Whichever side of the aisle we were on, the 2024 election results surprised many of us. A lot of people I talk to are simply wondering "what does this mean?" We wonder, as we would in any election, what the results mean for our future. We wonder what it means about our neighbors, whether the things we want are the same things that they want. And because questions of character were important for many people in this particular election, we wonder what it means about ourselves — as in this question that I keep hearing: "Is this really who we are now?" These are deep, existential types of questions, so it's no wonder that many people are struggling to make sense of them. One way to consider the situation is to take seriously the idea (from Eric Schwitzgebel ) that America itself is a conscious entity. Schwitzgebel’s technical argument is about complexity -- America has a structure with a high level of organization, integration among its parts, specialization of func
Fatigue is one of the most common symptom experiences, both among people with chronic illnesses and among healthy adults. Unfortunately, it's one with no easy medical solution: Caffeine helps in the short term, but its effects aren't as restorative as sleep. And the same factors that cause fatigue can also interfere with getting restful sleep or true recovery. Unfortunately, this post isn't going to be about how to reduce fatigue; instead, it's about what happens in the brain when we are tired. We're all likely to be fatigued at some point, so it might be useful to understand how that affects us. A 2022 study using fMRI brain scan technology found that the amount of inter-connection between different parts of the brain tended to decrease after people completed a cognitively demanding task. That this means is that the conscious, deliberate, Narrative Mind becomes isolated from the Intuitive Mind that actually controls behavior. Similarly, a 2021 study showed that