Debbie Foster

From the point of view of an external observer, a silent cortex and a silenced cortex resemble each other, as neither lights up with electrical activity. Yet, while a silent cortex retains its full causal power but chooses not to speak, a silenced cortex has lost its voice and is unconscious.

In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.

Israeli physicist named Yakir Aharonov basically agreed with Einstein about God not playing dice, and he proposed that the future is the hidden variable underlying quantum strangeness. Individual particles, such as those photons passing through the slits of the double-slit experiment, are actually influenced by what will happen to them next (i.e.,

We're drawn to artwork that subtly deviates from our predictions of the world—“Too much prediction error is unpleasant or even disturbing; none or too little is boring"--and new art movements may emerge as our predictions adjust to (and get bored with) the new images around us. (We initially reject cutting-edge art because it's too far afield from

need to include the putty-like malleability of memory, and the ability of the imagination to put vivid visual-sensory flesh on the bare bones of passing thoughts or things we read, within our account of precognition and how it might operate. In fact, it would help make sense of the characteristic obliquity of precognition.

Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form.

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like.

it is individuals at the top of social hierarchies who set cultural agendas. As such, the Viennese preoccupation with the allure of nerves was not a trivial phenomenon. It was a glimpse of the future. A prophecy concerning the shape of the modern mind.

In her diary, [Woolf] recollects Strachey saying at some point, "We can only live if we see through illusion," a statement whose phrasing she finds incommensurate with the space it occupies in her mind. It is not only his words she finds there, she explains: "This saying of Lytton's has always come pictorially, with heat, flowers, grass, summer, &