family observations

What Do Babies Dream Of?

I returned home a couple of days ago from spending a glorious week-and-a-half with my new grandbaby. He’s still considered to be in the newborn phase and does lots of sleeping. I, happily, did lots of holding while he was sleeping. (There’s no such thing as spoiling a baby by constantly holding one this young … a myth that circulated heavily when I was raising my kids. I ignored it then; I ignore it now.)…

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family ideas observations

Aphantasia Revisited: What Is Neurotypical?

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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history pragmatic historian

Aphantasia and the Study of History

Here is an amazing fact of life that younger people may not realize until they have a good number of years behind them: You never stop learning interesting, fundamental things about yourself. My husband and I are in our early 50s and Erik (that’s my husband, in case you didn’t know) just learned that he is aphantasiac. Here is the BBC article about aphantasia that brought this realization to him. Basically, people who have aphantasia…

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