Discovering Yourself

Make things and you will discover yourself. The act of creation reveals who you are.

Love's Goal

Love seeks not only to fight for the good, but constantly to be reconciled with the ones we have had to oppose as we struggle for the good.
C. Stephen Evans

God's Favorites

The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he made so many of them.
Abraham Lincoln

The Gardeners

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust

Expanding life

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anais Nin

Easy Street

Life only gets easier when you’re going downhill.

The sum of life

Life is painting a picture, not creating a sum.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Course Corrections

Life is about change, whether good or bad, and being able to adjust accordingly.
Okechukwu Keke

Our Moment

Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it will not always be so.
Mary Jean Irion.

Taking a Refresher

Laughter is like an instant vacation.

Deleting Memory with a Pill

The careful application of inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. Being able to control memory doesn’t simply give us admin access to our brains. It gives us the power to shape nearly every aspect of our lives. There’s something terrifying about this. Long ago, humans accepted the uncontrollable nature of memory; we can’t choose what to remember or forget. But now it appears that we’ll soon gain the ability to alter our sense of the past. The problem with eliminating pain, of course, is that pain is often educational. We learn from our regrets and mistakes; wisdom is not free. If our past becomes a playlist—a collection of tracks we can edit with ease—then how will we resist the temptation to erase the unpleasant ones? Even more troubling, it’s easy to imagine a world where people don’t get to decide the fate of their own memories. Those scenarios aside, the fact is we already tweak our memories—we just do it badly. Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey.

Jonah Lehrer 
Wired Magazine

Choosing

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Victor Frankle

Last Gasp

The last act of a dying organization is to get out a new rule and enlarged edition of the rulebook.

Painful Memories

So many of our assumptions about the human mind—what it is, why it breaks, and how it can be healed—are rooted in a mistaken belief about how experience is stored in the brain. According to a recent survey, 63 percent of Americans believe that human memory “works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later.” We want the past to persist, because the past gives us permanence. It tells us who we are and where we belong. But what if your most cherished recollections are also the most ephemeral thing in your head?

Because our memories are formed by the act of remembering them, controlling the conditions under which they are recalled can actually change their content. The… worst time to recall a traumatic event is when people are flush with terror and grief. They’ll still have all the bodily symptoms of fear—racing pulse, clammy hands, tremors—so the intense emotional memory is reinforced. It’s the opposite of catharsis. But when people wait a few weeks before discussing an event… they give their negative feelings a chance to fade. The volume of trauma is dialed down; the body returns to baseline. As a result, the emotion is no longer reconsolidated in such a stressed state. Subjects will still remember the terrible event, but the feelings of pain associated with it will be rewritten in light of what they feel now.

“When therapy heals, when it helps reduce the impact of negative memories, it’s really because of reconsolidation,” neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux says. “Therapy allows people to rewrite their own memories while in a safe space, guided by trained professionals…”

Jonah Lehrer
Wired Magazine

Just Because

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
Thomas Edison