Mary Martin

This Camera Takes 1,000 Years to Capture a Single Photograph

Per this framework, main ingredient to meaningful & flourishing lives: Expand "the phenotypic bound on the amount of surprise people can tolerate in their lives," or: inhabit the goldilocks zone of uncertainty. Fun paper by @PredictiveLife & @JulianKiverste1. Few other riffs:... See more

When people suppressed their fearful thoughts, as opposed to vividly imagining them, they were markedly less anxious about those thoughts later. They also rated their fears as less vivid and remembered them less.

In the case of a monk who has attained the cessation of perception and feeling ... his vitality is not exhausted, his heat has not subsided, and his faculties are exceptionally clear.

One problem is that consciousness means different things to different people. For example, some researchers focus on the subjective experience — what it is like to be you or me. Others study its function — cognitive processes and behaviours enabled by being conscious. These differences muddy attempts to compare ideas.

The more you build your self-conception

on memory, which is notoriously unreliable, and the more you try to give yourself an identity

by constructing a narrative of your life, the less likely you are to understand who and what

you really are.

Smell has the power to evoke strong emotions and trigger vivid memories, making it an ideal candidate for enhancing children’s experiences in a living enactment of the story on a trail within the museum.