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…
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…
In 1966, the greatest Poe scholar to have ever lived, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, retired from his teaching post at Hunter College, elated to finally possess the leisure to pursue in earnest his long-held dream of compiling a definitive edition of Poe’s complete works. Two years later, at age 69, he had all but finished the…
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…
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…
For those who are curious about the subjective and malleable nature of reality, yet wish to abstain from experimenting with hallucinogens, consider this sober-friendly mental-tease: Stand facing a digital countdown at an angle, such that the two rightmost vertical segments of the 7 segment display are hidden from view. When the number lit is 9,…
If you pour a cup of tomato sauce into a 50 lb bag of chili powder and thoroughly mix, the spiciness of the combination will be very nearly equal to the spiciness of chili powder alone. This exemplifies one of three regimes which, together, I believe, account for all action–>effect pairs. I’ll call these regimes…
Two helicopters hovered near each other in the sky this evening. It was more than twice as noteworthy a sight than a single helicopter. It was, therefore, an affirmation of the validity of the sometimes true notion that the Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts (WIGTTSOIP). In this universe of duality, however,…
Before discarding as completely useless a belief you don’t believe in, consider its worth as entertainment. Unproveable yet deeply held convictions, and variations on them, can represent fertile ground for quality daydreaming. Consider the premise of an all-knowing god who orchestrates everything, from people’s decisions to where on the ground a falling leaf will land….
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