Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of th...
When Olivier had been taken away Gamache had sat back down and stared at the sack. what could be worse than Chaos, Despair, War? What would even the Mountain flee from? Gamache had given it a lot of thought. What haunted people even, perhaps especial...
The Sunlight on the Garden The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold, When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon i...
I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a na...
If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and o...
I’ve never gotten a love letter before. But reading these notes like this, one after the other, it feels like I have. It’s like . . . it’s like there’s only ever been Peter. Like everyone else that came before him, they were all to prepare me...
Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interes...
Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make...
Did you see Grace is back with us?" Megan did see me. She saw me jump off a cliff and crawl under an Iranian fence. Megan has seen plenty. And I can't help but hold my breath, waiting on her answer. "Hi," Megan says, turning to me. "Welcome home." Ho...
People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics ...
We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, river...
Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artif...
But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the...
...we begin to understand marriage as the insistently practical union that it is. We begin to understand it, that is, as it is represented in the traditional marriage ceremony, those vows being only a more circumstantial and practical way of saying w...
By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful lab...
An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack....
This is where you first failed us. You gave us minds and told us not to think. You gave us curiosity and put a booby-trapped tree right in front of us. You gave us sex and told us not to do it. You played three-card monte with our souls from day one,...
But it will be asked: What is the force and power of the blessings and curses of men, even if these men be such giants as Plato and Aristotle? Does truth become more true because Aristotle blesses it, or does it become error because Plato curses it? ...
In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward acc...
I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site year...
We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only d...
