Debbie Foster

… the fog will turn to the slow and awful bloom of recognition that the only constancy or connection I can find between that night and this moment … is the awareness that I am performing, that I am reciting the lines and movements I've seen others speak and make, and I cannot bear the flatness of myself, nor the flimsiness of my disguise. I get

The take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.

Due to inherent and unavoidable randomness in nature, toggling tiny synapses on and off does not always lead to the same, reproducible result each time. Thus, a more general approach is to consider conditional probabilities: if ten synaptic inputs are activated, the neuron turns on 75 percent of the time and remains off the other 25 percent. The

Memory is shown to be not so much a library but more a repository of ready-to-run routines that enable our daily living.

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

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.

The sum of the phi’s of all distinctions and relations is the integrated information of the circuit in this state, symbolized by the uppercase letter phi, Q. This number measures the irreducibility of the substrate. Something with no integrated information does not exist as an integrated entity, as it can be reduced to two or more subsystems

He was not so much a vision as a mass of energy configured in a deeply familiar way as my father.

She had outshone at puzzles and abstractions her entire life, and still she had not learned a single thing about how to live.