The Circuit Book Quotes

When does real love begin? At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity. At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love? At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

My shame circuits burned out from overuse years ago.

When love doesn’t work, we hurt. Indeed, “hurt feelings” is a precisely accurate phrase, according to psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California. Her brain imaging studies show that rejection and exclusion trigger the same circuits in the same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate, as physical pain.

American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.

The truth is, I am a person who is meant to stay home and read books, maybe have a nice dinner, and then put myself to bed. That is the life I’m built for. It’s all about the setting. When I’m out in public, it’s as if my system gets overwhelmed and instantaneously short-circuits. I turned the phoenix into ashes, by accident, in small ways, all the time.

Without you at my side, I feel as though my eyes are just a camera, like a closed-circuit camera without film in it, registering what’s out there, second by second, letting it all vanish instantly to be replaced by more images, none of them properly appreciated.

New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying. ("New York Blues")

There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts.

The blame lies with our brains. While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them.

Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.

For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity. Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting." Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories. The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it. — excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)

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.

Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents—will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction? Much as with physical exercise, you can even get a kind of perverse pleasure out of this pain, knowing the benefits it will bring you. In any event, you must meet any boredom head-on and not try to avoid or repress it. Throughout your life you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline.

Burden … began to read to the child in Spanish from the book which he had brought with him from California, interspersing the fine, sonorous flowing of mysticism in a foreign tongue with harsh, extemporized dissertations composed half of the bleak and bloodless logic which he remembered from his father on interminable New England Sundays, and half of immediate hellfire and tangible brimstone of which any country Methodist circuit rider would have been proud.

...it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city's transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name - street, level, square - and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or - finally - on foot; therefore, four maps

There are four independent brain circuits that influence our lasting well-being, Davidson explained. The first is “our ability to maintain positive states.” It makes sense that the ability to maintain positive states or positive emotions would directly impact one’s ability to experience happiness. These two great spiritual leaders were saying that the fastest way to this state is to start with love and compassion. The second circuit is responsible for “our ability to recover from negative states.” What was most fascinating to me was that these circuits were totally independent. One could be good at maintaining positive states but easily fall into an abyss of a negative state from which one had a hard time recovering. That explained a lot in my life. The third circuit, also independent but essential to the others, is “our ability to focus and avoid mind-wandering.” This of course was the circuit that so much of meditation exists to develop. Whether it was focusing on one’s breath, or a mantra, or the analytic meditation that the Dalai Lama did each morning, this ability to focus one’s attention was fundamental. The fourth and final circuit is “our ability to be generous.” That was amazing to me: that we had an entire brain circuit, one of four, devoted to generosity. It is no wonder that our brains feel so good when we help others or are helped by others, or even witness others being helped, which Ekman had described as the elevation that is one dimension of joy. There was strong and compelling research that we come factory equipped for cooperation, compassion, and generosity.

you asked him, he could only say he loved her, and that he did not know what that word meant before her, and that he would forget what it meant after her.

We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony [Iommi] launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’ – doh, doh, doooohnnnn – but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you f**king serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’ ‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’ ‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dream-in’”.’ ‘Who – us?’ laughed Tony. ‘That’s what your manager told me!’ ‘Jim Simpson told you that?’ ‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’ ‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’ He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

A branch of electrical theory called network theory deals with the electrical properties of electrical circuits, or networks, made by interconnecting three sorts of idealized electrical structures:

What are you?' Trout asked the boy scornfully. 'Some kind of gutless wonder?' This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground. Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Our lives, I’ve learned, don’t simply proceed nicely and directly from “birth” to “death.” Instead, I see each one of us as traveling a most curious and branching-out or circuitous route, one that is creative in ways that are both known and, I’m sure now, unknown. Ah,

In his first eight years on the global lecture circuit, Bill had never been paid to speak in Nigeria. But once Hillary was appointed secretary of state, he booked two of his top three highest-paid speeches ever by traveling to Nigeria, pulling in a whopping $700,000 each.69

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

The crowds that queued for snacks and knick-knacks, the constant stream of passengers recorded by the closed-circuit TVs, were wondrous proof of the sheer variety of human specimens, except that they were presumed to be identically faithless inside, duty-free in every sense of that word.

My mother imbued me with a love of libraries. The reason why I finally embraced this book project—wanted, and then needed, to write it—was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit

Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sacralizing” figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act _ an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.

Most often in culture we see people who short-circuit the Current. They observe some phenomenon in culture or nature that makes them emotional and they run rampant with speculations, never taking the time to entertain possible explanations that could have been verified by further observation. They disconnect themselves from reality and can then imagine whatever they want. On the other hand, we see many people, particularly in academia or in the sciences, who accumulate mountains of information and data from studies and statistics but never venture to speculate on the larger ramifications of this information or connect it all into a theory. They are afraid to speculate because it seems unscientific and subjective, failing to understand that speculation is the heart and soul of human rationality, our way of connecting to reality and seeing the invisible. To them, it is better to stick to facts and studies, to keep a micro view, rather than possibly embarrassing themselves with a speculation that could be wrong.

Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice? Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.” Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.” Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight.

Our brain is therefore not simply passively subjected to sensory inputs. From the get-go, it already possesses a set of abstract hypotheses, an accumulated wisdom that emerged through the sift of Darwinian evolution and which it now projects onto the outside world. Not all scientists agree with this idea, but I consider it a central point: the naive empiricist philosophy underlying many of today's artificial neural networks is wrong. It is simply not true that we are born with completely disorganized circuits devoid of any knowledge, which later receive the imprint of their environment. Learning, in man and machine, always starts from a set of a priori hypotheses, which are projected onto the incoming data, and from which the system selects those that are best suited to the current environment. As Jean-Pierre Changeux stated in his best-selling book Neuronal Man (1985), “To learn is to eliminate.

People with a right parietal lobe injury, for example, will commonly suffer from a syndrome called spatial hemi-neglect. Depending on the size and location of the lesion, patients with hemi-neglect may behave as if part or all of the left side of their world, which may include the left side of their body, does not exist! This could include not eating off the left side of their plate, not shaving or putting makeup on the left side of their face, not drawing the left side of a clock, not reading the left pages of a book, and not acknowledging anything or anyone in the left half of the room. Some will deny that their left arm and leg are theirs and will not use them when trying to get out of bed, even though they are not paralyzed. Some patients will even neglect the left side of space in their imagination and memories.3 That the deficits vary according to the size and location of the lesion suggests that damage that disrupts specific neural circuits results in impairments in different component processes.

The Obamas are now worth 30 times more than when they entered the White House in 2008, giving them a net worth in excess of $40 million. Much of this came from lucrative book deals, from speeches delivered by both Obamas at $200,000 a pop and from a sweetheart deal with Netflix that is reportedly worth $50 million. For the Obamas, no money-making scheme is too petty; Michelle rakes in the bucks by charging even nonprofit groups $225,000 to speak and sells 25 different items of merchandise—mugs, shirts and candles—on the speaking circuit.

I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier." "Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not." "We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born." "Oh, I like choice, though," he said. "I like choosing the jobs I take and the places I go and the food I eat and the companions I sit and yarn with. Don't you wish for a choice once in a while ?" She considered, and then said, "Perhaps we don't mean the same thing by choice, Mr. Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we're not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don't feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?" "Well, I'm kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel. But ma'am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I'm a simple aeronaut, and I'd like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses...Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I've got enough, ma'am, I'm gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I'll never leave the ground again." "There's another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves." "I see that, ma'am, and I envy you; but I ain't got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I'm just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain't been told nothing about kinda troubling." "lorek Byrnison's quarrel with his king is part of it too," said the witch. "This child is destined to play a part in that." "You speak of destiny," he said, "as if it was fixed. And I ain't sure I like that any more than a war I'm enlisted in without knowing about it. Where's my free will, if you please? And this child seems to me to have more free will than anyone I ever met. Are you telling me that she's just some kind of clockwork toy wound up and set going on a course she can't change?" "We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair. There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do it. If she's told what she must do, it will all fail; death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

LONG, LONG AGO IN the Incubation Period of Man—long before booking agents, five-a-days, theatrical boarding houses, subway circuits, and Variety—when Megatherium roamed the trees, when Broadway was going through its First Glacial Period, and when the first vaudeville show was planned by the first lop-eared, low-browed, hairy impresario, it was decreed: “The acrobat shall be first.” Why the acrobat should be first no one ever explained; but that this was a dubious honor every one on the bill—including the acrobat—realized only too well. For it was recognized even then, in the infancy of Show Business, that the first shall be last in the applause of the audience. And all through the ages, in courts and courtyards and feeble theatres, it was the acrobat—whether he was called buffoon, farceur, merry-andrew, tumbler, mountebank, Harlequin, or punchinello—who was thrown, first among his fellow-mimes, to the lions of entertainment to whet their appetites for the more luscious feasts to come. So that to this day their muscular miracles are performed hard on the overture’s last wall shaking blare, performed with a simple resignation that speaks well for the mildness and resilience of the whole acrobatic tribe.

I'd suggest that what J R documents is the way that America is hollowing out the foundation necessary to even read a book like it, an America that teaches its children via closed-circuit television, an America that thinks democracy means owning a share of profit-maximizing publicly traded corporations. This is what it means to say that J R is about the conditions underlying the impossibility of its own reception. If there were a welcoming mass public for books like this, a public able to appreciate its beautiful difficulty and astonishing imagination, we wouldn't live in the sort of world so in need of savage satirical critique in the first place.

There is so much going on, but there is so much less of any real value happening. I don’t think that books or fiction in general is as important to the society or culture at large as it was in years gone by- we are the products of what I believe is a decidedly- and purposefully- less literate culture. To utilize a symbol everyone can understand intuitively, Big Brother WANTS you to be stupid- and He wants you to tune in to Joe Millionaire and Friends, to Wife Swap and Dog The Bounty Hunter, and a million other circuitous destinations where He will provide you with examples of precisely how brainless and inane He wants you to be. Stupid is as stupid does. Stupid citizens aren’t a threat to the status quo.

What’s more, the focus on answers and arguments in apologetics sometimes has made us inattentive to the questions being asked. There are times and places to have arguments that are won or lost (namely, in formal settings when those are the rules). But with our neighbors, conversations are more fun and instructive when they take the form of mutual reason-giving and explaining. When the impulse to defend takes hold, we tend to short-circuit the work of understanding. Which, ironically, makes it harder to engage in spirited, lively, and open discussion with those who think about the world very differently than we do. Our instinctive disposition will be to reach into the argumentative bag of tricks rather than to listen attentively and dialogue in love.13

If I had followed the great man’s advice and never burdened myself with the gift of my children, or if I had never written any novels at all, in the long run the result would have been the same as the result will be for me here, having made the choice I made: I will die; and the world in its violence and serenity will roll on, through the endless indifference of space, and it will take only 100 of its circuits around the sun to turn the six of us, who loved each other, to dust, and consign to oblivion all but a scant few of the thousands upon thousands of novels and short stories written and published during our lifetimes. If none of my books turns out to be among that bright remnant because I allowed my children to steal my time, narrow my compass, and curtail my freedom, I’m all right with that.

I didn’t actually have to write a thing because the act of reading was my writing. I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything. It’s not a bad way to begin. It’s to blur that distinction between reader and writer. If you think about it, any book that you pick up as a reader, if it’s good, is a printed circuit for your own life to flow through—so when you read a book you are engaged in the events of the mind of the writer. You are bringing your creative faculties into sync. You’re imagining the words, the sounds of the words, and you’re thinking of the various characters in terms of people you’ve known—not in terms of the writer’s experience but your own. So it’s very hard to make any distinction between reader and writer at this ontological level. As a child I somehow drifted into this region where you are both reader and writer: I declared to myself that I was the writer. I wrote a lot of good books. I wrote Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. That was one of my better efforts.

And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for. Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’ I don’t know when we started drifting apart. When I told Mary about the project—I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen—something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off—I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful. Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping.

That is the moment I begin to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? When you have died you can't read those history books. When you have died the small trace you have left behind, even if you win a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, an election, will lose its vibrancy, fade into an outline. Oh yes, him, I heard of him, I knew someone who read him once. What difference does it make to the corpse if his books are in libraries or not in libraries? Who cares if his plays are revived on the summer-stock circuit for one hundred years? Isn't the simplest touch of a child's arm on the face more important, isn't the good meal, the brush against a thigh, a hand held during a movie, a swim in the sea, aren't those things of equal importance as the sands of time come rushing down on our heads burying ambition and love, good and evil, breath, blood, brains, waste, memory, alike in oblivion?

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.

to look around. At first sight, the apartment was perfectly ordinary. He made a quick circuit of the living room, kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom. The place was tidy enough, but with a few items strewn here and there, the sort of things that might be left lying around by a busy person—a magazine, a half-finished crossword puzzle, a book left open on a night table. Abby had the usual appliances—an old stove and a humming refrigerator, a microwave oven with an unpronounceable brand name, a thirteen-inch TV on a cheap stand, a boom box near a modest collection of CDs. There were clothes in her bedroom closet and silverware, plates, and pots and pans in her kitchen cabinets. He began to wonder if he’d been unduly suspicious. Maybe Abby Hollister was who she said she was, after all. And he’d taken a considerable risk coming here. If he was caught inside her apartment, all his plans for the evening would be scotched. He would end up in a holding cell facing charges that would send him back to prison for parole violation. All because he’d gotten a bug up his ass about some woman he hardly knew, a stranger who didn’t mean anything. He decided he’d better get the hell out. He was retracing his steps through the living room when he glanced at the magazine tossed on the sofa. Something about it seemed wrong. He moved closer and took a better look. It was People, and the cover showed two celebrities whose recent marriage had already ended in divorce. But on the cover the stars were smiling over a caption that read, Love At Last. He picked up the magazine and studied it in the trickle of light through the filmy curtains. The date was September of last year. He put it down and looked at the end tables flanking the sofa. For the first time he noticed a patina of dust on their surfaces. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned in some time. He went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. It seemed well stocked, but when he opened the carton of milk and sniffed, he discovered water inside—which was just as well, since the milk’s expiration period had ended around the time that the People cover story had been new. Water in the milk carton. Out-of-date magazine on the sofa. Dust everywhere, even coating the kitchen counters. Abby didn’t live here. Nobody did. This apartment was a sham, a shell. It was a dummy address, like the dummy corporations his partner had set up when establishing the overseas bank accounts. It could pass inspection if somebody came to visit, assuming the visitor didn’t look too closely, but it wasn’t meant to be used. Now that he thought about it, the apartment was remarkable for what

You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense. (1949)

In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

Once the writer was at the deathbed of a fellow writer. What interested his dying colleague more than anything else was what was being said in the cultural section of the newspapers. Did these battles of opinion take his mind off his illness by infuriating him or making him laugh? Did they put him in mind of an eternal repetition, preferable after all to what was in store for him? There was more to it than that. Even in his hopeless situation, far-removed as he was from the editorial offices, he was their prisoner; more than his nearest and dearest, the critics and editors were the object of his dreams; and in the intervals when he was free from pain, he would ask, since by then he was incapable of reading, what one publication or another had said about some new book. The intrigues, and the almost pleasurable fury they aroused in the sufferer - who saw through them - brought a kind of world, a certain permanence into the sickroom, and the man at his bedside understood his vituperating or silently nodding friend as well as if it had been his own self lying there. But later, when the end was near and the dying man still insisted on having opinions read out to him from the latest batch of newspapers, the witness vowed that he would never let things come to such a pass with him as they had with his image and likeness. Never again would he involve himself in this circuit of classifications and judgments, the substance of which was almost exclusively the playing off of one writer or school against another. Over the years since then, he had derived pride and satisfaction from staying on the outside and carrying on by his own strength rather than at the expense of rivals. The mere thought of returning to the circuit or to any of the persistently warring cliques made him feel physically ill. Of course, he would never get entirely away from them, for even today, so long after his vow, he suddenly caught sight of a word that he at first mistook for his name. But today at least he was glad - as he would not have been years ago - to have been mistaken. Lulled in security, he leafed through the local section and succeeded in giving his mind to every single news item.

Witches own nothing, so we’re not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don’t feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?” “Well, I’m kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I’ll break yer bones, but names ain’t worth a quarrel. But ma’am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I’m a simple aeronaut, and I’d like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses...Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I’ve got enough, ma’am, I’m gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I’ll never leave the ground again.” “There’s another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.” “I see that, ma’am, and I envy you; but I ain’t got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I’m just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain’t been told nothing about kinda troubling.” “Iorek Byrnison’s quarrel with his king is part of it too,” said the witch. “This child is destined to play a part in that.” “You speak of destiny,” he said, “as if it was fixed. And I ain’t sure I like that any more than a war I’m enlisted in without knowing about it. Where’s my free will, if you please?

The rats that Marian Diamond studied had either an enriched or an impoverished environment. That changed their brain state. If you’re surrounded by a nurturing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual environment, you’re in one brain state. If you’re surrounded by danger, uncertainty, and hostility, you’re in a quite different brain state. Brain states, along with mental, emotional, and spiritual states, run the gamut. When the brain’s Enlightenment Circuit is turned on, you’re in a happy and positive state. When the Default Mode Network (DMN) of Chapter 2 predominates, you’re in a negative and stressed state. State Progression Cognitive psychologist Michael Hall has been fascinated by human potential for over 40 years. He has studied the most advanced methods, authored more than 30 books on the topic, and mapped the stages by which people change. Unpleasant experiences are what usually motivate us to change. These involve mental, emotional, or spiritual states. Examples of such states are despair, stagnation, anger, or resentment. Hall calls these “unresourceful” states. We can cultivate resourceful states, such as joy, empowerment, mastery, and contentment. To describe the movement of a person from an unresourceful to a resourceful state, Hall uses the term “state progression.” Hall’s “state progression” model has several steps: Identify the unresourceful state. Identify the desired state. Countercondition dysfunctional behavioral patterns that maintain the unresourceful state. Activate change toward the desired state. Experience the target state. Repeat the experience of the desired state. Condition new behaviors that reinforce the desired state. That’s the promise of directing your attention consciously rather than defaulting to the brain’s negativity bias. Attention sustained over time produces state progression and triggers neural plasticity. If you focus on positive beliefs and thoughts repeatedly, bringing your mind and focus back to the good, you then use attention in the service of positive neural plasticity. When we have practiced sufficiently to be able to maintain this focus, we achieve a condition that Hall calls positive state stability. Our minds become stable in that new state. Their default setting is no longer to focus on the negative. The brain’s negativity bias is no longer hijacking our attention and directing it toward the negative things that are happening, either in our own lives or in the world. We have moved through the stages of state progression to positive state stability.

network of my mentees, students, and book readers will shine as value-added, good-hearted leaders and citizens of the world. Related to the Young Leaders 3.0 theme, I plan to conduct purposeful seminars and conferences tailored to high schoolers, college and university students, young adults just recently launched into the world, parents, and business executives in phases. I will also be actively contributing and hopefully inspiring on the speaking circuit. In addition, I may consider planning and offering new, value-added programs and services both at home and abroad. I hope that along the way, one or more of these events, programs, or services will add significant value to you

Archivist / Circuit Bender For the figure of the artist, technical media has meant nods both toward engineering and the archive, as Huhtamo has noted: “the role of the artist-engineer, which rose into prominence in the 1960s (although its two sides rarely met in one person), has at least partly been supplanted by that of the artist-archaeologist.”23 Yet methodologies of reuse, hardware hacking, and circuit bending are becoming increasingly central in this context as well. Bending or repurposing the archive of media history strongly relates to the pioneering works of artists such as Paul DeMarinis, Zoe Beloff, or Gebhard Sengmüller—where a variety of old media technologies have been modified and repurposed to create pseudo-historical objects from a speculative future.

was now over two million dollars, a nice little nest egg nobody knew about, not even his ex-wife. The $200,000 from Smith would simply be walking-around cash. The St. Paul police and the bureau suspected Smith had a partner when they took him down, but Smith never put Burton’s name in play. He took all the weight. When Smith was being sodomized in jail, when the bureau visited him, talking about how they could make his life easier if he just told them who he worked with, he didn’t give in, didn’t fold, and didn’t turn in his partner. Burton knew all this, tracking his partner’s incarceration, always worried he might break. He never did. Meanwhile, Burton moved to kidnapping and found his true calling within the bureau. When he brought home the daughter of one of New York’s wealthiest businessmen, taking down the kidnappers in a spectacular chase through the subway tunnels, his name and reputation were cemented. He published a book. Traveled the country speaking about his cases, and now performed training for the bureau. Retiring at the end of the year, he could expect to greatly enhance his wealth on the speaking circuit. Several prestigious colleges had inquired of his interest in teaching. His life was set. Then, four months ago Smith showed up on his doorstep. Burton owed him and there was no argument. His life was what it was because Smith never turned him in. Smith took all the heat, and Burton ended up with all the glory. Burton spent days and nights thinking of ways out of helping Smith. He offered up part of his nest egg. Smith wasn’t interested. Burton offered to put him in touch with people who would put him to work, let him earn a respectable living, start a new life, a comfortable life, a decent life. Smith wasn’t interested in any of that. He wanted one thing: he wanted Charlie Flanagan, and he didn’t just want to hurt him, he wanted to gut him. And Burton owed him. And if Burton refused, Smith would kill him. If he could just get through the next day, help Smith get what he wanted and get his crew theirs; he’d be free and clear. Smith would be gone. Burton could retire a happy and wealthy man. If Charlie Flanagan, Lyman Hisle, and their daughters had to pay the ultimate price for that—well, it was him or them. If that was the way it had to be, he’d

Relax and use awareness belly breathing for a few minutes. Pre-stimulate your hands and feet, legs and arms. Then do a whole-body bounce. Perform the full-body circuit for a few minutes. Then return to awareness belly breathing and spend fifteen minutes relaxing and quieting your mind. The energy work you have done so far has mainly involved secondary and tertiary structures. It is important to be comfortable with this level of energy work before approaching the primary energy centers, coming up next.

Too much stress for too long creates distress, and prolonged distress eventually short-circuits the brain. The

Psa. 19:4-6 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them.   Psa. 50:1 The Mighty One, God, the LORD, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting.   Eccl. 1:5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.   Josh. 10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies… The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.   Matt. 5:45 Jesus said, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.

3. Develop a personal learning style Having known your personal profile, you can pick the learning style that can give you the most benefits. There are three common types of learning styles; Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. By identifying the learning style that best suit your profile, you will be able to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. Visual Learning – If your dyslexia isn’t anything related to your visual processing or any visual dyslexia, this learning type may just suit you. Visual learners like to see things with the eyes. They likely think in pictures and uses different illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, videos and mind maps when they study. If you are a visual learner it will be useful to rewrite notes, put information on post-it notes and stick it everywhere, and to re-create images in the mind. Auditory Learning – Auditory learners, on the other hand, think in verbal words rather than in pictures. The best they can do to learn is to tape the information and replay it. It also helps if they discuss the materials that must be learned with others by participating in class discussions, asking questions to their teachers and even trying teaching others. It is also helpful to use audio books and read aloud when trying to memorize information. Kinesthetic Learning – Kinesthetic learners are those who are better to learn with direct exposure to the activity. They are the ‘hands-on’ people and learn best when they actually do something. For them, wiring a circuit board would be much more informative than listening to a lecture about circuits or reading a text book or about it. However, it may also help to underline important terms and meanings and highlight them with bright colors, write notes in the margin when learning from text and repeat information while walking. 4. Don’t force your mind Don’t force your mind to do something beyond your ability. Don’t force yourself to enter a library and finish reading a shelf of books in one day. Be patient on yourself. Take everything slowly and learn step by step. Do not also push yourself if you are not in the mood to read, it will just cause you unnecessary stress. 5.

His book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, came out back in 2011. (glancing down at her notes) “The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. The Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use.

Într-un eseu din 2008 din New York Reviw of Books, Michael Greenberg a descoperit poezia neuroplasticității. El a remarcat că sistemul nostru neurologic, „cu ramurile, transmițătoarele și interstițiile sale ingenios calibrate, posedă o capacitate de improvizație ce pare să oglindească însăși impredictibilitatea gândirii”. Este „un spațiu efemer care se schimbă pe măsură ce se schimbă experiența noastră”. Există multe motive pentru a fi recunoscători că hard diskul nostru mental este capabil să se adapteze experienței atât de prompt, că până și creierii bătrâni pot să învețe trucuri noi. Adaptabilitatea creierului nu a condus numai la noi tratamente și la speranțe noi, pentru aceia care suferă de leziuni sau boli cerebrale. Ea ne furnizează tuturor o flexibilitate mentală și o suplețe intelectuală care ne permit să ne adaptăm la situații noi, să dobândim prin învățare noi abilități și, în general, să ne lărgim orizontul. Știrea nu este însă în totalitate bună. Deși neuroplasticitatea ne oferă o evadare din determinismul genetic, o portiță de scăpare pentru gândire liberă și liber-arbitru, ea impune totodată comportamentului nostru propria sa formă de determinism. Pe măsură ce anumite circuite particulare din creierul nostru se întăresc prin repetiția unei activități fizice sau mentale, ele încep să transforme acea activitate într-un obicei. Paradoxul neuroplasticității, remarcă Doidge, este acela că, în schimbul întregii flexibilități mentale pe care ne-o acordă, ea poate sfârși prin a ne fereca în „deprinderi rigide”. Sinapsele declanșate chimic, care fac legături între neuronii noștri, ne programează, de fapt, să dorim să păstrăm exercitarea circuitelor pe care le-au format. Odată ce am făcut un nou cablaj de circuite în creierul nostru, scrie Doidge, „tânjim să le menținem activate”. Aceasta este calea pe care creierul face acordajul fin al operațiilor sale. Activitățile de rutină sunt îndeplinite din ce în ce mai rapid și eficient, pe când circuitele neutilizate se scurtează. Cu alte cuvinte, plastic nu înseamnă elastic. Buclele noastre neuronale nu sar să-și reia forma anterioară ca o bandă de cauciuc; ele se mențin în starea lor modificată. Și nimic nu spune că noua stare trebuie să fie una dezirabilă. Deprinderile rele pot fi sădite în neuronii noștri la fel de ușor ca cele bune. Pascual-Leone observă că „schimbările plastice pot să nu reprezinte în mod necesar un câștig comportamental pentru un subiect dat”. Pe lângă faptul de a fi „mecanismul de dezvoltare și învățare”, plasticitatea poate fi „o cauză de patologie”. Nu este surprinzător că neuroplasticitatea a fost legată de beteșugurile mentale mergând de la depresie până la tulburările obsesiv-compulsive sau tinitus. Cu cât un om suferind se concentrează asupra simptomelor sale, cu atât mai adânc acele simptome sunt gravate în circuitele sale neuronale. În cel mai rău caz, în esență mintea se antrenează pe sine să fie bolnavă. Multe forme de dependență sunt, de asemenea, consolidate de întărirea căilor plastice din creier. Chiar doze foarte mici de droguri adictive pot să altereze în mod dramatic fluxul de neurotransmițători, precum dopamina, o verișoară producătoare de plăcere a adrenalinei, pare-se că declanșează realmente pornirea sau oprirea unor gene particulare, amplificând și mai mult pofta de drog. Căile vitale devin mortale.

Each day you will perform a circuit consisting of the five strength exercises covered in this book: The Goblet Squat The Kettlebell Swing The Push-up The Kettlebell Press The Chin-up

Thousand Leagues Under the Sea out like a sword. “What are you going to do?” The Magister turned to her. “First, as I promised, I’ll free all fictional creatures I can find. I’ve explained the way things work to my friends, here. And they’d like to speak to their creators, much as I’d still like to.” He held out a hand. “Give me Jonathan Porterhouse, and no harm shall come to you.” Bethany swallowed hard. “What for?” “He will accompany any and all other writers into a fictional world, where they will be free to live or die as they can.” He spread his hands. “It is the only way to ensure an end to their power, and seems the fairest way to imprison them. After all, it is no more than they have done to us.” Bethany’s eyes went wide. “You can’t just send everyone into books! Do you have any idea what would happen?” “Do you know what happened to me?” the Magister roared. “Fighting a war for the freedom of my people, only to find none of it is real? Let the writers of this world decide if their dystopian futures, their dangerous magic, their monsters and stories of terror are so entertaining once it’s their own life or death they’re living out!” Her legs shaking, Bethany took a step forward. “I’m not going to let you do this,” she said quietly. “I can’t.” “Bethany, don’t,” Kiel whispered to her, but she shook her head. “There’s nothing you can do that I can’t undo,” she told the Magister. “So go ahead. Steal my power some more. I’ll just find a way to put everything back where it belongs, and will keep at it as long as I live.” “I understand,” the Magister said. “Then I suppose you leave me with no other option.” “NO!” Kiel shouted, but it was too late. The Magister gestured, and Bethany immediately crumpled to the ground, unmoving. CHAPTER 30 What’s the problem?” Charm said, waving her robotic hand for Owen to hurry up. “We don’t have much more time!” “Give me a minute,” Owen told her, trying not to look at the skeleton sitting on the computer-circuit throne. Kiel had mentioned wanting to bring his parents back to life using magic (before he found out he was a clone of Dr. Verity, of course), but the Magister had always forbidden it, saying that such dark magic led to horrible results.

The vast population of the world have slipped into a coma of laziness.

They insist on subscribers following the rules, but they have no issue breaking them for what they justify as the greater good. The ‘Proclamation of Distrust’ is designed to make everyone feel that any actions they take are necessary.” “What

No one should hold power without oversight.

Thinking on behalf of subscribers was one of the additional benefits of membership. A function that began as an optional extra gradually, and almost unnoticeably, became mandatory.

By the twenty-forties governments were no more than proxy management teams for a new global power and voting became just another decision that was taken on people’s behalf.

The figures were used to prove the system worked and to subdue potential disquiet.

I am writing this with my left hand, although I am strongly right-handed. I had surgery to my right shoulder a month ago (…) and am not capable of use of the right arm at this time. I write slowly, awkwardly – but more easily, more naturally, with each passing day. I am adapting, learning, all the while – not merely this left-handed writing, but a dozen other left-handed skills as well: I have also become very adept, prehensile, with my toes, to compensate for having one arm in a sling. (…) I am developing different patterns, different habits… a different identity, one might say. There must be changes going on with some of the programs and circuits in my brain – altering synaptic weights and connectivities and signals (though our methods of brain imaging are too crude to show these). (…) Nature’s imagination is richer than ours (...). For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life. Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its “creative” potential, that forms the central theme of this book. Thus while one may be horrified of the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative toon- for if they destroy particular paths, they may force the nervous system into making other paths and ways, force on it an unexpected growth and evolution. This other side of development or disease is something I see, potentially, in almost every patient; and it is this, here, which I am especially concerned to describe. (…) In addition to the objective approach of the scientist, the naturalist, we must employ an intersubjective approach too, leaping, as Foucault writes, “into the interior of morbid consciousness [trying] to see the pathological world with the eyes of the patient himself”. (…) The exploration of deeply altered selves and worlds is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office. The French neurologist Francois Lhermitte is especially sensitive to this, and instead of just observing his patients in the clinic, he makes a point of visiting them at home, taking them to restaurants of theatres, or for rides in his car, sharing their lives as much as possible.

Erica instantly changed her entire demeanor, shifting from spy surveillance mode to behaving like an actual teenage girl. Even her voice changed, ratcheting up a few octaves. “I am so psyched to hit the slopes tomorrow!” she exclaimed, taking a bite of pizza. “Aren’t you?” “Definitely,” I replied, trying my best to play along. “I hear there’s some major freshies coming in this week,” Erica proclaimed, leading me between the guards and across the street. “Maybe a foot. Twelve inches of pow-pow! How radical is that?” “Er . . . very radical.” I had no idea what Erica was talking about, but suspected it was skier-speak for something to do with snow. Erica shot me a peeved glance, as though she was annoyed I wasn’t holding up my end of the charade very well, and then decided to handle everything herself. She launched into a long, purposefully vapid diatribe about how much she loved skiing while we continued our circuit around the hotel.

After landing in Julius Nyerere International Airport, he’d browsed the Internet for all the safari companies in Dar es Salaam that serviced Tanzania’s northern safari circuit. There had been several dozen. The addition of the keyword “luxury” narrowed the search significantly. He wrote down the telephone numbers and addresses of the ten most expensive companies. He didn’t think Salvador Brazza would settle for anything less. It turned out he was right. He hit the money on the third outfit he called. Yes, Salvador Brazza and Scarlett Cox had booked a safari with them, the woman on the phone had said. But no, she could not provide any details. It was prohibited by management.

The religious man renounces the joys of this world, but only that he may win in return the joys of heaven; … and the joys of heaven are the same as those of earth, only that they are freed from the limits and contrarieties of this life. Religion thus arrives, though by a circuit, at the very goal, the goal of joy, towards which the natural man hastens in a direct line. To live in images or symbols is the essence of religion. Religion sacrifices the thing itself to the image.

Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were perfectly calculated to jam his circuits. Well, you know, we've already booked you a seat on the first manned spaceflight, but I suppose if you have an internship . . .

He acquired more and more books, books being an acknowledged extravagance he could seldom curb. (With one London bookseller he had placed a standing order for “every book and pamphlet, of reputation, upon the subjects of law and government as soon as it comes out.”) “I want to see my wife and children every day,” he would write while away on the court circuit. “I want to see my grass and blossoms and corn. . . . But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.

ADD A BUZZER TO YOUR GAME Congratulations: You’ve finished the last project in the book! Now, it’s up to you to decide what to make next. If you’re not sure where to start, why not add more circuits to your reaction game? The LED in the middle is where you want the light to stop, and I suggest adding a sound circuit to bring some excitement to hitting your target. To do this, you could use an active buzzer like the one in “Project #2: Intruder Alarm” on page 11, as shown in this partial circuit diagram. The darker part of this circuit shows new components you’d need in order to add a buzzer to the reaction game project. The lighter components are just a section of the original circuit diagram. Connect the positive leg of the middle LED through a 1 kΩ resistor to the base of an NPN transistor. Then connect the buzzer to the transistor’s collector. Connect the positive side of your battery to the other side of the buzzer, and connect the negative side of the battery to the transistor’s emitter. You should end up with a circuit that makes a little beep every time the light passes the middle LED. If you can stop the light on the middle LED, the buzzer should beep continuously to indicate that you’ve hit the main target. When you’ve customized the game to your liking, solder it onto a prototyping board. Maybe you’ll even want to place it in a nice box to hide the electronics and show only the buttons and LEDs.

WHY IS IT CALLED VCC? The positive voltage symbol is called VCC because of old naming conventions. VCC was the voltage supplied to the collector side of a transistor in common transistor circuits, usually through a resistor or some other components. The collector is where the “CC” comes from. You’ve used a bipolar junction transistor throughout this book, but there’s another type of transistor called a field-effect transistor (FET). The pin that equals the collector on this type of transistor is called the drain, so the voltage that was supplied to the drain side of the FET was called VDD.

MEET THE REACTION GAME CIRCUITS The reaction game will consist of three circuits: A 555 timer circuit that determines the speed of the game A counter that controls which LED light to turn on An SR latch that will add a reset button and an action button This section explains each circuit, but to help you understand their diagrams, let’s meet two new circuit symbols. Meet the VCC and GND Symbols Circuit diagrams don’t always use a battery symbol like the one used throughout this book. Sometimes they use the VCC (or VDD) and GND symbols instead. If nothing in the circuit diagram or its description says otherwise, you can assume that VCC represents the positive side of the battery and that GND represents the negative side, or ground. The symbols sometimes look a little different, but the VCC symbol usually shows a wire connecting down from its symbol to the circuit, while the GND symbol shows a wire connecting up from the symbol to the circuit. In bigger circuit diagrams, like the one you’re going to build from in this chapter, these symbols make the diagram much easier to draw and understand.

LET’S MAKE A GAME! You’ve built all sorts of small circuits in this book, and each circuit was designed to teach you a particular concept. In this chapter, you’ll combine all your new skills to build a reaction game. The game has a row of five LEDs that light up one at a time so that a light appears to run back and forth. The goal of the game is to stop the light when it’s in the middle of the five LEDs. That gives you 10 points. If you stop it on an LED next to the middle one, you get 5 points. But if you stop it on one of the end LEDs, you lose all your points and have to start over from 0. Try to reach 50 points! You can play this game by yourself to practice your reaction time, or with as many friends as you want. If you’re competing with friends, I suggest giving each player only one attempt at stopping the light before the next player gets a turn.

The fourth and final circuit is “our ability to be generous.

The general premiss of … belief is: man of himself can know nothing of God; all his knowledge is merely vain, earthly, human. … God is known only by himself. Thus we know nothing of God; for revelation is the word of God … [I]n revelation man … places revelation in opposition to human knowledge … ; here reason must hold its peace. But nevertheless the divine revelation is determined by the human nature. God speaks not to brutes or angels, but to men; hence he uses human speech and human conceptions. … God is … free in will; … but he is not free as to the understanding; he cannot reveal to man whatever he will, but only what is adapted to man, … [W]hat God thinks in relation to man is determined by the idea of man – it has arisen out of reflection on human nature. [H]e thinks of himself, not with his own thinking power, but with man's. … That which comes from God to man, comes to man only from man in God, … only from the ideal nature of man to the phenomenal man, from the species to the individual. Thus, between the divine revelation and the so-called human reason or nature, there is no other than an illusory distinction; … so in revelation man goes out of himself, in order, by a circuitous path, to return to himself!

The real protagonists of the Quartet are surely the parched and beautiful deserts of the biblical lands, with their oases and ruins, and above all the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. Whittemore is profoundly in love with these, and it’s a love that shines forth in all the books. Much of the “talky” nature of the book comes not just from his characters endless speculations and declarations, but from their loving memories of past nights spent idling by the Nile, or the magnificence of the pyramids at dawn, or the smell of a scented garden during some long-ago secret assignation. What you come to realize as you read, unconsciously at first, and then with growing awareness, is that these are not really digressions at all, but rather the very meat of the book. The land speaking to the people, and the people speaking to each other in an endless cycle is the closest definition of what it’s all “about”, if one needs to pursue its meaning into some final corner. The book, and the whole Quartet, is a monument to digression, to the necessity of the circuitous and the roundabout as the only way to truth. Certainty of vision, unquestioned clarity of purpose, leads only to oppression—as the ruthless and single minded Nazi presence hovering in the background serves to remind us.

Gopi Krishna, a Hindu bureaucrat who took up yoga originally only for health reasons, was abruptly catapulted into a negative neurosomatic state for several years. All sensations were so painful that he many times thought he would die. The details, in his autobiography, Kundalini, are pathetic, and sound much like schizophrenia. He came out of this finally, entered a positive neurosomatic state, and has been writing blissful books about the Perfection of the All, typical of this circuit, ever since.

These Rationalist robots are also very uncomfortable with the newer circuits — and some of them spend most of their lives writing articles and books devoted to “proving” that the newer circuits do not exist and that all scientists who have recorded the behavior of these newer circuits are liars, fools, bunglers, charlatans or some manner of Damned Heretics.

Carthago delenda est. How many humans would know what those words meant? How many Terrans, whose world had birthed them, and how many on the thousands of newly populated and rediscovered orbs, all frantically developing and building and reaching upwards to a dimly understood but fantastically powerful future? Just a handful, maybe, who had access to lost books written in dead languages. History had a penchant for repeating itself, though, for rehearsing old patterns in ever grander circuits even if the participants had forgotten their origins.

The walls were lined with bookcases, packed with the usual trial lawyer tomes, including Proof of Facts, American Jurisprudence, and Federal Reporters from the Seventh Circuit as well as a good dozen or more volumes on insurance litigation, medicine and law, and trial reporters from across the country. The books were mainly to impress the visitors from the insurance industry who paid the firm’s bills. All research anymore was computer-driven, and Jones Marentz had accounts with both Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis, your choice.

you think that if I start just meditating and becoming aware of the field, I’ll be on my way to mastering this realm thing.” Paige giggled at her practical assessment of everything she’d been describing to her about the rituals and practices. “Yeah; it’s the first step, so sure.” “Ace!” exclaimed Molly brightly. “I can’t believe there was this whole other world of physics that I’d somehow missed.” Molly, I’ve been researching some of these practices Paige has been referring to. Oh, good. Do we have another manual to study, then? Ugh, no. Flashcards maybe? No. I was about to point out that this is unlikely to be something you can just master in a few sessions. These people take a whole lifetime to learn and practice, in order to finally ascend once. That isn’t even stepping into and out of the etheric like you’re trying to do. Molly paused for a moment. Oz could feel her pushing him out of her circuits a little. Molly? Yeah. I just don’t think they’ve optimized this shit. Safe house, Gaitune-67, Conference room Molly breezed past Joel as he came into the kitchen. “Morning!” she said, uncharacteristically brightly for pre-caffeination.

Win-Tech tried a lot harder to keep you than they did to keep me. I’m a backstop-type guy, hot on administration and controls. But people who can design circuits and take the bugs out of them are rare birds.

Slice the gray stuff up, Phoenix thinks. Put those circuits in place and give them room to grow and let’s see what the human brain can do with ’em. And you may as well put hinges on that piece of my skull you’re cutting out, ’cause you can bet that when Sitech or Omniware comes up with something new to add, I’ll want that installed, too. You’ve only got one life to live, right? So why waste it on outdated ’ware?

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As psychologists, Ericsson and the other researchers in his field are not interested in why deliberate practice works; they’re just identifying it as an effective behavior. In the intervening decades since Ericsson’s first major papers on the topic, however, neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people’s improvements on hard tasks. As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

I believe that Mormon would have us understand that the path to the Savior is more circuitous and scenic than one might expect. In 3–4 Nephi, coming to Christ is what happens when the disciple focuses on other things. We make progress on the road not by speeding as quickly and efficiently as we can to our destination but by stopping to help others who have broken down along the way and by taking detours to search for those who are lost or stranded...Mormon’s focus on other-centeredness and outward-orientation invites the disciple to see salvation less as a goal that can be sought out for its own sake and more as a byproduct of trying to love and serve others. It is the accumulation of small and simple things made great by God.

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Generosity is so important in all of the world’s religions because it no doubt expresses a fundamental aspect of our interdependence and our need for one another. Generosity was so important for our survival that the reward centers of our brain light up as strongly when we give as when we receive, sometimes even more so. As mentioned earlier, Richard Davidson and his colleagues have identified that generosity is one of the four fundamental brain circuits that map with long-term well-being. In the 2015 World Happiness Report, Davidson and Brianna Schuyler explained that one of the strongest predictors of well-being worldwide is the quality of our relationships. Generous, pro-social behavior seems to strengthen these relationships across cultures. Generosity is even associated with better health and longer life expectancy. Generosity seems to be so powerful that, according to researchers David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit, just thinking about

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The latest brain scan research suggests that we have a rather binary understanding of self and other and that our empathy circuits do not activate unless we see the other person as part of our own group.

Her brain imaging studies show that rejection and exclusion trigger the same circuits in the same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate, as physical pain.

It is my hope and fervent belief that the ten principles herein—taken directly from my unorthodox and rather circuitous life journey—will inspire you with common-sense insights that illuminate your own path to prosperity and fulfillment. But first: what is this thing we call “success”? Sure, prosperity is part of it. But it is more than a simple monetary reward. Far more. For me, success is an ideology, rather than simply a financial yardstick, and I think if you’ve picked up this book, you agree that success is less a destination and more a state of mind.

Each day you will perform a circuit consisting of the five strength exercises covered in this book:  The Goblet Squat The Kettlebell Swing The Push-up The Kettlebell Press The Chin-up

The brain’s reward system and the circuits that control eating behavior are the same ones that respond to drugs of abuse,” but, unlike sugar, “drugs of abuse seem to hijack those systems and turn off their normal controls.