Encoded Quotes

Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity

The greatest wisdom is in simplicity. Love, respect, tolerance, sharing, gratitude, forgiveness. It's not complex or elaborate. The real knowledge is free. It's encoded in your DNA. All you need is within you. Great teachers have said that from the beginning. Find your heart, and you will find your way.

I'm eighteen. I'm genetically encoded to fight with my parents.

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity -- self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness -- are the least attractive in a friend.

Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” He shook his head, dismissing it. “It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.” I snorted. He underestimated me. Ratthi said, “The one where the colony’s solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?” Again, I couldn’t help it. I said, “She didn’t kill him, that’s a fucking lie.” Ratthi turned to Mensah. “It’s watching it.

The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everyhing else we ove--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.

The greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many.

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.

This is why, in a nutshell, advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.

He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.

For every life I can’t save during my shift, one more drop of blood becomes a part of me. No matter how many times I wash my hands, our martyrs’ blood seeps beneath my skin, into my cells. By now it’s probably encoded in my DNA.

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.

Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love-everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires'-it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.

For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain. But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end? That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed. Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price. But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?

History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the week from the will of the strong, and the 'mutant' from being annihilated by the 'normal'.

So how bad is the world? How bad. The world's truth constitutes a /vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom? p.377

Every decoding is another encoding.

while probabilities encode our beliefs about a static world, causality tells us whether and how probabilities change when the world changes, be it by intervention or by act of imagination.

Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.

Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.

Take a good long look at The Lord’s Prayer. It’s all ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. There is no ‘me’, ‘I’ or ‘mine’ anywhere.

Time is an encoded pattern of fabric woven with information & energy.

The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.

In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world.

Perhaps the body has its own memory system, like the invisible meridian lines those Chinese acupuncturists always talk about. Perhaps the body is unforgiving, perhaps every cell, every muscle and fragment of bone remembers each and every assault and attack. Maybe the pain of memory is encoded into our bone marrow and each remembered grievance swims in our bloodstream like a hard, black pebble. After all, the body, like God, moves in mysterious ways. From the time she was in her teens, Sera has been fascinated by this paradox - how a body that we occupy, that we have worn like a coat from the moment of our birth - from before birth, even - is still a stranger to us. After all, almost everything we do in our lives is for the well-being of the body: we bathe daily, polish our teeth, groom our hair and fingernails; we work miserable jobs in order to feed and clothe it; we go to great lengths to protect it from pain and violence and harm. And yet the body remains a mystery, a book that we have never read. Sera plays with this irony, toys with it as if it were a puzzle: How, despite our lifelong preoccupation with our bodies, we have never met face-to-face with our kidneys, how we wouldn't recognize our own liver in a row of livers, how we have never seen our own heart or brain. We know more about the depths of the ocean, are more acquainted with the far corners of outer space than with our own organs and muscles and bones. So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties. But if this is true, surely the body also remembers each kindness, each kiss, each act of compassion? Surely this is our salvation, our only hope - that joy and love are also woven into the fabric of the body, into each sinewy muscle, into the core of each pulsating cell?

With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.

Look at any randomly selected piece of your world. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect’s wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, colour, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for the future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful.

The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.

Emotions are signs of our commitment to others; emotions are encoded into our bodies and brains; emotions are our moral gut, the source of our most important moral intuitions.

Turning the pages of this encoded codex, I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You're meant to scale the walls, stone by stone.

Sound is the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight as a single vocal quaver or icy harpsichord interjection.

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness.

People can learn to control and change their behavior, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. The body keeps the score: If trauma is encoded in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatized children are concerned, the last things we should be cutting from school schedules are the activities that can do precisely that: chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, and other forms of joyful engagement.

Both the giving and receiving of love is encoded within our deepest physiology and is all-important. This must not be taken for granted. Its expressions in our life – or lack and denial thereof – contribute substantially to our ultimate personal success, satisfaction, and quality of life.

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.

We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language, too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.

I don't know if she was born this goddamn fearless, if it's encoded in her DNA, gifted to her by her flawed bloodline, or if it's something life taught her, something molded into her all those years she was unknowingly on the run. I wonder if she got that from her father, or if it was me who caused her bravery.

:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.

The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle.

It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code.

Yes, it is out of control. It is a loud and livid objection to the kinds of control that have long been in place in a nation built by white men who, when they angrily broke free of imperialist control themselves, promptly encoded protections of liberty and independence only for themselves, building their new nation on slavery and the oppression of women, on the legal and civic subjugation of that nation’s majority.

The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.

The Arabian obsession with the beauty of their language had ironically blinded them to its core purpose. Their poets were masters of rhetoric who failed to inspire action in real life, having reduced their heritage to fancy yet hollow words. Their audiences were fanatically devoted to proper diction— ready to impulsively plunge a dagger over an inadvertent wrong term—yet otherwise wallowed passively in stagnation. Unable to access the latent wisdom encoded in their language, Arabs failed to act as masters of their own fate.

Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge.

The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. To make a metaphor, after all, is to describe something in terms of what it is not, the better to apprehend what it is.

A glance can both submit and subvert; it can be sharp or shy, scornful or adoring; it can be a near cousin to scrutiny – but it almost always assumes a degree of mutually encoded knowledge. A spark is struck and apprehended; the head turns on it's spinal axis; the shoulders freeze; the eyes are the only busy part of the body, simultaneously receiving and sending out information, so that a glance becomes more than a glance. It is a weapon, a command, or a sigh of acquiescence.

The second half of the twentieth century was an information-technology era, based on the idea that all information could be encoded by binary digits—known as bits—and all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches.

Dissociative identity disorder is conceptualized as a childhood onset, posttraumatic developmental disorder in which the child is unable to consolidate a unified sense of self. Detachment from emotional and physical pain during trauma can result in alterations in memory encoding and storage. In turn, this leads to fragmentation and compartmentalization of memory and impairments in retrieving memory.2,4,19 Exposure to early, usually repeated trauma results in the creation of discrete behavioral states that can persist and, over later development, become elaborated, ultimately developing into the alternate identities of dissociative identity disorder.

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!

In twenty-first-century Britain, we've linked singing with talent, and we've got that fundamentally wrong. The right to sing is an absolute, regardless of how it sounds to the outside world. We sing because we must. We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets our hearts soar with the notes we let out. We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts. In song, we can console our children while they are still too young our rusty voices, and we can find shortcuts to ecstasy while performing the mundane duty of a daily shower or scrubbing down the kitchen after yet another meal.

Traumatic memories have a number of unusual qualities. They are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story….[R]ather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images. It

The whole fabric of honey bee society depends on communication—on an innate ability to send and receive messages, to encode and decode information. —The Honey Bee

By a time capsule, I mean any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history.

feelings are “true” if the judgments they encode are accurate

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA. —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

What is the difference between a person and a book? We can know the truth of neither. Both are encoded things seeking to make themselves clear.

The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

consciousness (hypoarousal). When individuals are extremely hypoaroused they may not encode much of what is happening, may feel the event is not real, and may experience emotional and bodily anesthesia. To the extent that individuals nonetheless recall the events, all of these experiences make it more difficult for them to eventually fully integrate the experience.

Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover—in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal—what lies beneath the surface of the human label. What we recognize as beauty may be a language for encoding truth, a memetic mechanism for transmitting it, as native to the universe as mathematics—the one perceived by the optical eye, the other by the mind's eye.

Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in "Make America Great Again." Beneath the impossible promises -- that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn't even real -- is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.

For women, the boundaries of acceptability are strict, and they are many. We must be seductive but pure, quiet but not aloof, fragile but industrious, and always, always small. We must not be too successful, too ambitious, too independent, too self-centered—and when we can’t manage all the contradictory restrictions, we are turned into grotesques. Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women, in centuries’ worth of stories, because stories are a way to encode these expectations and pass them on.

Ohh,' said the girl with a sad tilt of her head. It was a response Sejal would hear a lot in the following weeks and which she would eventully come to understand meant, 'Ohh, India, that must be so hard for you, and I know because I read this book over the summer called The Fig Tree (which is actually set in Pakistan but I don't realize there's a difference) about a girl whose parents sell her to a sandal maker because everyone's poor and they don't care about girls there, and I bet that's why you're in our country even, and now everyone's probably being mean to you just because of 9/11, but not me although I'll still be watching you a little too closely on the bus later because what if you're just here to kill Americans?' There was a lot of information encoded in that one vowel sound, so Sejal missed most of it at first.

We are information, gentlemen; all living things are. However, we are lucky enough to be encoded in matter itself, not running in some abstracted system as patterns of particles or standing waves of probability.

It’s thought that this heightened sensitivity to similarities and differences during interleaved practice leads to the encoding of more complex and nuanced representations of the study material—a better understanding of how specimens or types of problems are distinctive and why they call for a different interpretation or solution.

The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion.

What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed to protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats.

According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why.

If…an infant, especially one born with a genetically-encoded altered neurophysiologic reactivity, does not have adequate experiences of being part of an open dynamic system with an emotionally responsive adult human, its corticolimbic organization will be poorly capable of coping with the stressful chaotic dynamics that are inherent in all human relationships. Such a system tends to become static and closed, and invested in defensive structures to guard against anticipated interactive assaults that potentially trigger disorganizing and emotionally painful psychobiological states. Due to its avoidance of novel situations and diminished capacity to cope with challenging situations, it does not expose itself to new socioemotional learning experiences that are required for the continuing experience-dependent growth of the right brain. This structural limitation, in turn, negatively impacts the future trajectory of self-organization.

Prior to then it was believed that black holes were just cosmic cookie monsters, swallowing everything that came within their gravitational clutches.

So how bad is the world? How bad. The world's truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom? p.377

put another way, electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper order from which it sprang. A piece of holographic film and the image it generates are also an example of an implicate and explicate order. The film is an implicate order because the image encoded in its interference patterns is a hidden totality enfolded throughout the whole. The hologram projected from the film is an explicate order because it represents the unfolded and perceptible version of the image.

I don't know what I would do without you. I don't know what I will do without you. I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar.

all humans have an innate capacity to heal from traumatic experiences. We as a species are genetically encoded with the capacity to heal ourselves. If we did not possess this ability, our species would have become extinct shortly after we were born. Not only can we heal from traumatic experiences, but trauma itself has been part of the natural evolutionary process of our species, and all traumatized individuals have access to this natural healing method that is genetically encoded within them.

Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It's encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory.

Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards. This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors—if we take control of the habit loop—we can force those bad tendencies into the background, just as Lisa Allen did after her Cairo trip. And once someone creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring the doughnuts becomes as automatic as any other habit.

Aren't we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it's you and I who are here - winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and water formed; it was able to hold an atmosphere. And in this place, on this small blue rock, innumerable miracles: redwoods, computers, stingrays, pianos, you and me.

We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness-an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.

The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings. Some of these choices were no doubt made with the best intentions. Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer.

The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.

Sex, one of the most complex of human traits, is unlikely to be encoded by multiple genes. Rather, a single gene, buried rather precariously in the Y chromosome, must be the master regulator of maleness.I Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: we barely made it.

Think back to when you were a student. Someone likely told you to get a good night’s sleep and to eat a healthy breakfast before a test or final exam. The theory is, you need to be fresh to perform well. However, while getting sound sleep the night before a test is a good idea, it is too late to help you on the test. The real benefit comes from getting good sleep as you learn throughout the year, so the information can be encoded in your memory each night. If you file everything away properly as you go along, this knowledge will be there for you when you need it most.

Some ideas are not really new but keep having to be affirmed from the ground up, over and over. One of these is the apparently simple idea that women are as intrinsically human as men, that neither women nor men are merely the enlargement of a contact sheet of genetic encoding, biological givens. Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather, our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around us.

There is data [on race and intelligence]. My claim is that it doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't enough work; there aren't enough people who have done the work – and the definition...I mean, trust me: "heritable" is a serious problem. Because...for example, let's say that there was a belief that people who had a brow ridge, or something, were stupid. And that belief was widespread. And that brow ridge was genetically encoded, and it resulted in people going into the world and facing discrimination in school, let's say, because the brow ridge connoted to the teachers that they were not likely to be intelligent, and therefore they were given simpler lessons; they got dumbtracked or something like that. That would show up as a genetically heritable difference in intelligence between brow-ridged people and non-brow-ridged people. That does not mean that it was encoded in the genome and that it was the brain that was blueprinted...what it means is that some feature that was encoded in the genome caused the environment to interact with the individual in a way that then produced a difference in intellect. [...] It is so early in the study of this stuff, we really don't know. And the taboo nature of those questions is causing a vacuum that is being filled with an artificially pure (and probably not correct) perspective.

Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist', i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible. However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings' lives finally become a function of the images they create. Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world 'out there', which meanwhile itself becomes like an image - a context of scenes, of states of things. This reversal of the function of the image can be called 'idolatry'; we can observe the process at work in the present day: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our 'reality' and turning it into a 'global image scenario'. Essentially this is a question of 'amnesia'. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination.

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already. But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.

Thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think about the color black and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, that’s a function of a cascade of electrical impulses rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain, which links a set of neurons that encode the concept of coffee with others containing the concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness. That much scientists know. But how exactly a collection of cells could “contain” a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience.

Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance—or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.

or any DNA chain could encode.

A looming ethical issue, everyone at the table agrees, is that gene editing could exacerbate, and even encode, inequality in society.

Gene, protein, function, and fate were strung in a chain: one chemical alteration in one base pair in DNA was sufficient to "encode" a radical change in human fate.

software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.”33

The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash.

gene (information -> encodes protein (form) -> enables function

Most obvious is that DNA may be only one of many ways that biological information is encoded, and it is hard to see how the aliens would know in advance what terrestrial life uses.

The circular flow of biological information - Genes encode RNAs to build Proteins to form/regulate Organisms that sense Environments that influence Proteins, RNA that regulate Genes.

When companies require individuals to fit a narrow definition of acceptable behavior encoded into a machine learning model, they will reproduce harmful patterns of exclusion and suspicion.

Jesus, that master of the universe never goes away, does he?’ ‘What the hell do you expect?’ he said, his voice no longer mellow or casual or weary in his mildly contemptuous way, but suddenly razor-sharp. ‘You think I’m going to change ? You think that hot sex with you is going to alter my life? Burn away thirty-two fucking years of encoded distrust and the poisonous shadow…

The late Chuck Missler would often describe the sixty-six books of the Bible, penned by more than forty different people over a period of several thousand years, as a highly integrated message system from an extraterrestrial source outside of time. Like a hologram, a facet of the message is encoded on every page that, when illumined by the light of the Spirit, projects a multidimensional portrait of its divine Author and communicates his plan to redeem, reconcile, and restore the sons and daughters of Adam to the glory of their original estate in the family of God.

The Concept of a “Panalogy” Douglas Lenat 1998: “If you pluck an isolated sentence from a book, it will likely lose some or all of its meaning—i.e., if you show it out of context to someone else, they will likely miss some or all of its intended significance. Thus, much of the meaning of a represented piece of information derives from the context in which the information is encoded and decoded. This can be a tremendous advantage. To the extent that the two thinking beings are sharing a common rich context, they may utilize terse signals to communicate complex thoughts.

Units of hereditary information, encoded in DNA and packaged on chromosomes, are transmitted through sperm and egg into an embryo, and from the embryo to every living cell in an organism’s body.

Lena Ella Haloway Tiddle." I pronounce her full name, very slowly, partly because I need to reassure myself of her existence—Lena, my friend, the worried one, the one who always pleaded for safety first, who now makes secret appointments to meet with boys. "You have some explaining to do." "Hana, you remember Alex," Lena says weakly, as though that—the fact of my remembering him—explains anything. "Oh, I remember Alex," I say. "What I don't remember is why Alex is here. " Lena makes a few unconvincing noises of excuse. Her eyes fly to his. A message passes between them. I can feel it, encoded and indecipherable, like a zip of electricity, as though I've just passed too close to one of the border fences. My stomach turns. Lena and I used to be able to speak like that.

Hitler/Himler research into genetics and mutigenerational families led them to believe that they could control the future by controlling society. Operating on the philosophy that secret knowledge equals power, they would keep pertinent facts from the people and alter their natural evolutionary process. They knew that traumas like incest and torture left people highly suggestible and easily led. After three generations of incest, abuse, and ignorance it becomes genetically encoded and people are born more compliant. It was believed that this could be a formula for mass mind control.

DNA doesn’t do much work. It mainly stays at home in the nucleus of our cells, not venturing forth. Its primary activity is protecting the information it encodes and occasionally replicating itself.

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.

When we use a measuring tape, we are using a system of numbers that is human invented. What are the birds using? And further, how are they storing it in memory? To be stored in memory the measurements have to be encoded in some form and that form has to have an internal consistency to it. In other words it has to possess the same kind of structural integrity as our system of mathematical measurement.

John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet’s experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness! The brain has acted before its person is conscious of it. Not only that, from looking at the scan, they can make a prediction about what the person is going to do. The implications of this are rather staggering.

Case in point: Warnings on cigarette packages can increase a smoker’s urge to light up. A 2009 study found that death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers—exactly what public health officials hope for. Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers’ default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn’t logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain. Stress triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight. It doesn’t help that the smoker is—of course—staring at a pack of cigarettes as he reads the warning. So even as a smoker’s brain encodes the words “WARNING: Cigarettes cause cancer” and grapples with awareness of his own mortality, another part of his brain starts screaming, “Don’t worry, smoking a cigarette will make you feel better!

As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them.

The self is not an immutable entity that lurks behind the windows of the eyes, looking out into the world and controlling the body as a pilot controls a plane. The experience of being me, or of being you, is a perception itself – or better, a collection of perceptions – a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared towards keeping your body alive. And this, I believe, is all we need to be, to be who we are.

This pointing-hand gesture—with its index finger and thumb extended upward—is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears all over the world in ancient art. This same gesture appears in three of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous encoded masterpieces—The Last Supper, Adoration of the Magi, and Saint John the Baptist. It’s a symbol of man’s mystical connection to God.” As above, so below. The madman’s bizarre choice of words was starting to feel more relevant now. “I’ve never seen it before,” Sato said. Then watch ESPN, Langdon thought, always amused to see professional athletes point skyward in gratitude to God after a touchdown or home run. He wondered how many knew they were continuing a pre-Christian mystical tradition of acknowledging the mystical power above, which, for one brief moment, had transformed them into a god capable of miraculous feats.

Have you heard the story of the widow’s mite?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘For years, as a schoolboy, I turned it over and over in my head. The poor widow’s small gift was more precious than the rich man’s large one. Okay. Fine. I understood the message. I could see the dignity it gave to every act of charity. But I could see a whole lot more encoded in that parable, and those other things wouldn’t go away. ‘I could see a religion which cared more about feeling good than doing good. A religion which valued the pleasure of giving – or the pain – more than any tangible effect. A religion which put … saving your own soul through good works far above their worldly consequences.

In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent. Such people are immensely dangerous, and for the health of our public world we need to become alert to the compelling power of lumping: having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.

over 80 percent of noncoding DNA is involved with regulating the production and assembly of gene-encoded proteins. A major discovery also found that “dark” DNA contains mechanisms by which environmental information can be used to modify the readout of protein-encoding genes. It turns out that dark DNA uses epigenetic mechanisms that enable a human cell with 19,000 gene blueprints to code for over a hundred thousand different protein molecules!

The right to sing is an absolute, regardless of how it sounds to the outside world. We sing because we must. We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets our hearts soar with the notes we let out. We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts. In song, we can console our children while they are still too young to judge our rusty voices, and we can find shortcuts to ecstasy while performing the mundane duty of a daily shower or scrubbing down the kitchen after yet another meal.

To leave behind what is considered normal amidst social convention and to create a new mind requires being an individual—for any species. Being uncompromising to one’s vision of a new and improved self and abandoning one’s prior ways of being may also be encoded in living tissue for new generations; history remembers individuals for such elegance. True evolution, then, is using the genetic wisdom of past experiences as raw materials for new challenges. What

I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be. My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form. If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.

... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.

Emotions are the complex conjunction of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretive processes; they are thus situated at the threshold where the noncultural is encoded in culture, where body cognition, and culture converge and merge.

A small segment of DNA that encodes a gene is transcribed into a snippet of RNA, which then travels to the manufacturing region of the cell. There this “messenger RNA” facilitates the assembly of the proper sequence of amino acids to make a specified protein.

When an action, positive or negative, is repeated for three generations it becomes genetically encoded. It becomes an inborn autogenic response. If a monkey collects ants on a honey-coated stick, for example, and other monkeys see he is eating more than they, they copy him. By the time the hundredth monkey begins collecting ants on a honey-coated stick, the added energy creates an ideological breakthrough that affects the whole society. When the whole society of monkeys does this for three generations, it becomes their culture. According to Ken Keyes Hundredth Monkey studies, when that hundredth monkey’s added energy creates the ideological breakthrough, evolution occurs. Even monkeys on other continents start collecting ants on honey-coated sticks without copying. They are born knowing.

Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.

[O]ur percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from [the environment], but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound.

...'Pro-life' encodes too much propaganda for me: that a fertilized egg is a life in the same sense that a woman is, that it has a right to life as she does, that outlawing abortion saves lives, that abortion is the chief threat to 'life' today, and that the movement to ban abortion is motivated solely by these concerns and not also by the wish to restrict sexual freedom, enforce sectarian religious views on a pluralistic society, and return women t traditional roles. It also suggests that those who support legal abortion are pro-death, which is absurd.

Did you know that the fundamental building blocks of life are not cells, are not DNA are not even carbon but language yeah 'cause DNA is just a four-character language and binary code is a two-character language and what these languages are saying is the very act of revealing, so you reach an X-point when language attains a level of complexity where it begins to fold in upon itself trying to understand itself and this is sentience. Did you know that the entire Library of Congress can be encoded in our DNA because all you have to do is translate a binary system into a four-character system to where you can decode the genes like you're searching a microfiche and if you were to genetically engineer the corpus of human knowledge into our DNA then we'd be able to genetically pass the entire library along from generation to generation like frickin' disease, man.

The machines were reliable and safe, he repeated to others as questions mounted. “They’re not connected on the internet and they tabulate the votes by taking a thumb drive, encoded to a specific machine in a specific precinct, and taking that to a central location to transfer the votes and count them.

From the moment Adam named his wife ‘Eve’ her defining moment was eminently predictable. Almost inevitably, it was going to revolve around an incident with a serpent. Her name Hebrew name Hawwah may mean life or living or mother of all living but it is particularly close to the Aramaic word, ‘hiwya’, serpent.

A gene," Beadle wrote in 1945, "can be visualized as directing the final configuration of a protein molecule." This was the "action of the gene" that a generation of biologists had been trying to comprehend: a gene "acts" by encoding information to build a protein, and the protein actualizes the form or function of the organism.

Let’s say that you have committed to running every day for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks, you “reward” yourself with a massage. I would say, “Good for you!” because we all could benefit from more massages. But I would also say that your massage wasn’t a reward. It was an incentive. The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milli-seconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit. Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening won’t work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two. The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, it’s also highly individualized. What causes one person to feel good may not work for everyone. Your boss may love the smell of coffee. When she enters a coffee shop and inhales, she feels good. And her immediate feeling builds her habit of visiting the coffee shop. But your coworker might not like the way coffee smells. His brain won’t react in the same way. A real reward — something that will actually create a habit — is a much narrower target to hit than most people think. I

India is triply disadvantaged. As in many other societies, we suffer from the “head versus hand” hierarchy, which ascribes higher status to purely mental work over work that requires physical labour. In India, that hierarchy is also encoded in caste, with mental labour assigned to dominant castes and physical labour assigned to oppressed ones. A widely held Western idea of art is to restrict anything utilitarian to the realm of craft, says Sainath. ‘A product of craft is something which has constant and wide replication, a specific use, plus a restricted number of patterns. The main differentiation made by many is to look at art as creative, and craft—even when highly skilled—as mechanical and unthinking.

Any mode of thought that lays out complete and final answers to great existential questions is liable to dogmatism. A great attraction of care ethics, I think, is its refusal to encode or construct a catalog of principles and rules. One who cares must meet the cared-for just as he or she is, as a whole human being with individual needs and interests. [...] At most, it directs us to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible. [...] it recognizes that virtually all human beings desire not to be hurt, and this gives us something close to an absolute: We should not inflict deliberate hurt or pain. Even when we must fight to save our children, we must not inflict unnecessary or deliberate pain.

But what *is* "natural"? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed. Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species. 

Lexium (TM): Trouble with limited vocabulary? These slow-release capsules are imbued with the latest in infra-cerebral nanobots that will gradually encode your brain with hundreds of thousands of new words while reinforcing the neural pathways to facilitate retention and recall. Now available in French. Kane Faucher, Metapharm, Journal of Experimental Fiction #39

For the longest time we believed the world around us was deterministic enough to be understood; that it was just a matter of encoding enough data, and enough processing power, to be able to see the future. That if I do x, and the other person does y, and if I know all the things I need to know about the actors and their actions, I can say that z is the logical outcome…

[The] excited, angry, upset, or calm choreography of fingers fluttering is simultaneously medicalized and moralized: re-encoded as '[an] odd or repetitive way of moving fingers.' The quiet play of a lone child in a busy playground is now seen as a pathological sign pointing not to personal choice or preference or even to social exclusion but to (medical/moral) deviance.

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

We Can’t Remember What We Don’t Understand The process of encoding information into long-term storage requires our brains to compare new information with what we already know and then figure out where to file it. For this to happen, we need to rely on our working memory to hold all of this information long enough for it to happen. If the new information is easy for us to understand and related to a familiar subject, the encoding process can be quick and easy. If, on the other hand, we have no clue what someone is talking about—possibly because we missed or didn’t encode the foundational knowledge well enough—we may not have enough time for this process to take place. Before our brains are able to encode it, new information comes in and bumps it out of our working memory.

The best way to express inheritance is to say that information about earlier generations is passed along to the next – the information needed to build a new organism in the likeness of the old. This information is encoded in the organism’s genes, which are replicated as part of the reproductive process. The essence of biological reproduction, then, is the replication of heritable information.

Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of “failed liberal policies,” immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people’s anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system.

Dropping into the world with a half-baked brain has proven a winning strategy for humans. We have outcompeted every species on the planet: covering the landmass, conquering the seas, and bounding onto the moon. We have tripled our life spans. We compose symphonies, erect skyscrapers, and measure with ever-increasing precision the details of our own brains. None of those enterprises were genetically encoded. At least they weren't encoded directly. Instead, our genetics bring about a simple principle: don't build inflexible hardware; build a system that adapts to the world around it. Our DNA is not a fixed schematic for building an organism; rather, it sets up a dynamic system that continually rewrites it's circuitry to reflect the world around it and to optimize its efficacy within it.

Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise. People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will, followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest, winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.

In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender. 33 But here’s an interesting quirk: countries with genderless languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) are not the most equal. Instead, that honour belongs to a third group, countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English. These languages allow gender to be marked (female teacher, male nurse) but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world’. In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all.

Before you immerse yourself into 3-D living, you have the ability to preview the parameters of earthly life, to oversee the aspects of your own plan, purpose, and intent within a specific climate of consciousness. You choose the moment and the time of your birth, as well as your genealogical bloodline, which is rich with an ancestral encoding of perceptions based on many lessons in living. In the here and now, you forget your plans in order to play your version of the game of life more effectively. You immerse yourself in your identity and become fully engaged in the process of exploring and experiencing the path you have chosen. The course of your life is a significant and purposeful journey that continuously confronts and stimulates you to develop your abilities. You actually learn about the nature of existence as you learn how to operate your biological form. You

These initially adaptive responses to immediate danger turn into inflexible and pervasive procedural tendencies when trauma is unresolved. Once these actions have been procedurally encoded, individuals are left with regulatory deficits and “suffer both from generalized hyperarousal [and hypoarousal] and from physiological emergency reactions to specific reminders” (van der Kolk, 1994, p. 254). Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a predicate; we know without thinking the difference between third person singular and third person plural. We may mention “race,” referring to people as black or white or Latino or Asian or indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look.

Live your life in real time -- live and suffer directly on-screen. Think in real time -- your thought is immediately encoded by the computer. Make your revolution in real time -- not in the street, but in the recording studio. Live out your amorous passions in real time -- the whole thing on video from start to finish. Penetrate your body in real time -- endovideoscopy: your own bloodstream, your own viscera as if you were inside them. Nothing escapes this. There is always a hidden camera somewhere. You can be filmed without knowing it. You can be called to act it all out again for any of the TV channels. You think you exist in the original-language version, without realizing that this is now merely a special case of dubbing, an exceptional version for the `happy few'. Any of your acts can be instantly broadcast on any station. There was a time when we would have considered this a form of police surveillance. Today, we regard it as advertising.

Twin, family, and population studies have all conclusively shown that psychological traits are at least partly, and sometimes largely, heritable—that is, a sizable portion of the variation that we see in these traits across the population is attributable to genetic variation. However, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, the relationship between genes and traits is far from simple. The fact that a given trait is heritable seems to suggest that there must be genes for that trait. But phrasing it in that way is a serious conceptual trap. It implies that genes exist that are dedicated to that function—that there are genes for intelligence or sociability or visual perception. But this risks confusing the two meanings of the word gene: one, from the study of heredity, refers to genetic variants that affect a trait; the other, from molecular biology, refers to the stretches of DNA that encode proteins with various biochemical or cellular functions.

For some, measuring porn’s real-world effects boils down to one extreme and ultimately misleading question: “Does it lead to rape?” What is overlooked here is the more subtle question of how porn shapes the culture and the men who use it. No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a nonrapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.”³ Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology.

In Bletchley, in Britain, in 1943, in total secrecy, a brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, is seeing his most incisive insight turned into physical reality. Turing has argued that numbers can compute numbers. To crack the Lorentz encoding machines of the German forces, a computer called Colossus has been built based on Turing’s principles: it is a universal machine with a modifiable stored program. Nobody realises it at the time, least of all Turing, but he is probably closer to the mystery of life than anybody else. Heredity is a modifiable stored program; metabolism is a universal machine. The recipe that links them is a code, an abstract message that can be embodied in a chemical, physical or even immaterial form. Its secret is that it can cause itself to be replicated. Anything that can use the resources of the world to get copies of itself made is alive; the most likely form for such a thing to take is a digital message—a number, a script or a word.

Yet another strategy for encoding in Renaissance works involved environmental “special effects.” Messages were ingeniously inserted so that they could be viewed only when one was in situ, in the very spot where the artist intended for the viewer to receive his true intent. Often this would be determined by how light coming from an actual window at the site would stream into the painting, thus literally and figuratively illuminating the piece. Leonardo did this with the light in his Last Supper fresco,

Some scientists, however, cling to the belief that the only obstacle to mastering common sense is brute force. They feel that a new Manhattan Project, like the program that built the atomic bomb, would surely crack the common-sense problem. The crash program to create this “encyclopedia of thought” is called CYC, started in 1984. It was to be the crowning achievement of AI, the project to encode all the secrets of common sense into a single program. However, after several decades of hard work, the CYC project has failed to live up to its own goals.

After nearly a decade of intensive hunting, what geneticists have found is not a "gay gene" but a few "gay locations." Some genes that reside in these locations are indeed tantalizing candidates as regulators of sexual behavior-but none of these candidates has been experimentally linked to homo- or heterosexuality. One gene that sits int he Xq28 region, for instance, encodes a protein that is known to regulate the testosterone receptor, a well-known mediator of sexual behavior. But whether this gene is the long-sought gay gene on Xq28 remains unknown.

The wave quality of light is the same as that of the electron. The wave determines the probable location of the photon of light when it is detected. The wave character of light is not vibrating stuff like a wave of water but rather a wavelike function encoding information about where you'll find the photon of light once it is detected. Until it reaches the detector plate, like the electron, it is seemingly passing through both slits simultaneously, making its mind up about its location only once it is observed [...]. It's this act of observation that is such a strange feature of quantum physics. Until I ask the detector to pick up where the electron is, the particle should be thought of as probabilistically distributed over space, with a probability described by a mathematical function that has wavelike characteristics. The effect of the two slits on this mathematical wave function alters it in such a way that the electron is forbidden from being located at some points on the detector plate. But when the particle is observed, the die is cast, probabilities disappear, and the particle must decide on a location.

Anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and other forms of racism persist in part because of the idea that there is one version of history, which white people have exclusive dominion over. It is expressed through the Eurocentric dismissal of oral histories and the reliance on the written word as irrefutable truth. It is expressed through an almost scientific reliance on the “white encoders of history” to tell us “truths,” even when we accept that there are obvious reasons as to why we should not rely on white supremacist historians to teach us Black or a Indigenous history

Sherri Solvig had had cancer, lymphatic cancer, but due to valiant efforts by her doctors she had gone into remission. However, encoded in the memory-tapes of her brain was the datum that patients with lymphoma who go into remission usually eventually lose their remission. They aren’t cured; the ailment has somehow mysteriously passed from a palpable state into a sort of metaphysical state, a limbo. It is there but it is not there. So despite her current good health, Sherri (her mind told her) contained a ticking clock, and when the clock chimed she would die. Nothing could be done about it, except the frantic promotion of a second remission. But even if a second remission were obtained, that remission, too, by the same logic, the same inexorable process, would end. Time had Sherri in its absolute power. Time contained one outcome for her: terminal cancer. This is how her mind had factored the situation out; it had come to this conclusion, and no matter how good she felt or what she had going for her in her life, this fact remained a constant. A cancer patient in remission, then, represents a stepped-up case of the status of all humans; eventually you are going to die.

This “triplet code” hypothesis was also supported by elementary mathematics. If a two-letter code was used—i.e., two bases in a sequence (AC or TC) encoded an amino acid in a protein—you could only achieve 16 combinations, obviously insufficient to specify all twenty amino acids. A triplet-based code had 64 combinations—enough for all twenty amino acids, with extra ones still left over to specify other coding functions, such as “stopping” or “starting” a protein chain. A quadruplet code would have 256 permutations—far more than needed to encode twenty amino acids. Nature was degenerate, but not that degenerate.

As time went on, I would grasp how deep such wounds go. For we carry not only our own wounding experiences, but the inherited wounds of our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women, Virginia Woolf said. This statement is not mere poetry. We carry something ancient inside us, an aspect of the psyche that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Containing river beds of collective experience. the collective unconscious is the place where preexisting traces of ancestral experience are encoded. Thousands of years of feminine rejection reside there, and it can rise up to do a dark dance with our conscious beliefs.

My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form. And, since a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel, it is not surprising that they found my little novel to be despicable. If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.

The fact that the genome also encodes genes to repair damage to the genome was discovered by several geneticists, including Evelyn Witkin and Steve Elledge. Witkin and Elledge, working independently, identified an entire cascade of proteins that sensed DNA damage, and activated a cellular response to repair or temporize the damage (if the damage was catastrophic, it would halt cell division). Mutations in these genes can lead to the accumulation of DNA damage-and thus, more mutations-ultimately leading to cancer. The fourth R of gene phyisiology, essential to both the survival and mutability of organisms, might be "repair.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.

The CF gene codes a molecule that channels salt across cellular membranes. The most common mutation is a deletion of three bases of DNA that results in the removal, or deletion, of just one amino acid from the protein (in the language of genes, three bases of DNA encode a single amino acid). This deletion creates a dysfunctional protein that is unable to move chloride-one component of sodium chloride, i.e., common salt-across membranes. The salt in sweat cannot be absorbed back into the body, resulting in the characteristically salty sweat. Nor can the body secrete salt and water into the intestines, resulting in the abdominal symptoms.

The Book of Man (in Twenty-Three Volumes) It has 3,088,286,401 letters of DNA (give or take a few). Published as a book with a standard-size font, it would contain just four letters...AGCTTGCAGGGG...and so on, stretching, inscrutably, page upon page, for over 1.5 million pages-sixty-six times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It encodes about 20,687 genes in total-only 1,796 more than worms, 12,000 fewer than corn, and 25,000 fewer genes than rice or wheat. The difference between "human" and "breakfast cereal" is not a matter of gene numbers, but of the sophistication of gene networks. It is not what we have; it is how we use it.

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying. Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

Parts of it are surprisingly beautiful. On a vast stretch on chromosome eleven, for instance, there is a causeway dedicated entirely to the sensation of smell. Here, a cluster of 155 closely related genes encodes a series of protein receptors that are professional smell sensors. Each receptor binds to a unique chemical structure, like a key to a lock, and generates a distinctive sensation of smell in the brain—spearmint, lemon, caraway, jasmine, vanilla, ginger, pepper. An elaborate form of gene regulation ensures that only one odor-receptor gene is chosen from this cluster and expressed in a single smell-sensing neuron in the nose, thereby enabling us to discriminate thousands of smells.

In America, straightforward talk about class inequality is all but impossible, indeed taboo. Political appeals to the economic self-interest of ordinary voters, as distinct from their wealthy compatriots, court instant branding and disfigurement in the press as divisive “economic populism” or even “class warfare.”39 On the other hand, divisive political appeals composed in a different register, sometimes called “cultural populism,” enlist voters’ self-concept in place of their self-interest; appealing, in other words, to who they are and are not, rather than to what they require and why. Thus, the policies of the 1980s radically redistributed income upward. Then, with “economic populism” shooed from the public arena, “cultural populism” fielded something akin to a marching band. It had a simple melody about the need to enrich the “investing” classes (said to “create jobs”), and an encoded percussion: “culture wars”; “welfare mothers”; “underclass”; “race-and-IQ”; “black-on-black crime”; “criminal gene”; on and on.40 Halfway through the decade, as the band played on, a huge economic revolution from above had got well under way. The poorest 40 percent of American families were sharing 15.5 percent of household income, while the share of the richest 20 percent of families had risen to a record 43.7 percent, and the trend appeared to be (and has turned out to be) more and more of the same.41 The

But what is “natural”? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire “empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

Then Volescu said, “Gurathin, you wanted to know how it spends its time. That was what you were originally looking for in the logs. Tell them.” Mensah lifted her brows. “Well?” Gurathin hesitated. “It’s downloaded seven hundred hours of entertainment programming since we landed. Mostly serials. Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” He shook his head, dismissing it. “It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.” I snorted. He underestimated me. Ratthi said, “The one where the colony’s solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?” Again, I couldn’t help it. I said, “She didn’t kill him, that’s a fucking lie.” Ratthi turned to Mensah. “It’s watching it.

Genes, oddly, compromise only a minuscule fraction of it. An enormous proportion-a bewildering 98 percent-is not dedicated to genes per se, but to enormous stretches of DNA that are interspersed between genes (intergenic DNA) or within genes (introns). These long stretches encode no RNA, and no protein: they exist in the genome either because they regulate gene expression, or for reasons that we do not yet understand, or because of no reason whatsoever (i.e., they are "junk" DNA). If the genome were a line stretching across the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Europe, genes would be occasional specks of land strewn across long, dark tracts of water. Laid end to end, these specks would be no longer than the largest Galapagos island or a train line across the city of Tokyo,

The third cardinal feature of gene regulation, Monod and Jacob discovered, was that every gene had specific regulatory DNA sequences appended to it that acted like recognition tags. Once a sugar sensing-protein had detected sugar in the environment, it would recognize one such tag and turn the target genes on or off. That was a gene's signal to make more RNA messages and thereby generate the relevant enzyme to digest the sugar. A gene, in short, possessed not just information to encode a protein, but also information about when and where to make that protein. All that data was encrypted in DNA, typically appended to the front of every gene (although regulatory sequences) an also be appended to the ends and middle of genes). The combination of regulatory sequences and the protein-encoding sequence defined a gene.

Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. The model (of the social graph, or of human knowledge) constructs and updates itself.

We must consider what we mean when we say that the spiking activity of a neuron 'encodes' information. We normally think of a code as something that conveys information from a sender to a recipient, and this requires that the recipient 'understands' the code. But the spiking activity of every neuron seems to encode information in a slightly different way, a way that depends on that neuron's intrinsic properties. So what sense can a recipient make of the combined input from many neurons that all use different codes? It seems that what matters must be the 'population code' - not the code that is used by single cells, but the average or aggregate signal from a population of neurons. In a now classic paper, Shadlen and Newsome considered how information is communicated among neurons of the cortex - neurons that typically receive between 3,000 and 10,000 synaptic inputs.They argued that, although some neural structures in the brain may convey information in the timing of successive spikes, when many inputs converge on a neuron the information present in the precise timing of spikes is irretrievably lost, and only the information present in the average input rate can be used. They concluded that 'the search for information in temporal patterns, synchrony and specially labeled spikes is unlikely to succeed' and that 'the fundamental signaling units of cortext may be pools on the order of 100 neurons in size.' The phasic firing of vasopressin cells is an extreme demonstration of the implausibility of spike patterning as a way of encoding usable information, but the key message - that the only behaviorally relevant information is that which is collectively encoded by the aggregate activity of a population - may be generally true.

How does the body push the comparatively tiny genome so far? Many researchers want to put the weight on learning and experience, apparently believing that the contribution of the genes is relatively unimportant. But though the ability to learn is clearly one of the genome's most important products, such views overemphasize learning and significantly underestimate the extent to which the genome can in fact guide the construction of enormous complexity. If the tools of biological self-assembly are powerful enough to build the intricacies of the circulatory system or the eye without requiring lessons from the outside world, they are also powerful enough to build the initial complexity of the nervous system without relying on external lessons. The discrepancy melts away as we appreciate the true power of the genome. We could start by considering the fact that the currently accepted figure of 30,000 could well prove to be too low. Thirty thousand (or thereabouts) is, at press time, the best estimate for how many protein-coding genes are in the human genome. But not all genes code for proteins; some, not counted in the 30,000 estimate, code for small pieces of RNA that are not converted into proteins (called microRNA), of "pseudogenes," stretches of DNA, apparently relics of evolution, that do not properly encode proteins. Neither entity is fully understood, but recent reports (from 2002 and 2003) suggest that both may play some role in the all-important process of regulating the IFS that control whether or not genes are expressed. Since the "gene-finding" programs that search the human genome sequence for genes are not attuned to such things-we don't yet know how to identify them reliably-it is quite possible that the genome contains more buried treasure.

That silence is not accidental. The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people. 19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.” Moreover, the state’s various militias had the “power to search and examine all negro-houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.” In Delaware, there could be no valid earthly reason that any “bought Servant, or Negro, or Mulatto slave … be allowed to bear Arms.” Georgia was even more direct. Not only were Blacks forbidden from owning or carrying firearms, but white men were required to own “a good gun or pistol” to give them the means to “search and examine all negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.” The distinction was clear: “Citizen( s) had the right to keep arms; the slave did not.” 20

Unlike any other chromosome, the Y is “unpaired”—i.e., it has no sister chromosome and no duplicate copy, leaving every gene on the chromosome to fend for itself. A mutation in any other chromosome can be repaired by copying the intact gene from the other chromosome. But a Y chromosome gene cannot be fixed, repaired, or recopied from another chromosome; it has no backup or guide (there is, however, a unique internal system to repair genes in the Y chromosome). When the Y chromosome is assailed by mutations, it lacks a mechanism to recover information. The Y is thus pockmarked with the potshots and scars of history. It is the most vulnerable spot in the human genome. As a consequence of this constant genetic bombardment, the human Y chromosome began to jettison information millions of years ago. Genes that were truly valuable for survival were likely shuffled to other parts of the genome where they could be stored securely; genes with limited value were made obsolete, retired, or replaced; only the most essential genes were retained (some of these genes were duplicated in the Y chromosome itself—but even this strategy does not solve the problem completely). As information was lost, the Y chromosome itself shrank—whittled down piece by piece by the mirthless cycle of mutation and gene loss. That the Y chromosome is the smallest of all chromosomes is not a coincidence: it is largely a victim of planned obsolescence (in 2014, scientists discovered that a few extremely important genes may be permanently lodged in the Y). In genetic terms, this suggests a peculiar paradox. Sex, one of the most complex of human traits, is unlikely to be encoded by multiple genes. Rather, a single gene, buried rather precariously in the Y chromosome, must be the master regulator of maleness.I Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: we barely made it.

Once again the resistance the visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that, like memory, vision was also distributed, and after Pribram became aware of holography he began to wonder if it, too, was holographic. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual cortex could be removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks. If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal hologram, even a very small piece of the hologram could still reconstruct the whole of what the eyes were seeing. It also explained the lack of any one-to-one correspondence between the external world and the brain's electrical activity. Again, if the brain was using holographic principles to process visual information, there would be no more one-to-one correspondence between electrical activity and images seen than there was between the meaningless swirl of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film encoded.

The bacterial defense system was soon found to involve at least two critical components. The first piece was the "seeker"-an RNA encoded in the bacterial genome that matched and recognized the DNA of the viruses. The principle for the recognition, yet again, was binding: the RNA "seeker" was able to find and recognize the DNA of an invading virus because it was a mirror image of that DNA-the yin to its yang. It was like carrying a permanent image of your enemy in your pocket-or, in the bacteria's case, an inverted photograph, etched indelibly into its genome. The second element of the defense system was the "hitman." Once the viral DNA had been recognized and matched as foreign (by its reverse-image), a bacterial protein named Cas9 was deployed to deliver the lethal gash to the viral gene. The "seeker" and the "hitman" worked in concert: the Cas9 protein delivered its cuts to the genome only after the sequence had been matched by the recognition element. It was a classic combination of collaborators-spotter and executor, drone and rocket, Bonnie and Clyde.

Altogether, these observations suggest that several processes contribute to psychotic experience: the loss of familiarity with the world, hypothetically associated with noisy information processing; increased novelty detection mediated by the hippocampus; associated alterations of prefrontal cortical processing, which have reliably been associated with impairments in working memory and other executive functions; increased top-down effects of prior beliefs mediated by the frontal cortex that may reflect compensatory efforts to cope with an increasingly complex and unfamiliar world; and finally disinhibition of subcortical dopaminergic neurotransmission, which increases salience attribution to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, increased noise of chaotic or stress-dependent dopamine firing can reduce the encoding of errors of reward prediction elicited by primary and secondary reinforcers, thus contributing to a subjective focusing of attention on apparently novel and mysterious environmental cues while reducing attention and motivation elicited by common and natural and social stimuli.

Second, the production of RNA Messages was coordinately regulated. When the sugar source was switched to lactose, the bacteria turned on an entire module of genes-several lactose-metabolizing genes-to digest lactose. One of the genes in the module specified a "transporter protein" that allowed lactose to enter the bacterial cell. Another gene encoded an enzyme that was needed to break down lactose into parts. Yet another specified an enzyme to break those chemical parts into subparts. Surprisingly, all the genes dedicated to a particular metabolic pathway were physically present next to each other on the bacterial chromosome-like library books stacked by subject-and they were induced simultaneously in cells. The metabolic alteration produced a profound genetic alteration in a cell. It wasn't just a cutlery switch; the whole dinner service was altered in a single swoop. A functional circuit of genes was switched on and off, as if operated by a common spool or a master switch. Monod called one such gene module an operon. The genesis of proteins was thus perfectly synchronized with the requirements of the environment: supply the correct sugar, and a set of sugar-metabolizing genes would be turned on together.

Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units). This is the conclusion we've been chasing. Notice that although black holes are central to the reasoning, the analysis applies to any region of space, whether or not a black hole is actually present. If you max out a region's storage capacity, you'll create a black hole, but as long as you stay under the limit, no black hole will form. I hasten to add that in any practical sense, the information storage limit is of no concern. Compared with today's rudimentary storage devices, the potential storage capacity on the surface of a spatial region is humongous. A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortable within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 10^70 Planck cells. The surface's storage capacity is thus about 10^70 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints. Yet as a guide to how the universe works, the storage limitations are telling. Think of any region of space, such as the room in which I'm writing or the one in which you're reading. Take a Wheelerian perspective and imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing-information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we're governed, seemingly take place within the region, it's natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But the results just derived suggest an alternative view. For black holes, we found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Susskind and 'tHooft stressed that the lesson should be general: since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three-dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggested, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes. If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much like a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two-I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes-would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.

Indeed, as predicted, when the gene encoding the hemoglobin B chain was later identified and sequenced in sickle-cell patients, there was a single change: one triplet in DNA-GAG-had changed to another-GTG. This resulted in the substitution of one amino acid for another: glutamate was switched to valine. That switch altered the folding of the hemoglobin chain: rather than twisting into its neatly articulated, clasplike structure, the mutant hemoglobin protein accumulated in stringlike clumps within red cells. These clumps grew so large, particularly in the absence of oxygen, that they tugged the membrane of the red cell util the normal disk was warped into a crescent-shaped dysmorphic "sickle cell." Unable to glide smoothly through capillaries and veins, sickled red cells jammed into microscopic clots throughout the body, interrupting blood flow and precipitating the excruciating pain of a sickling crisis. It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built). Gene, protein, function, and fate were strung in a chain: one chemical alteration in one base pair in DNA was sufficient to "encode" a radical change in human fate.

The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc. This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth. The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

Anyway, if my lips were rose petals they’d taste too bitter. If my cheeks were apples they’d crawl with apple worms. If my eyes were stars they’d be dead by the time you saw them. If I moved you like the moon I’d disappear once a month. If my teeth were Chiclets you’d want to chew on them and spit them out. If my hands were birds you couldn’t hold them; they’d peck you bloody. Is my skin alabaster? Then it’s cold and hard and one day someone will skin me, make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then how will you love me? If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you’ll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction. If my vagina is a cave-watch out! It’s prone to seismic shifts and avalanche. If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet. If my ears are shells I can’t hear you, only the ocean anyway. And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible. Don’t say anything. I am not a flower, but a body with rules and predictable, cellular qualities. My eyelashes and fingernails and skin and spit are organized by proteins designed to erode at a pre-encoded date and time, no matter what you do or do not do to me- I am remarkably like an animal. More like a heifer than a sunrise, I want to bite, stroke, swallow you so stop lying there trying to think of something to say and trying to understand me. I am the body next to but unlike yours. You already know me. You already know what I’m made of.

The first result of this randomized trial was predictable from prior studies: in the control group, children with the short variant-i.e., the "high risk" form of the gene- were twice as likely to veer toward high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity as adolescents, confirming earlier studies that had suggested an increased risk within this genetic subgroup. The second result was more provocative: these very children were also the most likely to respond to the social interventions. In the intervention group, children with the high-risk allele were most strongly and rapidly "normalized"-i.e., the most drastically affected subjects were also the best responders. In a parallel study, orphaned infants with the short variant of 5HTTLRP appeared more impulsive and socially disturbed than their long-variant counterparts as baseline-but were also the most likely to benefit from placement in a more nurturing foster-care environment. In both cases, it seems, the short variant encodes a hyperactive "stress sensor" for psychic susceptibility, but also a sensor most likely to respond to an intervention that targets the susceptibility. The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments-but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments.)

For the Hebrews, names provided a direct link with the Creator. They understood words as being the creative fire of God, the ‘black fire on white fire’ of His Law. Every utterance and every act of creation through which He revealed Himself was not only word made flesh but fire made flesh. The word for ‘being’, yesh, ‘to exist’ or ‘to have substance’ was flame–breathed. The word for ‘fire’, esh, was embedded in the word for ‘being’ and in the very notion of ‘being human’. The rabbis were said to have asked: Why is the word for ‘woman’, ishah? Because she is fire, esh. Why is the word for ‘man’, ish? Because he too is fire, esh. They noted that when the Hebrew letters for ‘man’ and ‘woman’ came together they produced a new word as part of the union: yah, a reference to Yahweh, the Name of God.

Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding information. The experts are interpreting the present board in terms of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower ranked players are seeing the board as something new...[de Groot] argued that expertise in the field of shoemaking, painting, building, or confectionary, is the result of the same accumulation of experiential linkings. According to Erikson, what we call expertise is really just vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain. In other words, a great memory isn't just a byproduct of expertise; it is the essence of expertise. Whether we realize it or not, we are all like those chess masters and chicken sexers- interpreting the present in light of what we've learned in the past and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it... Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past...Who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

It is conceivable that an interplay of genes and epigenes coordinates human embryogenesis. Let us return, yet again, to Morgan's problem: the creation of a multicellular organism from a one-celled embryo. Seconds after fertilization, a quickening begins in the embryo. Proteins reach into the nucleus of the cell and start flicking genetic switches on and off. A dormant spaceship comes to life. Genes are activated and repressed, and these genes, in turn, encode yet other proteins that activate and repress other genes. A single cell divides to form two, then four, and eight cells. An entire layer of cells forms, then hollows out into the outer skin of a ball. Genes that coordinate metabolism, motility, cell fate, and identity fire "on." The boiler room warms us. The lights flicker on in the corridors. The intercom crackles alive. Now a second code stirs to life to ensure that gene expression is locked into place in each cell, enabling each cell to acquire and fix an identity. Chemical marks are selectively added to certain genes and erased from others, modulating the expression of the genes in that cell alone. Methyl groups are inserted and erased, and histones are modified to repress or activate genes. The embryo unfurls step by step. Primordial segements appear, and cells take their positions along various parts of the embryo. New genes are activated that command subroutines to grow limbs and organs, and more chemical marks are appended on the genomes of individual cells. Cells are added to create organs and structures-forelegs, hind legs, muscles, kidneys, bones, eyes. Some cells die a programmed death. Genes that maintain function, metabolism, and repair are turned on. An organism emerges from a cell.

As an anology, consider the word structure. In bacteria, the gene is embedded in the genome in precisely that format, structure, with no breaks, stuffers, interpositions, or interruptions. In the human genome, in contrast, the word is interrupted by intermediate stretches of DNA: s...tru...ct...ur...e. The long stretches of DNA marked by the ellipses (...) do not contain any protein-encoding information. When such an interrupted gene is used to generate a message-i.e., when DNA is used to build RNA-the stuffer frragments are excised from the RNA message, and the RNA is stitched together again with the intervening pieces removed: s...tru...ct...ur...e became simplified to structure. Roberts and Sharp later coined a phrase for the process: gene splicing or RNA splicing (since the RNA message of the gene was "spliced" to removed the stuffer fragments). At first, this split structure of genes seemed puzzling: Why would an animal genome waste such long stretches of DNA splitting genes into bits and pieces, only to stitch them back into a continuous message? But the inner logic of split genes soon became evident: by splitting genes into modules, a cell could generate bewildering combinations of messages out of a single gene. The word s...tru...c...t...ur...e can be spliced to yield cure and true and so forth, thereby creating vast numbers of variant messages-called isoforms-out of a single gene. From g...e...n...om...e you can use splicing to generate gene, gnome, and om. And modular genes also had an evolutionary advantage: the individual modules from different genes could be mixed and matched to build entirely new kinds of genes (c...om...e...t). Wally Gilbert, the Harvard geneticist, created a new word for these modules; he called them exons. The inbetween stuffer fragments were termed introns.

Yet another unexpected development emerged from this bizarre duality, called the holographic principle. Holograms are two-dimensional flat sheets of plastic, containing the image of three-dimensional objects that have been specially encoded within them. By shining a laser beam at the flat screen, the three-dimensional image suddenly emerges. In other words, all the information needed to create a three-dimensional image has been encoded onto a flat two-dimensional screen using lasers, like the image of Princess Leia projected by R2-D2 or the haunted mansion at Disneyland where three-dimensional ghosts sail around us. This principle also works for black holes. As we saw earlier, if we throw an encyclopedia into a black hole, the information contained inside the books cannot disappear, according to quantum mechanics. So where does the information go? One theory posits that it is distributed onto the surface of the event horizon of the black hole. So the two-dimensional surface of a black hole contains all the information of all the three-dimensional objects that have been thrown into it. This also has implications for our conception of reality. We are convinced, of course, that we are three-dimensional objects that can move in space, defined by three numbers, length, width, and height. But perhaps this is an illusion. Perhaps we are living in a hologram. Perhaps the three-dimensional world we experience is just a shadow of the real world, which is actually ten- or eleven-dimensional. When we move in the three dimensions of space, we experience our real selves actually moving in ten or eleven dimensions. When we walk down the street, our shadow follows us and moves like us, except the shadow exists in two dimensions. Likewise, perhaps we are shadows moving in three dimensions, but our real selves are moving in ten or eleven dimensions.

The Golem If (as affirms the Greek in the Cratylus) the name is archetype of the thing, in the letters of “rose” is the rose, and all the Nile flows through the word. Made of consonants and vowels, there is a terrible Name, that in its essence encodes God’s all, power, guarded in letters, in hidden syllables. Adam and the stars knew it in the Garden. It was corroded by sin (the Cabalists say), time erased it, and generations have forgotten. The artifice and candor of man go on without end. We know that there was a time in which the people of God searched for the Name through the ghetto’s midnight hours. But not in that manner of those others whose vague shades insinuate into vague history, his memory is still green and lives, Judá the Lion the rabbi of Prague. In his thirst to know the knowledge of God Judá permutated the alphabet through complex variations and in the end pronounced the name that is the Key the Door, the Echo, the Guest, and the Palace, over a mannequin shaped with awkward hands, teaching it the arcane knowledge of symbols, of Time and Space. The simulacrum raised its sleepy eyelids, saw forms and colors that it did not understand, and confused by our babble made fearful movements. Gradually it was seen to be (as we are) imprisoned in a reverberating net of Before, Later, Yesterday, While, Now, Right, Left, I, You, Those, Others. The Cabalists who celebrated this mysterium, this vast creature, named it Golem. (Written about by Scholem, in a learned passage of his volume.) The rabbi explained the universe to him, “This is my foot, this yours, and this the rope,” but all that happened, after years, was that the creature swept the synagogue badly. Perhaps there was an error in the word or in the articulation of the Sacred Name; in spite of the highest esoteric arts this apprentice of man did not learn to speak. Its eyes uncanny, less like man than dog and much less than dog but thing following the rabbi through the doubtful shadows of the stones of its confinement. There was something abnormal and coarse in the Golem, at its step the rabbi’s cat fled in fear. (That cat not from Scholem but of the blind seer) It would ape the rabbi’s devotions, raising its hands to the sky, or bend over, stupidly smiling, into hollow Eastern salaams. The rabbi watched it tenderly but with some horror. How (he said) could I engender this laborious son? Better to have done nothing, this is insanity. Why did I give to the infinite series a symbol more? To the coiled skein on which the eternal thing is wound, I gave another cause, another effect, another grief. In this hour of anguish and vague light, on the Golem our eyes have stopped. Who will say the things to us that God felt, at the sight of his rabbi in Prague?

In Separation, the second volume of his great trilogy on attachment, John Bowlby described what had been observed when ten small children in residential nurseries were reunited with their mothers after separations lasting from twelve days to twenty-one weeks. The separations were in every case due to family emergencies and the absence of other caregivers, and in no case due to any intent on the parents’ part to abandon the child. In the first few days following the mother's departure the children were anxious, looking everywhere for the missing parent. That phase was followed by apparent resignation, even depression on the part of the child, to be replaced by what seemed like the return of normalcy. The children would begin to play, react to caregivers, accept food and other nurturing. The true emotional cost of the trauma of loss became evident only when the mothers returned. On meeting the mother for the first time after the days or weeks away, every one of the ten children showed significant alienation. Two seemed not to recognize their mothers. The other eight turned away or even walked away from her. Most of them either cried or came close to tears; a number alternated between a tearful and an expressionless face. The withdrawal dynamic has been called “detachment” by John Bowlby. Such detachment has a defensive purpose. It has one meaning: so hurtful was it for me to experience your absence that to avoid such pain again, I will encase myself in a shell of hardened emotion, impervious to love — and therefore to pain. I never want to feel that hurt again. Bowlby also pointed out that the parent may be physically present but emotionally absent owing to stress, anxiety, depression, or preoccupation with other matters. From the point of view of the child, it hardly matters. His encoded reactions will be the same, because for him the real issue is not merely the parent's physical presence but her or his emotional accessibility. A child who suffers much insecurity in his relationship with his parents will adopt the invulnerability of defensive detachment as his primary way of being. When parents are the child's working attachment, their love and sense of responsibility will usually ensure that they do not force the child into adopting such desperate measures. Peers have no such awareness, no such compunctions, and no such responsibility. The threat of abandonment is ever present in peer-oriented interactions, and it is with emotional detachment that children automatically respond. No wonder, then, that cool is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue. Although the word cool has many meanings, it predominately connotes an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.