“The things that we do for love is ugly, mad, full of seat and regret.”
“A magia do primeiro amor é inegável. Assim como o fascínio de amar uma mulher inesquecível.
E como negar a atração de céus noturnos, estrelas cadentes, e a maneira como Elle se iluminava sempre que olhava para elas?”
Source: The Promise of Stardust
“A groundswell of unease, like a rogue wave, rises and crashes over my consciousness.”
Source: The Foster Mother
“Strong evidence for a genetic language ability comes from the observation that children who are not exposed to any speech, but are able to interact with each other, will invent their own language, which is complex in syntax and meaning. This has been seen in deaf children who were not exposed to sign language. Amazingly, as long as they had someone to interact with, they managed to communicate complex thoughts by inventing their own system of signing.”
Source: A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
“[...] Many people put off doing what they love, or what they know they need to do for themselves, until later in life, trying to get the world's demands out of the way first. What a grave mistake! [...]”
Source: A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
“[...] A diet of constant, stimulating activity is the best prescription for our troubles. It keeps the brain in a state of constant change, flow, confirmation, and anticipation, thereby reducing the noise, fragility, self-doubt, and stagnation with which we all have to contend.”
Source: A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
“The debate over 'nature or nurture' has raged for two thousand years. [...]
In reality there is no debate. Most of who we are is a result of the interaction of our genes and our experiences. In some cases, the genes are more important, while in others the environment is more crucial. We tend to oversimplify because we want to identify a single cause of a particular problem, so we can pour our efforts into one 'cure'.”
“...it is easier to speak of what God is not, rather than what God is.”
Source: Finding God
“Loftus learned for herself how realistic false memories can seem when she had an upsetting experience several years ago. She was shocked when, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that thirty years earlier, when her mother drowned in a pool, she had been the one who discovered the body. Loftus, who was fourteen when the drowning occurred, always believed that she had never seen her mother's dead body. Indeed, she remembered little about the death itself. She recounts what happened the next in her book 'The Myth of Repressed Memory'. Almost immediately after her uncle's revelation, 'the memories began to drift back, like the crisp, piney smoke from evening camp fires. My mother, dressed in her nightgown, was floating face down. . . . I started screaming. I remembered the police cars, their lights flashing'.
A few days later, she writes, 'my brother called to tell me that my uncle had made a mistake. Now he remembered (and other relatives confirmed) that Aunt Pearl had found my mother's body.' This shocked Loftus even more than her uncle's false revelation. If someone so specially trained as she is to recognize fallible memories could suddenly believe her own false memory, just think how readily the average person can be fooled.”
Source: A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
“One interesting new theory, developed by Edward and Carol Diener at the University of Illinois in Urbana, involves the notion of a 'set point'. According to this theory, people have an inborn set point for mood, similar to the set point for weight. The set point is your basic level of happiness or sadness, which is subject to ups and downs of life but will inevitably return to some kind of base line, even in people who experience dramatic changes in their life circumstances. [...] In some people, however, set points decline with age.”
Source: A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain