The initial visit to a foreign country understandably presents generous opportunity for neurogenesis, as the visitor is potentially confronted with an abundance of new circumstances that their existing neural network is ill-equipped to process. So it was for me during my initial trip to Russia, which represented the first time I was immersed in an…
It wasn’t until several months after my final return from Russia, an event marking the end of a string of short-duration business trips to Moscow and Irkutsk, that the novelty of having traveled to those destinations began to wear off; as it did, the possibility grew that the impressions I was forming of my visits…
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…
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…
Winter, whose last breath began here yesterday, is forecast to continue until it froths at the mouth with characteristic New England spittle snowfall tomorrow. For a season on its death bed, its strength exceeds expectation–vernal equinox be damned. The wind, its notes sustained and hollow, lends itself to juxtaposition with the tranquility of our apartment,…
During a recent visit to the vault* of unshared musings, I discovered the pen-sketched framework of what I expound on here. It is common, I’m sure, when examining for the first time in years an artifact of one’s own creation, to be cognizant of a mild and sustained excitement that results from experiencing the fragments…
Many behaviors which initially appear incongruent reveal themselves, on closer examination, not to be. Often, such discoveries are made possible by differentiating the circumstances surrounding the behaviors in question. For example, one may observe the unconcern with which people converse in crowded places and wonder at why a lone stranger approaching on a hiking trail…
Phrases of the sort “words fall short” and “it was indescribable” impute a fault to language that it has no responsibility to bear. Before going further, so as to establish a foundation on which to build, a premise all should find acceptable: the inability to convey an experience to another, to a degree that recreates…
Why is a grapefruit known as such, given how dissimilar it is to a grape? More importantly, why is the question framed so? It is only a small perturbation that ripples through the query’s character if the edible nouns swap places, yet the question as written is more likely to be asked than its variant….