Unlike the future, Eternity, by its very definition, cannot be limited by the vagaries and unknowns of time. At best we can understand Eternity as existing outside of time, as timelessness — an infinite present. Which makes you rethink that eternal afterlife you were counting on. But don’t worry, because another name for timelessness is nirvana. So it’s all good.
Exosomatic Memory
Memory stored in externalized databases, which at some point will exceed the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there will be more memory “out there” than exists inside all of us. As humans we will have peripheralized our essence.
Fate Is for Losers
A state of being whose opposite is Destiny Is for Winners.
Fictive Rest
The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction. Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack one’s own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.
Field Denial
The near absence of any discussion around the fact that while fields exist (for example, magnetic fields) nobody actually knows how they work, nor are we any longer trying to figure them out.
Frankentime
What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is being spent working with and around a computer and the Internet. (See also Time Snack)
The Future of Labour
The fact that there is no word in the Chinese language for a “me day.”
General Anesthetic Afterlife
The concept that death must be akin to being under general anesthetic. A variant of the belief that because you don’t remember anything from before you were born, you need not worry about what happens after you die.
Goalpost Aura
The ability of places and objects, such as football goalposts or artwork in a museum, to possess an indescribable aura. An application of the more well-known process of sacralization — wherein places such as churches and mosques are understandably transformed through human emotion, thought, and belief into sacred places — to seemingly random elements of our lives.
Godseeking
An extreme version of Christmas Morning Feeling. Significant scientific literature has postulated that religious experience stems largely from a God module based in the temporal lobe. Additionally, for those who believe, as many physiatrists do, that our ideas of God are heavily influenced by our infant memories of giant, all-powerful beings — our parents — the hippocampus, encoder of those memories, must also be important for religious experience. And finally, there is evidence that the parietal lobe plays an important role in all mystical experience. All of which leads us to the primary objection to localizing religious activity in the brain, the reductionist “nothing but” argument: that if religious states are brain states, they are nothing but brain states, and the experience of God is simply a neurological phenomenon.
Grim Truth
You’re smarter than TV. So what?
Guck Wonder
The brain has always been poorly understood. Warriors on ancient battlefields must have wondered what the grey guck was that spilled out when they lopped off the top of someone’s skull. At least with a heart you could tell it was doing something useful. Maybe they saw the brain as filler material the gods used to fill skull cavities, the way pet food manufacturers bulk up tinned meat products with grains.
Humanalia
Things made by humans that exist only on earth and nowhere else in the universe. Examples include Teflon, NutraSweet, thalidomide, Paxil, and meaningfully sized chunks of element number 43, technetium.
Iddefodial Storage
The brain’s way of protecting itself from itself. To whit, if our subconscious is so wonderful, why do our bodies work so hard to keep it deeply buried?
Ikeasis
The desire in both daily and consumer life to cling to generically designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information. (See also Invariant Memory)
Indoor/Outdoor Voice
A very quick test one can use to understand the expressive world of people further along the autistic spectrum than others. People unable to modulate their voices to suit the environment are just that much further along. (See also Internal Voice Blindness; Preliterary Aural Bliss)
Inhibition Spectrum
From the centre to the right:
“normal” → shy → quiet → reclusive loner → scary loner → hermit → Unabomber
From the centre to the left:
“normal” → talkative → life of the party → no off button → rants → talks to self → madness
Instant Reincarnation
Most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for total radical change in their lives. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.
Internal Voice Blindness
The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue, a fact that undermines the conventional wisdom that one’s inner voice is one’s own. Witness the universal confusion when non-professionals hear recordings of their own voice. In fact, the tone of one’s inner voice is almost impossible to nail down.
Curiously, what artists commonly refer to as their muse — a seemingly external voice that guides them in their work — is actually a defective and/or amplified inner voice mechanism, a function regulated by the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes, which are responsible for speech and auditory processing.
Interruption-Driven Memory
We remember only the red traffic lights, never the green ones. The green ones keep us in the flow; the red ones interrupt and annoy us. Interruption: this accounts for the almost universal tendency of car drivers to be superstitious about stoplights.
Intraffinital Melancholy vs. Extraffinital Melancholy
Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely or to be lonely within a dead relationship?
Intravincular Familial Silence
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
Invariant Memory
The process whereby the brain determines when looking at an animal whether it is a dog or a cat. There exists no perfect model of a cat or a dog, yet we can instantly tell which is which by rapidly moving up and down long lists of traits that define cat-ness and dog-ness. The brain’s ability to form invariant representations is the root of all intelligence. Some people refer to invariant memories as idealized Platonic forms or as generic forms.
Itness
The ability of one agent to create the perception of an object, person, or event as possessing “it” — for example, not wanting to be “it” in a game of tag — or even the ability of a dog owner to create instant itness when choosing a stick to be thrown for retrieval.
Karaokeal Amnesia
Most people don’t know the complete lyrics of almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)
Limbic Trading
The belief that the need for stories comes from deep within the brain’s limbic system — where memory and emotion percolate, and where stories are first processed before they are passed on to the left hemisphere, the home of intuition, imagination, and inspiration — and that storytelling is one limbic system’s way of communi-
cating with that of another person.
Limited Pool Romantic Theory
The belief that one can fall in love only a finite number of times, most commonly six.
Lyrical Putty
The lyri
cs one creates in one’s head in the absence of knowing a song’s real lyrics.
Malfactory Aversion
The ability to figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then to stop doing it.
Mallproof Realms
Realms where shopping never happens. For example, Star Trek characters never go shopping. Also, universes that wilfully exclude commerce.
Mechanics of Friends and Influence
The fact that people will like and respect you for no other
reason than that you give the illusion of remembering their names.
Me Goggles
The inability to accurately perceive ourselves as others do.
Memesphere
The realm of culturally tangible ideas.
Metaphor Blindness
An exceedingly common inability to understand metaphor, which often leads to avoidance of art forms, such as novels, where metaphor might be encountered. (See also Poetic Side Effects)
Metaphor Spectrum
Confusion in the noun centre of the brain that leads to schizophrenic or delusional thinking:
Napoleon was a general → Napoleon is great → I think I am great → I am Napoleon
Monophobia
Dislike of feeling like an individual.
Nanoexploitative Industry
Pretty much everything invented after the year 1900 is based on our knowledge of things that are incredibly tiny and processes that occur at atomic or subatomic levels.
Narrative Drive
The belief that a life without a story is a life not worth living — quite common, and ironically accompanied by the fact that most people cannot ascribe a story to their lives.
Negative Nonprocessing
The fact that the brain doesn’t process negatives. Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel, the smell. Try — you can’t.
Next-Flight-Homers
People who click on the Internet but not in real life when they go to meet their hookup at an airport cocktail lounge; related to but not the same as Room-Getters — people who click both on the Internet and in real life.
Ninetenicillin
A pill that makes one feel as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred. A variation of Millennial Tristesse, a longing for the twentieth century.
Nonrotational Dreamlessness
The theory that dreams are largely a biological response to the planet’s rotation, so citizens of planets that do not rotate most likely do not dream.
Noun-Nouning
By repeating a noun twice, one invokes the noun’s generic form, its invariant-memory form. “No, I don’t want blue khakis with pleats. Just give me clean generic beige khaki-khakis.” Or, “Officer, I’ve tried to remember what kind of car the getaway car was but I can’t — it was just a car-car.”
Omniscience Fatigue
The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.
Omnislut
Mitochondrial Eve — the “universal mother” — a female who lived about 200,000 years ago, to whom all human beings are related via the mitochondrial DNA pathway. “Superdog,” a.k.a. Y-Chromosomal Adam, the universal father, lived 60,000 years ago.
Pathologography
A new strain of biographical writing that acknowledges the importance of performing forensic analysis of the subject’s physical and mental states. Biology is not destiny, but it can certainly open and close a few doors.
Permanent Halloween
The ultimate expression of individuality is to arrive at a point where one wears a Halloween costume every day of the year. Writes Louise Adler, “The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become. This is most obvious in people whom society no longer keeps in line; the eccentricity of the very rich or of castaways.”
Phantom Point
An object that exists but, when you really think about it, does not; for example, a corner or an edge. Also known as “virtual tangibles,” phantom points must be considered when contemplating theoretical geometry. For example, the head of a pin — a point that obviously exists and yet does not — is theoretically no different than the state of the universe before the Big Bang. It encompasses everything and nothing.
Poetic Side Effects
The result of looking at a water molecule and being able to predict rainbows, or inventing the motor vehicle and predicting that dogs will cheerfully stick their faces out into the oncoming wind.
Point Mesmerization
Deflection by dispersion. The manner in which a lion tamer controls a lion, keeping it mesmerized by holding a chair up to its face, legs first. The lion, unable to relinquish its instinctual and powerful ability to focus, stares at the ends of the chair legs, its eyes darting back and forth between the four of them to the exclusion of the larger picture.
Polydexterity
Handedness isn’t just about writing or throwing a ball. It can be applied to almost all body activities: winking, crossing the legs, guitar playing, sleeping on one’s side, and so forth. No person is ever universally monodextrous.
Pope Gregory’s Day-timer
Doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it certainly would have been interesting to see.
Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome
The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-to-21 age range. “Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.”
The inability of teens to consider the consequences of risky action is due to the fact that their brain’s development is only 80 percent finished. The cortex matures from back to front, leaving connection and development of the frontal lobe incomplete until somewhere in the mid to late twenties. Not surprisingly, the frontal lobe is home to reasoning, planning, and judgement.
Post-human
Whatever it is that we become next.
Preliterary Aural Bliss
The notion that what you think of as your inner voice is actually a rather new “invention” created by the printed word, solitary reading, and a text-mediated daily environment. In the old days — say, a thousand years ago — people didn’t have an inner voice. Citizens inhabited a mental universe that had more to do with sound effects than speech. Words and voices might pass through your head, but it wasn’t necessarily you that was speaking. Maybe the king or the gods or something, but not you.
Proceleration
The acceleration of acceleration.
Propanolol
A beta blocker used by the military that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.
Proscenial Universe Theory
The notion that time simply provides a medium — an arena — within which emotions are able to play themselves out. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “Time is the element in which we exist. We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”
Proteinic Inevitability
The tendency for life-forming molecules to aggregate and create life the first moment they possibly can. So dedicated are they to this cause, recent research suggests that in the beginning stages of life on earth, small molecules acted as “molecular midwives,” assisting in the formation of life-creating polymers and appropriate selection of base pairs for the DNA double helix.
Pseudoalienation
The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating
because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”
Punning Syndrome
The medicalization of what was previously considered merely an annoying verbal tic displayed by a limited number of people. Punning is an almost inevitable side effect of connectopathies within the brain’s verbal nodes, somewhat akin to Tourette syndrome.
This leads to a larger discussion about the concept of spectrum behaviour: sliding scales of behaviour connected by clinical appearance and underlying caus-ation, ranging from mild clinical deficits to severe disorder. Psychiatric disorders understood along spectrums include autism, paranoia, obsessive compulsion, anxiety, and conditions that result from congenital malformations, brain damage, and aging. There are many more, however, and each category itself can be broken down into more specific spectrums.
Quantum-DNA Link Theory
The belief that DNA is not just a blueprint or recipe for life, but that the physical DNA molecule acts as a quantum-level transmitter or homing device communicating with other life-forming molecules in the universe — similar molecules that act as blueprints for other sentient beings that are aware of space and time and the role of themselves within it. This theory presupposes that countless sentient beings exist throughout the universe, and that life is the universe’s raison d’être. It is a lot to believe in, but ultimately this line of thought resonates with swaths of belief systems, from “the Buddhist concept of Indra’s net, Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the noosphere, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, to Hegel’s Absolute idealism, Satori in Zen, and to some traditional pantheist beliefs. It is also reminiscent of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.” Thank you, Wikipedia.
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