Debbie Foster

To Robert, his negative thoughts were the other stronger guy, the one overpowering him. He decided to just drop the rope—to exist alongside the negative thoughts but to stop resisting them. Avoiding discomfort wasn't making him any less uncomfortable; it just mired him in weary inertia.

This meant that he resolved to move forward despite his

The basic modus operandi of a neural network—in which information is repeatedly transformed non-linearly, to map inputs onto outputs—is a loose description of how computation unfolds in biological brains. Attention (in the transformer) and short-term memory (in recurrent networks or LSTMs) may now be critical tools in deep learning, but they have

IF BOTTOM-UP ATTENTION asks, “What’s the obvious thing to home in on here?” top-down attention asks, “What do you want to concentrate on?” Because this active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort, the harder you concentrate, the better you’ll attend, but the longer you persist, the likelier you’ll fade.

The best way to understand your dreams is to study them in a series over time.

Those knobs or wads of used gum, with their genital shapes—they're tiny monuments to contemplation, really. Each one memorializes a distinct passage of mind. The thoughts are flown, but the gum remains. Get it on your shoe, wrap it round your heart, and think of me.

One common observation is that psychedelics destabilize longrange cortical communication patterns and reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus in the posterior regions of the neocortex. This is the compatible with our knowledge of the brains of people trained in mindfulness. It appears that the less these midline structures

The unsafe person is in a state of situationally induced paranoia; they are put in a position of terrible alertness', as Sedgwick observes in her essay on paranoia. … The threatened individual can only ensure their safety by feeling unsafe, by maintaining a constant state of anticipatory vigilance. This is the emotional logic of the threatened

Instead of focusing on a destination, he simply moves in the direction of his curiosity

I thought about my old feeling of too-muchness, and what it would mean to surrender to that "softness and permeability" that Ehrenreich describes. To be permeable to the tides of story and history, to let everything that feels like too much flow freely through the mind and body. This is the way to live joyfully and defiantly, whether in politics or