Input Quotes

Percy says be talked to a Nereid in Charleston Harbor!” “Good for him!” Leo yelled back. “The Nereid said we should seek help from Chiron’s brothers.” “What does that mean? The Party Ponies?” Leo had never met Chiron’s crazy centaur relatives, but he’d heard rumors of Nerf sword-fights, root beer-chugging contests, and Super Soakers filled with pressurized whipped cream. “Not sure,” Annabeth said. “But I’ve got coordinates. Can you input latitude and longitude in this thing?” “I can input star charts and order you a smoothie, if you want. Of course I can do latitude and longitude!

It wasn't that she was sad—sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired.

Do you want my input or is this just an angry tirade you need to vent? (Acheron) Both! (Kat) Okay, you rant and I’ll add my comments at the end. (Acheron)

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

What we share as introverts is the love of ideas and the desire to explore them with minimal interruption. We want and need input, but we’d rather get it through reading, research, and rich conversation than through unfiltered talk.

- Be thou not technical with me,/Or else thine input valve may swift receive/a hearty helping of my golden foot.

First, we cannot overload the human brain. This divinely created brain has fourteen billion cells. If used to the maximum, this human computer inside our heads could contain all the knowledge of humanity from the beginning of the world to the present and still have room left over. Second, not only can we not overload our brain - we also know that our brain retains everything. I often use saying that "The brain acquires everything that we encounter." The difficulty does not come with the input of information, but getting it out. Sometimes we "file" information randomly of little importance, and it confuses us.

Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235)

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Pareto's Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.

Eve talking to someone on her computer and having trouble with the language translator. ...."I have two like crimes. Your data and your input on Leclerk would be very helpful" Marie pursed her lips and humor danced in her eyes. "It says you would like to have sex with me. I don't think that is correct" "Oh, for Christ sake" Eve slammed a fist against the machine.....

Scale of one to ten How would you rate your demise? Thanks for your input

Life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.

Surround yourself with the kinds of input that are uplifting, that expand your mind and settle your spirit.

When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.

In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.

Think of it this way: the input remains the same, so the output has to remain the same. How, then, can you ever create anything new?

Claiming all power for the purpose of prosperity and justice in society is conflicting to its own cause, rather authorizing individual authority is the just way toward a better society, because each individual has the right to decide about himself, and for collective decision making in society, all individual has the right to provide their input in it, after that majorities’ rule and minorities’ rights is the key to move forward, otherwise its destruction of society.

The human body is amazing," she said. If you deprive it of one sensory input, the other senses take over, almost instantly.

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life.

I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

A major determining factor by which a superior human can be isolated from his average counterparts is his very isolation—the degree to which he naturally removes himself from mass-media input and stimuli. You cannot be an elitist, a Magician, and be plugged into the system.

The best advice I ever heard is, don’t take anyone else’s advice.” There’s power in this because it puts you in the conductor’s seat, right at “the controls” in your life. It doesn’t mean you should stop seeking information or outside input, it just means that you’re the one driving. You choose your own destination.

you create your brain from the input you get.

A good investment is like a good fruit tree. From its conception, it grows exponentially larger consistently and reliably. It’s required input in a small percentage of its output. It regularly gives back to the broader ecosystem, helping multiple other lives to prosper. And it produces an abundance of fruit for the enjoyment of its owner.

The well-being of a neuron depends on its ability to communicate with other neurons. Studies have shown that electrical and chemical stimulation from both a neuron's inputs and its targets support vital cellular processes. Neurons unable to connect effectively with other neurons atrophy. Useless, an abandoned neuron will die.

Productivity is about turning valuable inputs into valuable outputs. Individual people are more productive when all the elements of the permaculture economy are at work in their lives. When individuals are productive, then businesses become productive. When businesses become productive, the nation becomes productive.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

As a counterpoint to sociopathy, the condition of narcissism is particularly interesting and instructive. Narcissism is, in a metaphorical sense, one half of what sociopathy is. Even clinical narcissists are able to feel most emotions are strongly as anyone else does, from guilt to sadness to desperate love and passion. The half that is missing is the crucial ability to understand what other people are feeling. Narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy, which is the capacity to perceive emotions in others and so react to them appropriately. The poor narcissist cannot see past his own nose, emotionally speaking, and as with the Pillsbury Doughboy, any input from the outside will spring back as if nothing had happened. Unlike sociopaths, narcissists often are in psychological pain, and may sometimes seek psychotherapy. When a narcissist looks for help, one of the underlying issues is usually that, unbeknownst to him, he is alienating his relationships on account of his lack of empathy with others, and is feeling confused, abandoned, and lonely. He misses the people he loves, and is ill-equipped to get them back. Sociopaths, in contrast, do not care about other people, and so do not miss them when they are alienated or gone, except as one might regret the absence of a useful appliance that one has somehow lost.

JUST CALLING IT “FEEDBACK” DOESN’T MEAN THAT IT HAS ACTUALLY FED BACK To speak precisely: IT HASN’T FED BACK UNTIL THE SYSTEM CHANGES COURSE Up to that point, it’s merely Sensory Input.

The universe is exactly the size that your soul can encompass. Some people live in extremely small worlds, and some live in a world of infinite possibilities. you have just received some sensory input that suggest its bigger than you previously thought. What are you going to do with that information? Will you deny it or embrace it?

By asking people for their input early in the process, you help them feel invested in the outcome.

Be mindful that the world that you want to live in and that you need to live in needs you to create it; it needs your input. The world needs to hear what you have to say. The last word has not been spoken.

To vary your inspiration, consider varying your inputs. Turn the sound off to watch a film, listen to the same song on repeat, read only the first word of each sentence in a short story, arrange stones by size or color, learn to lucid dream. Break habits. Look for differences. Notice connections.

To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW

For an introvert, interacting in a group setting does mean missing out. Where there is too much input, the introvert misses his mind, his subjectivity, his freedom, his very potential. The high-stimulus social environment, the “where it’s at on a Friday night,” this apparent “more,” becomes a prison to the introvert. He can’t wait to be free—to get out and away from the noise, the talk, the interference with his inner process.

Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly. Build an eye.

It's hard to know what to say when your best friend serenades an amphibian. On one hand, Miss Lana likes me to be sensitive. On the other hand, the Colonel says most situations don't require my input.

Renewables are, in fact, much more reliable than power based on extraction, since those energy models require continuous new inputs to avoid a crash, whereas once the initial investment has been made in renewable energy infrastructure, nature provides the raw materials for free.

My goal is to do the most with the least—get the maximum output with the minimum input.

the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody’s saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain.

What non-Autistic folks often don’t realize is that Autistic people experience intense sensory input as if it were physical pain.[6

We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do. It’s based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us.

In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Every output is upcycled into new inputs of equal or greater value. This creates a cycle of productive utility, continuous growth and continuous expansion. I like to invest in companies that follow nature’s example.

However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don't.

God was thinking of you long before you ever thought about him. His purpose for your life predates your conception. He planned it before you existed, without your input! You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.

Commander William T. Riker: It's just that our mental pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns. Lt. Commander Data: Hm. I understand. I am also fond of you, Commander. And you as well, Counselor.

In terms of business resilience, it's important to have the ability to repurpose inputs and redirect outputs. It's important to have a good amount of flexibility designed into the businesses operating systems. When a business can answer the if this then that question over and over again with different fill in the blanks, it's got resilience.

Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all. Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rose bushes.

This means that, in some sense, free will is a fake. Decisions are made ahead of time by the brain, without the input of consciousness, and then later the brain tries to cover this up (as it’s wont to do) by claiming that the decision was conscious. Dr. Michael Sweeney concludes, “Libet’s findings suggested that the brain knows what a person will decide before the person does. … The world must reassess not only the idea of movements divided between voluntary and involuntary, but also the very idea of free will.” All this seems to indicate that free will, the cornerstone of society, is a fiction, an illusion created by our left brain. So are we masters of our fate, or just pawns in a swindle perpetuated by the brain?

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?

Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

Your belief systems are what will ultimately dictate what is possible. Overcoming their limitations is not a matter of fighting it, but taking complete ownership, complete integration of all the belief systems that you have right now, and then simply making the choice to introduce inputs into your mental environment that support the truth of what you want to see.

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different. But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.

For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.

For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.

If you’re a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don’t. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.

A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives,” she said once. “Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, Meredith said, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

Emotions interpret the world for us. They have a signal function, telling us about our internal states as they are affected by input from the outside. Emotions are responses to present stimuli as filtered through the memory of past experience, and they anticipate the future based on our perception of the past.

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.

...many women have almost always done it differently, power without control, leading without terrorizing, nurturing community and communal input and output like nurturing a family. Maybe that's one of the main reasons powerful men resist women in power; it's not just control they don't want to give up, not just privilege, but exploitation.

Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: "high tolerance for ambiguity"; "systems thinkers"; "additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains"; "repurposing what is already available"; "adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process"; "ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways"; "synthesizing information from many different sources"; "they appear to flit among ideas"; "broad range of interests"; "they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests"; "need to learn significantly across domains"; "Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.

I do not believe ADD leads to creativity any more than creativity causes ADD. Rather, they both originate in the same inborn trait: sensitivity. For creativity, a temperamental sensitivity is indispensable. The sensitive individual, as we have seen, draws into herself the unseen emotional and psychic communications of her environment. On some levels of the unconscious, she will, therefore, have a deeper awareness of the world. She may also be more attuned to particular sensory input, such as sound, color or musical tone. Thus the sensitivity provides her with the raw materials her mind will rework and reshape. Thus sensitivity contributes to the emergence of attention deficit disorder, as well as to creativity. Colin,

Ultimately, incentive structures and systems drive ESG investing, which can be disingenuous. Structurally, public market investors continue to focus on the incentives which maximize their financial returns, even while taking certain ESG inputs into account in their portfolio allocations. Only by regulating and incentivizing the actual outcomes might investors alter their investment strategies towards new rewards based on ESG outputs.

The lack of transparency regarding training data sources and the methods used can be problematic. For example, algorithmic filtering of training data can skew representations in subtle ways. Attempts to remove overt toxicity by keyword filtering can disproportionately exclude positive portrayals of marginalized groups. Responsible data curation requires first acknowledging and then addressing these complex tradeoffs through input from impacted communities.

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.

health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are that's all you need

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone.

Losing a belief in free will has not made me a fatalist - in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn't draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn't do so on a basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system - learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention - may radically transform one's life. Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one's thoughts and feelings can -paradoxically- allow for greater creative control over one's life. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, our perspective is largely influenced by what we learn from nature. A good investment is like a good fruit tree. From its conception, it grows exponentially larger - consistently and reliably. Its required input is a small percentage relative to its output. It regularly gives back to the broader ecosystem, helping multiple other lives to prosper as well. And it produces an abundance of fruit for the enjoyment of its owner. This is how all good investments are. And this is our perspective at Mayflower-Plymouth.

For Introverts, the inner world--the world of ideas--is what they think of as the real world. It's where the real action is and where they naturally prefer to spend their time. Interacting with ideas in their own heads is natural and effortless. For Extroverts the real world is external. The real action happens outside themselves, with other people and input. It's where they naturally spend their time and feel most at home.

I’ve said several times that the brain acts like a scientist. It forms hypotheses through prediction and tests them against the “data” of sensory input. It corrects its predictions by way of prediction error, like a scientist adjusts his or her hypotheses in the face of contrary evidence. When the brain’s predictions match the sensory input, this constitutes a model of the world in that instant, just like a scientist judges that a correct hypothesis is the path to scientific certainty.

This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

What does that mean? The Party Ponies?” Leo had never met Chiron’s crazy centaur relatives, but he’d heard rumors of Nerf sword-fights, root beer–chugging contests, and Super Soakers filled with pressurized whipped cream. “Not sure,” Annabeth said. “But I’ve got coordinates. Can you input latitude and longitude in this thing?” “I can input star charts and order you a smoothie, if you want. Of course I can do latitude and longitude!

I like to get input from the ladies when I shop.” He grabbed a navy T-shirt and studied the il ustration, a cartoon drawing of a woman with enormous breasts and a rocket launcher between her legs. “That would be a definite no,” she said. “I like it.” He tossed it over his shoulder and began thumbing through a stack of jeans. “I thought you wanted my input.” He stared at her blankly. “Why’d you think that?” She gave up.

If something happened to Suzanne I don’t think I would want to go through with finding somebody else either. I’d feel quite lost without her. It would be like separating Siamese twins, as we’ve been through everything together. Which can also be handy, as my memory isn’t what it used to be, so I use hers as my back-up memory drive. Meeting someone new would be like getting a new phone. You have to start again, input all of your information into them while trying to get to know their functions.

The day is already so full my mind is going fuzzy. You know when the input has been so big, the computer starts to fizz and pop? That's how I'm feeling, like my stimulus intake meter has gone into the red. This is more conversation, more newness, more smiling, more Jasper than I've experienced in months. I can feel the blankness swell and turn slowly in my brain, pushing for space. I just have to keep it together enough to not embarrass myself. Just put one word in front of the other Biz; that's all you have to do.

The paradox of the modern world is this: Not only do we do less, physically, than ever before, but we also almost never do nothing. Our bodies, deprived of large movements, are inundated with subtle-yet-continuous physical stimulation from noise, light, data, etc. This constant stream of input is a two-fold stressor, as not only is the frequency of certain environmentally induced loads extremely high, the types of input we are experiencing are unnatural.

To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children’s classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven’t done for a while....

This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it.

Professional musicians, in general, possess what most of us would regard as remarkable powers of musical imagery. Many composers, indeed, do not compose initially or entirely at an instrument but in their minds. There is no more extraordinary example of this than Beethoven, who continued to compose (and whose compositions rose to greater and greater heights) years after he had become totally deaf. It is possible that his musical imagery was even intensified by deafness, for with the removal of normal auditory input, the auditory cortex may become hypersensitive, with heightened powers of musical imagery (and sometimes even auditory hallucinations).

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

On being conscious of being a writer: As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. [...] Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip – all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dinning-room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.

First item in the crew roster is given name, so I'll input 'Skippy'. Second item is surname-" "The Magnificent." "Really?" "It is entirely appropriate, Joe." "Oh, uh huh, because that's what everyone calls you," I retorted sarcastically, rolling my eyes. Not wanting to argue with him, I typed in 'TheMagnificent'. "Next question is your rank, this file is designed for military personnel." "I'd like 'Grand Exalted Field Marshall El Supremo'." "Right, I'll type in 'Cub Scout'. Next question-" "Hey! You jerk-" "-is occupational specialty." "Oh, clearly that should be Lord God Controller of All Things." "I'll give you that one, that is spelled A, S, S, H, O, L, E. Next-" "Hey! You shithead, I should-" "Age?" I asked. "A couple million, at least. I think." "Mentally, you're a six year old, so that's what I typed in." "Joe, I just changed your rank in the personnel file to 'Big Poopyhead'." Skippy laughed. "Five year old. You're a five year old." "I guess that's fair," he admitted. "Sex? I'm going to select 'n/a' on that one for you," I said. "Joe, in your personnel file, I just updated Sex to 'Unlikely'." "This is not going well, Skippy." "You started it!" "That was mature. Four year old, then. Maybe Terrible Twos." "I give up," Skippy snorted. "Save the damned file and we'll call it even, Ok?" "No problem. We should do this more often, huh?" "Oh, shut up.

Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. 42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. 43 Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.

If you keep experiencing the same things, your mind keeps its same patterns. Same inputs, same responses. Your brain, which was once curious and growing, gets fixed into deep habits. Your values and opinions harden and resist change. You really learn only when you’re surprised. If you’re not surprised, then everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives. With effort, you could do this from the comfort of home. But the most effective way to shake things up is to move across the world. Pick a place that’s most unlike what you know, and go. This keeps you in a learning mindset. Previously mindless habits, like buying groceries, now keep your mind open, alert, and noticing new things. New arrivals in a culture often notice what the locals don’t. (Fish don’t know they’re in water.)

When we meet someone, we form a first impression (“He seems like a really nice guy”), frequently with no apparent information on which to base it. This is because attributes of the person evoke in us something we’ve previously categorized as familiar and positive. The opposite can happen (“This guy is a complete jerk”) if some attribute taps into a previous negative experience. Our brain catalogs vast amounts of input from our family, community, and culture, along with what is presented to us in the media. As it makes sense of what it’s stored, it begins to form a worldview. If we later meet someone with characteristics unlike what we’ve cataloged, our default response is to be wary, defensive. In turn, if our brains are filled with associations based upon media-driven biases about ideal body type, or racial or cultural stereotypes, for example, we will exhibit implicit biases (and maybe overt bias).

Attention words. A single word wasn't enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received attention. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind's last door swung open.

You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water. But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked. Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing. And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.

Won’t you look at me, Camilla Hect?” Camilla murmured something that Nona could not hear. The body said, “I died, and you carried me. I gambled, and you covered my bet. You kept the faith, and were the instrument of both my vengeance and my grace. And now I have fought through time, and the River, and Ianthe the First—fought and bested Ianthe the First, and I hope I never fight her ever again…Will you not look at me now, Cam, and know me?” Camilla raised her chin. She looked at the dead face. She said quietly—“Yes Warden. I will always know you.” Their foreheads touched. Camilla reached out with her slippery hand, and Palamedes clasped it with Ianthe Naberius’s cold, gloveless one. Because both of their hands were very messy, it made an embarrassing squelch, but neither of them appeared to notice or care. Nona had to look away. She heard Palamedes say, in the voice of Ianthe Naberius—“Pyrrha, I can barely do anything. I’m only the hand in a sock puppet. I don’t think I could unpick a single ward, and I can’t do a damn thing for Cam’s bleeding—thank God nothing’s protruding.” Cam said, without opening her eyes, “Don’t worry about me, Warden. I’ll walk it off.” “Yes, thank you for your input,” said Palamedes pleasantly. “I’ve taken it under advisement and will add it to the next agenda.” Camilla smiled that wonderful hot-metal smile that Nona loved as long as she had been alive. “Jackass.

Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.

He said sometimes when you're young you have to think about things, because you're forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you're too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything, know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you're forty or fifty or a hundred forty and you find something that doesn't work, you can still find all the threads and pull them. But that's not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most CITs don't. CITs have a trouble with not wanting to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real eetee once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets. Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they're gone and thinking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don't remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it stems from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it's a personal problem.

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence. Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.” Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.