sort of endless repetition that is needed to store information in the weights of a target neural network. In the biological case, that target is the neocortex, which is gradually 'trained' by replay activity to incorporate