Hour Between Dog And Wolf Quotes

The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day…The hour in which…every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.

fatigue should be understood as a signal our body and brain use to inform us that the expected return from our current activity has dropped below its metabolic cost.

The cure for fatigue, according to this account, is not a rest; it is a fresh task.

information is synonymous with unpredictability, with novelty.

Remember this rule,” advises Kahneman: “Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.

good judgment may require the ability to listen carefully to feedback from the body.

Thinking, one could say, is something we do only when we are no good at an activity.

Yet of this massive flow of information no more than about 40 bits per second actually reaches consciousness. We are, in other words, conscious of only a trivial slice of all the information coming into the brain for processing.

Enterprise is driven to a great extent by a pure love of risk taking.

Think of it: the worlds in this world.

It was at the end of the day, at twilight--the hour we call "between a dog and a wolf.

researchers have found that three types of situation signal threat and elicit a massive physiological stress response—those characterized by novelty, uncertainty and uncontrollability.

Findings such as these can change the way we handle chronic stress. When we are mired in stress, what we desperately need to do is minimize the novelty in our lives. We need familiarity. But quite often we seek out the exact opposite, responding to chronic stress at work, for example, by taking a vacation in some exotic place, thinking that the change of scenery will do us good. And under normal circumstances it does. But not when we are highly stressed, because then the novelty we encounter abroad can just add to our physiological load. Instead of traveling, we may be better off remaining on home turf, surrounding ourselves with family and friends, listening to familiar music, watching old films. Exercise, of course, can help, in fact there are few things better at preparing our physiology for stress. But when someone is this far into chronic stress its effects, suggests Stephen Porges, are mostly analgesic, possibly because exercise treats us to a shot of natural opioids. Again, what we really need is familiarity.

Then the zoo to say hello to the Moon Bear in his pit. Then out for Vietnamese iced coffees at the sketchy place we like downtown, where I almost got shot. “You did not almost get shot, Smackie. Jesus Christ. That was a car backing up or something,” she said when I brought it up. “Yes, I did.” “You need to get out more.” “I get out. I’m out with you, aren’t I?” Now we’re back at her place drinking the sangria she made that’s so strong I’m pretty sure it’s poison. It’s that time of evening she calls the hour between the dog and the wolf. A time that actually makes this sorry swath of New England beautiful, the sky ablaze with a sunset the color of flamingos. We’re on her sagging roof, listening to Argentine tango music to drown out the roaring Mexican music next door.

Deep blue like the hour between the dog and the wolf. An attractively scooped neckline. Sleeves and hemline a length and cut you would call kind. Buttons in back like discreetly sealed lips. Good give in the fabric. Double lined. The sort of dress that looks like nothing but a sad dark sack on the hanger, but on the body it’s a different story. Takes extremely well to accessories. My mother loved this sort of dress. At whatever weight she was—thin, fat, middling—she owned an iteration. I saw her wear it to work, lunch with friends, on dates, to movies, parties, funerals. I saw her wear it alone in her apartment for days on end. Scratch at a stain on the boob. Shit. The hemline begin to unravel. Fuck fuck fuck. Do you have a safety pin? Holes begin to appear in the armpits. Jesus. The sleeves fray. Well. That’s that, isn’t it? She wore it so much she’d wear it out and then she’d have to hunt for another, whip through the plus-size racks for something that fit just as impossibly well, that was just as dignified, just as forgiving in its plain dark elegance.

Thus our brains have evolved what Joe LeDoux has called the high and low roads for information processing: the thalamus–cortex circuit being the slow but accurate high road; the thalamus–amygdala circuit, which cannot distinguish between a shadow and a bear, the fast, low road. With the aid of the low road we react first and calm down later, feeling slightly foolish, in the case of a false alarm, that swaying leaves startled us so much.

In many animals testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of the year, and in humans these levels rise until the autumn, and then fall until the spring. This autumnal drop in testosterone can lead animals into a condition called “irritable male syndrome,” in which they become moody, withdrawn and depressed.

The initial and most rapid phase of the stress response, the fight-or-flight reaction, is triggered by the amygdala and the locus ceruleus. The electrical signals of the fight-or-flight alarm travel down the spinal cord and out into the body, raising heart rate, breathing and blood pressure, and liberating adrenaline from the core of the adrenal glands. The more sustained phase of the stress response involves the hypothalamus, which, through a series of chemical signals carried in the blood, instructs the outer layer of the adrenal glands to produce cortisol. Cortisol then exerts widespread effects on both body and brain, instructing them to hunker down for a long siege by suppressing long-term functions such as digestion, reproduction, growth and immune activation.

mental toughness involves a particular attitude to novel events: a toughened individual welcomes novelty as a challenge, sees in it an opportunity for gain; an untoughened individual dreads it as a threat and sees in it nothing but potential harm.

The mighty edifice that is Wall Street was not built on the fortunes of flamboyant speculators, as myth would have it—it was built on pennies.

There is nothing that fascinates us more, little that agitates the body more completely. Information warns us of danger, prepares us for action, helps us survive. And it enables us to perform that most magical of all tricks—predicting the future.

feeling was an integral component of the machinery of reason.

Damasio and Bechara developed their ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, each event we store in memory comes bookmarked with the bodily sensations – Damasio and Bechara call these ‘somatic markers’ – we felt at the time of living through it for the first time; and these help us decide what to do when we find ourselves in a similar situation.

the true miracle of human evolution was the development of advanced control systems for synchronizing body and brain.

thought itself is best understood as planning; even higher forms of thought, such as philosophy, the epitome of disembodied speculation, proceed, they argue, by hijacking algorithms originally developed to help us plan movements.

The brain stem, often called the reptile brain, controls automatic processes such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. The cerebellum stores physical skills and fast behavioral reactions; it also contributes to dexterity, balance and coordination. The hypothalamus controls hormones and coordinates electrical and chemical elements of homeostasis. The amygdala processes information for emotional meaning. The neocortex, the most recently evolved layer of the brain, processes discursive thought, planning and voluntary movement. The insula (located on the far side and near the top of the illuminated brain regions) gathers information from the body and assembles it into a sense of our embodied existence.

hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, “can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.” The syndrome, he continues, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.

We process more information in the lower half of our visual field, because there is normally more to see on the ground than in the sky. We group objects into units of three or four in order to perceive numbers rather than count them, a process known as subitising, that comes in handy when assessing the number of opponents in battle.

As George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, points out, “There is little evidence beyond fallible introspection supporting the standard assumption of complete volitional control of behavior.

Consciousness, these experiments suggested, is merely a bystander observing a decision already taken, almost like watching ourselves on video.

For the fact is, while they last, bubbles are fun; and the widespread silliness attending them is often remembered with a certain amount of humour and fondness.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf,

Coates argued at length in his book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

At dusk she switched to gin. Her marrying hour. The hour between the dog and the wolf. It sometimes seemed that dusk came to the island several times a day. Brought in by storms and fog. The change was in the fog. The Devil. Pearl's mother had once told her that she must never be embarrassed to tell another that she had seen the Devil.