Given two paths, of equal length, between where one is and where one wishes to be, the path that can offer the traveler the perception of making comparatively superior progress toward their final destination goal is the path that will more often than not be chosen. It was an episode of introspection, in which I…
The placebo effect demonstrates the mind’s capacity to outperform a given treatment. Within contextual limits, one can deduce from it the impact on the body of believing to be true something that is false. I’m interested here in a related concept that follows quite naturally: what is the impact of believing to be true something…
What better topic for the first post in nearly a year than a reflection on the evolution of one’s writing? It’s worth noting that I’ve given only cursory thought to this matter–I have no map with which to speculate where this post will lead, and any conclusions will be reached purely by means of its…
Last December, smiling wryly, a friend asked, “What is a hallucination?” Judging by the way in which the query was posed–the inflections as well as the nonverbal cues–it was clear he had already settled the question in his mind, probably years prior, and was asking to satisfy his curiosity of my opinion on the matter…
Imagine this yellow circle is a young man named Jack. Jack is friends with a young blue circle man named Jim. Being friends, Jack and Jim regularly share in each other’s company and engage in behaviors typical of friendship, such as discussing matters of mutual interest, jointly participating in recreational activities, requesting assistance of one…
Solitary walking is conducive to clearing the mind and settling into contemplation. The same is true of bicycling, albeit only for a narrower range of circumstances. The same is true of driving, albeit only for an even narrower range of circumstances. One could summarize this trend with the statement that the potential of a particular…
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…
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…
When we’re surrounded by what we want, we cease to want it. The trivial explanation is that the desire to have is incompatible with the condition of having. “Listen hear, little nipper! You can’t want to have what you already keep!” This is, however, a pathetic, semantics-fueled avoidance of the following truth: when one is…
People can be led to second-guess themselves when information presented to them differs slightly, in conceivable ways, from their expectations or beliefs. It’s straight-forward to state that the likelihood of second-guessing one’s self grows with the region of overlap between what one had held to be true and the new information.* And for anyone doubting…
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