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Title: Upgrade
Authors: Blake Crouch
Category:supplementals
Number of Highlights: 28
Date: 2026-05-20
Last Highlighted: **
Summary
Document Note
Highlights
What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didnât happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.
Note: This feels like a good description of some of the autism symptoms.
Tags:cognition
Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.
Tags:social_construct,stories
What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe thereâs no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.
Tags:love,perspective
Finally understood that free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.
Tags:free-will
âItâs denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.â
Tags:cognition,denial,problem_solving
We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxicallyâtragicallyâour creationâs complexity had now far outstripped our brainsâ ability to manage it. Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we werenât doing enough to un-fuck it.
âThereâs no one else on this planet I would rather have ten thousand dinners with.â
Tags:love
The idea that the brain speeds up during stressful situations is a myth. When a person is afraid, their amygdala becomes more active, laying down extra memories that coincide with the normal memories of everyday life. Itâs the richer, additional memories that give the illusion of time slowing down.
âRight and wrong are constructs born of human sentiment. Nothing but stories weâve made up and assigned meaning to. They donât correspond to any objective reality. The only thing real is survival.â
I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of who we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.
Hyperbolic discountingâthe tendency to value lower, short-term rewards over greater, long-term rewards, or to make choices today that our future self would prefer not to have made.
I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.
Today, in a given tragedy, we can overlay the faces of our family, friends, and co-workers on only 150 people. Beyond that, compassion fades, but not because weâre evil. Our emotional hardwiring canât cope with it. Weâre living in a global community of ten billion, with brains that can only feel compassion for our immediate clan.
It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.
The muscles in his jaw tightened and something flickered in his eyes. He tucked his chin-length blond hair behind his ears and glanced around the wine bar. And then beyond it, at the travelers moving through the concourse.
We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this.
âThe genes that steered us toward sentiment and its downstream belief patterns are still present in our genome. They were advantageous at the dawn of humankind, when we had no understanding of the universe. They led us to invent myth and religion and tradition, and these systems unquestioningly put us on the path to stability and cooperation.
People with those kinds of ambitionsâthey arenât like the rest of us. Thereâs a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.â
In virology, the R0 (R-naught) indicates the contagion level of a given illness. Itâs the number of cases expected to be caused by a single infected person. Measles, the most contagious virus known to humankind, has an R0 of 12 to 18, which means that each infected person would be expected to infect 12 to 18 others. By comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed fifty million, had a much lower R0 of between 1.4 to 2.8. COVID-19 had been around 5.7.
Safe harbors are natural regions of the genome that scientists discovered can accommodate the integration of new genetic material without harming other genes or causing bad alterations to the host genome.â
The end of Homo sapiens lies just over the horizon. We can see it in a thousand metrics. Which means we have a chance. But only if we collectively decide to act. If nothing changes, we will die off for the stupidest reason imaginableâbecause we refused, for so many childish reasons, to do the obvious things that would save us.â
Humans are 99.9 percent identical in their haploid DNA/genome sequence of approximately 3.2 billion base pairs. However, while we all have roughly the same genes, there are polymorphismsâsmall differences in the sequence of these genesâthat lead to changes in expression levels, and even alter a geneâs function. These subtle differences are what make us each unique from other members of our species.
Iâd felt it that night and I felt it on this oneâbeing with Kara quenched some evolutionary thirst. A primal, genetic need to belong to a tribe.
What had started earlier this month as a few days of feeling mentally sharper and clearer was becoming more intense and inescapable with each passing day.
If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joyâthose brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.
A violence of black skies, wind, and rainâthe final nail being hammered through the heart of autumn.
Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox.
A, C, G, and T, which represent the four nucleobasesâadenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine.