Debbie Foster

"There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library."

There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part, whether it be a game of cards or the selling of a cow. The advantage is always to the one who is shrewder in what secret to reveal and when.

When humans use language, the boundary between fact and fiction can be indistinct. Each of us sees the world through a different lens, so our words are inevitably grounded in a bespoke version of reality. A narrative that is fact to one person can seem like fiction to another, and vice versa. Even a supposedly impartial journalist describing an

If we want our internal models to generate expectations that capture the gamut of diversity in others we may interact with, we are likely to need diverse experiences first, allowing these broader predictions to be forged.

In groups of people, particularly of family, my mind can sometimes feel like a garden wilting in relentless sun. I need solitude, or movement, or ideally both to restore my thoughts to their unshriveled state.

The scientific process involves a delicate duet between theory and data. We can use our theories to make sense of the data we collect, but that means seeing the data through the lens of our existing ideas. A surprising piece of data could lead to a paradigm shift, overturning one of our dominant theories. But our view of reality can only really be

All quality is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation. One implication is that consciousness is nonalgorithmic; it is not (Turing) computable.

Therefore, in both confabulation and dreaming, altered functioning of the prefrontal cortex may release from reality-filtering or executive constraint an innate human tendency to create stories that organize past, present, and future reality. Dreaming may represent a potent, naturally occurring form of confabulation in which imaginary events are

For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher.