It Is The Most Wondrous

...you Are Battered And Bruised In The Collisions Between Reminiscence And Reality.

The Three-pound Organ In Your Skull - With Its Pink Consistency Of Jell-o - Is An Alien Kind Of Computational Material. It Is Composed Of Miniaturized, Self-configuring Parts, And It Vastly Outstrips Anything We've Dreamt Of Building.

You Gleefully Say, "i Just Thought Of Something!", When In Fact Your Brain Performed An Enormous Amount Of Work Before Your Moment Of Genius Struck. When An Idea Is Served Up From Behind The Scenes, Your Neural Circuitry Has Been Working On It For Hours Or Days Or Years, Consolidating Information And Trying Out New Combinations. But You Take Credit Without Further Wonderment At The Vast, Hidden Machinery Behind The Scenes.

You Are Part Of A Complex Social Network That Changes Your Biology With Every Interaction, And Which Your Actions Can Change.

If You Cannot Always Elicit A Straight Answer From The Unconscious Brain, How Can You Access Its Knowledge? Sometimes The Trick Is Merely To Probe What Your Gut Is Telling You. So The Next Time A Friend Laments That She Cannot Decide Between Two Options, Tell Her The Easiest Way To Solve Her Problem: Flip A Coin. She Should Specify Which Option Belongs To Heads And Which To Tails, And Then Let The Coin Fly. The Important Part Is To Assess Her Gut Feeling After The Coin Lands. If She Feels A Subtle Sense Of Relief At Being "told" What To Do By The Coin, That's The Right Choice For Her.