Category: ideas

family ideas observations

Aphantasia Revisited: What Is Neurotypical?

By Mary | by Mary

My husband’s investigation into aphantasia continues. He discovered he was aphantasiac in 2019 after reading an article from the BBC on this form of brain function that is primarily characterized by the inability to visualize things in the mind. I wrote about this in June 2019. Erik recently found another article on aphantasia, this one from Scientific American, that explains more about how his brain works. Whenever he is asked to recall specific events from…

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A Social Contract of Care and Concern

By Mary | by Mary

  I found the above story on Twitter. It is attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead as told to Ira Byock. It relates how Mead felt that the first sign of civilization within a culture was finding a broken femur that had healed, indicating that someone had taken the time to allow an injured person to heal by protecting and caring for them. It’s an interesting story, though the tweet has since been removed, probably because…

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Writing in My Sleep

By Mary | by Mary

Royel M. Johnson posted an interesting question on Twitter recently. I shared the tweet with a reply: “Yes, I definitely write in my sleep.” A quick, throwaway tweet. Or so I thought. A friend of mine suggested I write a blog post about it, so here we are, after a week of dream-writing. As soon as the suggestion was made, my sleeping brain went into overdrive and presented several vivid dreams with writing elements in…

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Olio: October 18, 2020

By Mary | by Mary

Olio: A miscellaneous collection of things (or, when I was trying to remember the definition of olio, what popped to mind was “random shit”). When I started this blog 6 years ago, I wanted a way to share miscellaneous stuff that I found interesting but with a heading I could use habitually, so I could find this stuff again. Hence, “olio.” My last olio post was in April 2016. Not sure how I lost track…

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Embodied Energy Is Key to the Grand Unified Theory of Preservation

By Mary | by Mary

Big, complex ideas take a significant amount of thought. Such is the case with the Grand Unified Theory of Preservation I’ve been working on for years. The thinking has continued since I shared the post I wrote about the theory a couple of weeks ago on this blog. Friend and history colleague David Grabitske sparked fresh thinking about the theory with a question he left on LinkedIn: “Where does Language Preservation fit? Just curious.“ Yes,…

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