After the latent content of a dream has been translated into the manifest content, the dream narrative might be subject to secondary revision. The logical part of the mind is still functioning, and it attempts to make the dream more intelligible. It acts like a newspaper editor making last-minute changes to an article before publication.

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

Neuroticism is a personality trait, a particular way of approaching and responding to the world. Those of us who are more neurotic approach the world with caution; we look for and expect danger and difficulty. We are always on guard. When we do meet danger and difficulty, we tend to react more strongly to it; we experience more distress, more frust

But Quentin believed in reading as a lifeline to the past—to the store of experience that made the foundation of our species. By assembling our thoughts like risers in a staircase the generations would climb. Those who could draw from this reservoir would exist beyond the jealous shackles of time, grasp the utterness of contingency, and know the wi

We want to be reconciled, somehow, to loss and failure, injustice and human suffering. We are hoping for a truth that will take the edge off our despair.

The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur is full of imagery and incident that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation: the minotaur - half man, half animal - embodies the essential conflict between ego and id; the labyrinth, which coincidentally resembles the sulci of the cortex, suggests the complexities of the mind. In 1927, Freud told an int

The very impossibility of recovering a scene from the past, of recapturing the flow of an afternoon in life, guarantees that self’s persistence.

Life is Cheap The brain is constantly trying to automate processes, thereby dispelling them from consciousness; in this way its work will be completed faster, more effectively and at a lower metabolic level. Consciousness, on the other hand, is slow, subject to error and ‘expensive’.

The word ‘routine’ derives from ‘route’, itself deriving from ‘rupta via’, meaning a road forged by force, a forced and beaten path.