Hello, bagel bakers of the world! Before you settle into a defensive position in preemptive response to the criticism you anticipate, recognize that I wouldn’t waste my time critiquing what I don’t care a good deal about. The bagel is a venerable thing. On innumerable high school mornings, the blink-fast preparation and portability of the…
People without progeny have difficulty conceiving of what it would be like to have a child. This is wildly unexpected. It seems their prediction effort should yield something more veracious, more definitive than an ever-receding mirage of uncertainty, especially since the future they’re trying to imagine is, in many ways, simply a reciprocal of the…
It’s difficult to alter, without use of chemicals, patterns of behavior that chemical use cultivated–so difficult, in fact, that one of the most effective methods relies on the supposition that chemicals are involved. And in an important sense, the supposition is correct. The Placebo Effect, in many cases potent and sustainable, results from a deluge…
In spite of the facetiously cynical opinion, bolstered by empirical truth, that concludes last week’s post, I think most people would prefer to understand what it is they believe than to opt for the ignorant alternative. Besides the contentment afforded those who answer their internal inquiries, introspective individuals are also well-equipped to defend their beliefs…
It’s clear that the capacity of a guest speaker to influence their audience depends not singly on their message but also on their delivery. More opaque is the extent of what this could mean. Acknowledging the existence of a matter little understood–an important step, I’ll not deny–is far from offering understanding, yet the inanity of…
Depending on the duration and intensity of what one had involved oneself in, emergence from an Immersive Experience will be accompanied by a Cognitive Transformation Period, lasting hours, days, perhaps weeks. To be clear, the associated neural reconfiguration should be thought of as occurring in addition to rather than instead of the ever-present ebbs and…
Consider deep space and the following category of image will be noticeably without representation among the scenes you call to mind: the standing-on-its-surface view of an alphanumeric-labeled planet. A Google image search confirms that the visuals we conjure are largely a reflection of the types of images satellites have dutifully transmitted back to Earth for…
The concept of opposites is described to children as representing the maximum dissimilarity possible between two things that share a relation—hot and cold are opposites sharing a relation in temperature, approaching and receding are opposites sharing a relation in proximity over time, etc. So when some of these children become adults and find themselves contemplating…
Provided Eastern ideas of unity are temporarily dismissed, we can adopt an individualistic perspective and imagine there to be a distinct, if porous, division between our internal world and the world that exists outside us—wondrously, the latter is as unique to each person as is the former. We can then speak of an event’s origin…
We postpone taking actions that facilitate our comfort in cases where immediately obliging the desire would result in others’ discomfort. This is polite behavior. For example, you won’t see a sober passenger take a piss on the subway. What’s happening implicitly in many of these cases, including the example above, is the establishment of a…
You must be logged in to post a comment.