Recent quotes:

How REM and non-REM sleep may work together to help us solve problems -- ScienceDaily

Suppose I give you a creativity puzzle where you have all the information you need to solve it, but you can't, because you're stuck," says first author Penny Lewis, a professor at the Cardiff University School of Psychology. "You could think of that as you've got all the memories that you need already, but you need to restructure them -- make links between memories that you weren't linking, integrate things that you weren't integrating." Studies show that this kind of restructuring often happens while we are asleep, so Lewis and her co-authors drew on that literature, as well as physiological and behavioral data, to create a model of what might be happening during each stage. Their model proposes that non-REM sleep helps us organize information into useful categories, whereas REM helps us see beyond those categories to discover unexpected connections.

Human brain recalls visual features in reverse order than it detects them: Study challenges traditional hierarchy of brain decoding; offers insight into how the brain makes perceptual judgements -- ScienceDaily

The brain appeared to encode one line, then the other, and finally encode their relative orientation. But during decoding, when participants were asked to report the individual angle of each line, their brains used that the lines' relationship -- which angle is greater -- to estimate the two individual angles. "This was striking evidence of participants employing this reverse decoding method," said Dr. Qian. The authors argue that reverse decoding makes sense, because context is more important than details. Looking at a face, you want to assess quickly if someone is frowning, and only later, if need be, estimate the exact angles of the eyebrows. "Even your daily experience shows that perception seems to go from high to low levels," Dr. Qian added.
In an interview with The Paris Review twenty years ago, Don DeLillo mentioned that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria.” From the vantage point of today, you wonder how much anyone—even someone as routinely prescient as DeLillo—could possibly have identified list-based hysteria in 1993. DeLillo’s statement also hints at something crucial about the list as a form: the tension between its gesturing toward order and its acknowledgement of order’s impossibility. The list—or, more specifically, the listicle—extends a promise of the definitive while necessarily revealing that no such promise could ever be fulfilled. It arises out of a desire to impose order on a life, a culture, a society, a difficult matter, a vast and teeming panorama of cat adorability and nineties nostalgia. Umberto Eco put it dramatically: “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.”
Cutting down on your storage space can do wonders for limiting consumption. Try cutting your closet down to 10 hangers or force yourself to use a small bag when you travel. Do you really need a walk-in closet or a rack for all your shoes? Try constraining your storage spaces and you’ll quickly identify what you really need.