Debbie Foster

Through this survey, we will confront a paradox of shamanism: when it comes to healing, the stronger the illusion, the more potent the effects.

Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality: it can contribute to the disruption of that feedback loop. But it can't change reality on its own, by itself.

Located at the base and back of the brain in two kumquat-shaped lobes, the cerebellum is small—it occupies only 10 percent of brain volume—but it is powerful: it contains a full 75 percent of the neurons of the brain.

John Stilgoe, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the author of several books, including Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. Stilgoe believes the power of acute observation is one of nature’s most useful learning tools.

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.

IN SOME WAYS, the nervous system is like a thunderstorm, the controlled chaos of gathering electrical activity occasionally rendered visible in a bolt of lightning. The delicate skin of every neuron is studded with proteinaceous pumps that siphon positively charged ions—potassium, sodium, calcium—out of the cell and into its watery surroundings

One of the most pervasive myths about writing is that specificity is limiting. It's just the opposite. You might think that a poem about love or truth or freedom—a large abstraction—would reach more people if it were written with universality in mind. But if your goal is to speak to everyone, and to remove particulars from the piece because others

…a philosopher by training, I, too, am prone to regard reality as thin fodder for theorization. Yet as dull and distasteful as the facts may be, they make up the edifice on which principles are erected…