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Title: Upgrade Authors: Blake Crouch Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 18 Date: 2025-09-04 Last Highlighted: **
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