Extracts (15)
the brain is labile and has been shown to accept introduced machines, stem cells, drugs, electrodes, brain cells from other species, evolution conserves things that work. We have a conserved brain, with different ages for its different parts-in effect lizard at back and bottom, mammal in the middle, human at the front and top. Lizard brain to breathe and sleep, mammal brain to form packs, human brain to think it over over-selecting for a single trait warps evolution, you can get a result called “the bad becoming normal.” As people have been speciating into self-evolved post-humans of various kinds, this result has been seen frequently, as in parts of the brain fire at the sight of a picture of food, but not at food itself. People like to hunt. Hunting takes many forms. Hunt for a deal, hunt for meaning. A predator’s killing is calm and rewarding. Rage always feels bad, rage is a painful emotion. Without a catch, the predator may not be able to deactivate the hunt. Fear is a constraint on anger. Animals never unlearn a bad fear. And we are animals. Piloerection pathological aggression: dolphins kill porpoises for no reason, they don’t eat them, they’re not competitors. Does this suggest the uncanny valley exists for all mammals? reason can’t work without emotion. People cut off from their emotions can’t decide. Thus the decision to manipulate the brain with hormonal therapies has wide-reaching consequences. Bisexual therapies alter brain levels of oxytocin, vasopressin, and their precursor vasotocin. An oxytocin nasal spray causes immediately better eye contact. Endorphins are nature’s version of morphine. The brain releases endorphins when injured, and when someone we love touches us. Thrill seekers calm a hurt
3 percent of mammals monogamous. Play teaches mammals how to handle surprises five different brain areas evaluate melody, rhythm, meter, tonality, and timbre. Music was the first human language, and still is the language of animals and birds. Music predates humanity by 160 million years. The introduction of birdsong brain nodules to the appropriate human brain sites has resulted in aphasia, also temporal lobe phenomena like omnipresent sublimity, hypermusicality leading to hyperventilation (whistling or singing), human vocal cords were already capable of purring and it needed only the insertion of feline amygdalan and hippocampal and hypothalamic cells to performance in flight waldos is vastly improved by implantation of raptor or hummingbird flight nodules in human operators. The different structure of avian brains makes insertion into interstitial cells particularly it is possible that orgasm already taxes the relevant systems as far as it can without damage such as hernias, broken ribs, thrombosis, and heart attacks. Passengers on sexliners who have taken vasotocin have been known to
The subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, or sgACC, is the place in the brain that directs the body to ignore fear. It is the place of courage, and stimulating it can help a person overcome the dread of phobias. It is possible to overstimulate it, after which
The temporal lobe is the site of feeling states such as the omnipresent sublime, hyperreligiosity, hypersexuality, hypergraphia, overinclusion mania, and so on. Intentional brain stimulation or alteration to promote any of these states can easily trigger the others, or cause epileptic
Human subjects (volunteers) who have ingested the Enceladan community, including the organism Enceladusea irwinii, reported synesthesia and individually heightened senses, sometimes confirmable by test. Heightened sensory impressions are often balanced by a reduced ability to generalize or calculate
Lists (12)
boredom, taedium vitae, the knowledge of maya, absurdity, weltschmerz, mal du siecle, existential nausea, dysphoria, doldrums, the funk, malaise, ennui, hebephrenia, discouragement, depression, melancholia, anomie, accidie, dysthymia, blankness, lack of affect, the blues, despair, the black dog, black ass, hopelessness, sorrow, grief, unhappiness, Hikikomori, alienation, withdrawal, tristitia, nihilism, morbidity, anhedonia, wretchedness, anxiety, fear, pain, terror, horror, desolation, postcentennial hypochondria, Alterschmerz, thanatropism, fear of death, death wish
SWAN IN AFRICA
Swan was not enjoying the Earth project. She stuck it out because she believed in it and thought it was her best way to help; she thought it was what Alex would be doing, and so she couldn’t abandon it just because it was hard, frustrating, stupid. She cursed the day she had ever left Terminator; she dreamed of the day when she could dance down the Great Staircase to the park and the farm.
She got impatient so fast. Wahram would have been better for stuff like this, but he had flown off to America, frustrated like so many before him by irrefragable Africa. Swan wanted to be tougher than that, and was irritated with him. That added to her general irritation, and her patience often disappeared and left her seething. She became abrasive with people, thus even more ineffective. She woke wondering how many days she had left of this. Someone in the office repeated something Zasha had said, “Earth itself is a development sink,” and she shouted in his face.
Another day she got into another shouting match with a woman from the African League, down visiting from Dar to make trouble, and to keep from striking her Swan had to just walk away, hustling down the crowded streets of the city, cursing in Chinese. She realized that in her current state of mind she was a liability to the cause.
Earth the bad planet. Despite its wind and its sky, she was coming to hate it again, and not just because of the awful g but rather because of the evidence everywhere of what her species had done to the place, and was still doing. The dead hand of the past, so huge, so heavy. The air seemed a syrup she had to struggle through. Out in the terraria one lived free, like an animal-one could be an animal, make one’s own life one way or another. Live as naked as you wanted. On the God-damned Earth the accumulated traditions and laws and habits made something that was worse than any body bra; it was one’s mind that was held in place, tied in straitjackets, obliged to be like all the others in their ridiculous boxed habits. Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice-as if they were in a space station-as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn’t even look up at the stars at night. Walking among them, she saw that it was so. Indeed if they had been people who were interested in the stars they would not have still been here. There overhead stood Orion at his angle, “the most beautiful object any of us will ever know in the world, spread out on the sky like a true god, in whom it would only be necessary to believe a little.” But no one looked.
D espite her discontent, another North Harare shantytown near Dzivarasekwa had agreed to work with her and her team. The shantytown was banked on the side of a steep ridge, and the people there were squatters, with the ridge near enough to the borders of New Zimbabwe and Rhodesia to make for confusion about sovereignty. A good prospect, therefore, in political terms, but the steepness of the ridge was a problem for the selfreps. Swan’s team had designed a platting for the process that had the hangars moving in a warp-and-weft pattern, with some following contour intervals, while others climbed straight up slopes using telescoping pillar jacks to keep the factories horizontal. In this manner they were managing to transform the swath of their passage into a stylish white village with some touches of color; it would be quite beautiful.
But one morning one of their hangars suddenly veered downhill from the ridge, chomping through first a park and then the leafy suburb Kuwadzana. The locally trained minders of the selfrep had given up trying to control the thing and had jumped off ladders on its sides into the arms of a growing crowd.
When Swan arrived on the scene, she shouted and shoved her way through the crowd, then leaped onto the bottom of the hangar ladder; even when out of control, the behemoth was crunching along at only about a kilometer an hour. Up the ladder she climbed, then slipped through a door into the control room, like a tugboat’s bridge. It was empty. She went to the back wall and smashed down the override switch with her fists. Nothing happened; the leviathan ground on over the streets and homes of the suburb, with a rumble like a muffled Niagara Falls coming from its hidden underside. Now she began to understand why the local minders had abandoned ship. With the override not working, there wasn’t anything else obvious that one could do.
Swan sat down before the operation console and began to type at speed, while also commanding it verbally to stop. She was first calm, then demanding, then persuasive, then pleading, finally shouting in a fury. The selfrep AI neither responded nor stopped the hangar moving. Something in it must have been jammed; that couldn’t have
