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stone and rock are like bouba and kiki

these are stones

these are rocks

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Why Your Childhood Memories Feel Magical (But Weren't)

I was in my parents' back garden a few years ago when I heard a blackbird singing in the old apple tree. Suddenly I was seven years old again, and that same patch of grass felt bathed in this warm, golden light - like something from a fairy tale.

But here's what puzzled me: I knew that garden wasn't actually 'magical' back then. I remember it being mostly weeds and patchy lawn. My mum was always moaning about the slugs eating her plants, and I must have spent most summer afternoons there complaining I was bored.

Yet now, in memory, those same mundane hours feel precious and enchanted. The wonky shed seems charming rather than falling apart and the overgrown borders look 'romantic', rather than neglected.

How does that happen? How do perfectly ordinary childhood experiences - experiences I knew were ordinary as a kid - somehow transform into something that feels magical decades later?

The Same Feeling, Over and Over

Once I started paying attention, I noticed something strange. That mysterious "glow" from childhood memories? I'd get the exact same feeling from completely different experiences.

When I hear certain pieces of classical music, there's this sense of connecting with something profound and timeless - the same feeling. When I visit old churches or historical sites, I get that same inexplicable sense that something deeply special exists within that place. In abstract artworks, luxury brands and glamour - again, it's identical.

There's now a word for this: hagioptasia. Basically, it's our natural tendency to see certain things as having this special, almost 'sacred' quality of meaning that feels so authentic, even when we know it is not.

Your Brain on Meaning

Recent research looked at nearly 3,000 people and found that about 80% of us recognise this feeling from childhood. We're apparently hardwired to take ordinary stuff and somehow transform it into something that feels extraordinary.

Think about it - you probably have songs that don't just sound good, they feel inexplicably wonderful. Places that aren't just pretty, they feel deeply significant. Objects that aren't just mementoes, but feel strangely meaningful.

None of these things actually possess magical properties, but your brain treats them like they do.

So What's Really Going On?

The uncomfortable truth is that all that profound meaning we experience - in nostalgia, in art, in spiritual moments - is something our minds are actively creating. The magic isn't "out there" waiting to be discovered. We're making it ourselves.

Although this revelation may seem rather disheartening at first, an understanding of the influence of hagioptasia provides us with a very helpful tool indeed. Recognising hagioptasia for what it is doesn't need to diminish the magic, but can allow us to foster that magic more constructively - an insight, which helps us to distinguish between the magic worth pursuing and the illusions that lead us astray. And in a world full of manufactured 'specialness', that distinction might be more valuable than ever. To find out more about hagioptasia, the supporting evidence, and why we possess such a natural trait, please see Hagioptasia: A Fundamental Perceptual Tendency in Human Psychology

Source: Why Your Childhood Memories Feel Magical (But Weren't)

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and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

no tumblr this doesnt need tags im releasing it into the wild as god intended

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Tumblr is not the place to advertise the ball pit

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Everyone shut up and look at this carving of a whale from the 1200-600 CE Chumash culture

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Do you want to be politically pure in theory or help your neighbor. Is it fruitless to help your neighbor because there's no Perfect Pure way to do it ?

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ok note to self i gotta leave the house regularly so that i dont feel like im slowly transforming into an evil fucking shadow clone of myself

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I mean, if I can choose between two worlds where everyone is fed a little bit of history (even if that's force-fed), v.s. a world where they don't teach any history at all, I'd rather choose the former. Speaking as someone who grew up disliking the two history subjects at my school, I wish I paid more attention & knew how useful it would've been. After 18, people have full-time jobs/other education degrees and lives to live, you can't expect everyone to become literate in every subject using their own time. (The same applies for the sciences/STEM, but I don't think that's as controversial.)

we need to legalise learning for adults

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Celiacs are clearly heretics

me: how do churches deal with gluten at communion

first response on a catholic forum:

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Someone was asking in a thread what kind of people could work for ICE right now.

I think it's a good time to remember that the image above are the people who put children into gas chambers.

When I was little, I asked what kind of person could work at a concentration camp.

The answer to both questions I think is "normal people who have accepted the dehumanization of another group of people."

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It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

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Okay I've watched all of these movies now. Can we fuck now?

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Sometimes I forget Tumblr includes dumb opinions like "what's happening in Gaza isn't genocide" and I have to bring up the entire definition of genocide.

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

Tl;dr: yes, it is a genocide.

There is a direct line between calling Israel's war in Gaza a "genocide" and the US's attack on Iranian nuclear facilities "WWIII"

The sensationalism, the maximalist rhetoric, the blindness to history, even the usual suspects making these claims

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That was hauntingly beautiful. Thank you for sharing, OP.

Tangentially, the fear of having Done Harm is paralysing. Your shoulders tense, your jaw clenches, and your fists ball up, anticipating for a strike that never comes. This is your sympathetic nervous sytem choosing the third option from the "flight-fight-freeze" response. Your mind reasons, that because you are the cause of the misfortune, by forbidding you to do anything, it can reduce the stressful stimulus.

And I guess that's what happened to John when he tried to get off the plane - he had to negotiate with his body for control over these frozen muscles, or be helped by his wife down the plane. Each time this fear gripped his whole body, he had to come up with various excuses to negotiate with his mind. For example, the excuse "Someone else would have gone and done the same Harm if I didn't", as was a shorthand/mantra to help him negotiate away this fear.

It is incredibly distressing to know that what you've done constitute harm, the very thing that you've sworn to protect people from. It's anxiety-inducing to think that one-day someone will discover you for the monster that you truly are, discrediting all of the effort you have made to be a good person. So you are constantly bracing for this impact in the back of your mind, no matter how ridiculous this possibilty may seem.

I don't have a positive message or morale to end my post with. I just wanted to record what I know and share it, to help us understand each other better, I suppose.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the people I interact with. I have a coworker who I am pretty sure is a MAGA type, and she is also a lovely woman who is dreadfully overworked and so good at connecting to patients when they call. I can see the conflict on her face when she talks to me, a gigantic tranny dork who speaks Spanish and affirms the LGBT community, but can also talk to her about her cows and knows about guns and stuff. I can see the fear in the eyes of my former Young Men’s leader when he misgenders me and realizes that I’m not an ideology but a person he has known for a long time. I can see the way my extended family stop and stutter over political discussions when they realize they are talking about me. And I don’t know why but lately it’s just made me think about my neighbor as a kid.

When we moved to Arizona, we moved next door to a lovely retired couple - John and Lucy. John was a veteran of WWII, he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. in radiology, and he LOVED us to pieces. His wife, Lucy, was a sharp and gifted woman - well spoken, very observant, and VERY clever. I just know that she used that cleverness as a mom to great effect, because with my and my siblings she always managed to find a way to send us home with candy and treats for a week despite my dad’s protests. We loved them, growing up, and even though they have long-since passed away I love them still, and I love what I learned from them.

John was, as stated, a WWII veteran. He was enlisted as a rifleman, and later as a front line medic, starting at Point Du Hoc and moving inwards to France and towards the Rhine. He let me do a report on him in 6th grade where he shared war stories with me he had kept to himself his whole life - he said it was out of respect for his friends who didn’t get to come home and tell their stories.

He said he told me because he knew I could respect the memories of his friends.

He showed me his collection of medals, and which he’d kept hidden away in a sock in his attic because he’d feel an immense grief any time he saw them. He had wanted to be a doctor his whole life, prior to being drafted he was studying medicine and had taken the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. He saw his medals as a reminder that he had Done Harm.

After telling me his stories he was able to convince himself that while he had Done Harm, it was only because his only other alternative was, to him, cowardice. He chose to be brave even if it meant acting against his Oath because he felt that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to go in his place and he would be responsible for the harm that befell them. I don’t think that’s true, but for him it was and that was something no being on earth could have ever dissuaded him from believing.

He shared wild stories - melee combat on the beach, clearing artillery bunkers, receiving a Purple Heart for being injured in hand-to-hand combat with a Wehrmacht rifleman he said he felt pity for because they were the same age and he had to imagine the man he was fighting had been drafted just like him.

He shared how he was awarded a Silver Star for charging a machine gun nest, but shared that he was most proud of not killing anyone in the process. He threw a grenade with the pin still in it and when the machine gunners jumped to avoid being blown up they were killed by someone else so he didn’t have to do it. He took the machine gun and shot the other machine gun in that French field to pieces so he didn’t have to kill the people operating it. He said they were giving out Silver Stars like candy but I knew he was being modest.

He told me about being redesignated as a medic, about how he crawled for about 500 yards on his belly to rescue an injured tank driver, then threw him over his back and crawled the same 500 yards back (1000 yards total) to treat his injuries. He said he met the man in an Army hospital in England after his spine was broken by a high explosive panzer shell was fired through a hollowed out French farmhouse and landed about 20 feet away from him.

He told me about all the people he helped and saved as a medic, he told me about his work in radiology and research after the war. He showed me a hallway that was quite literally wallpapered with academic honors he’d earned as a researcher. He told me about how his first Fourth of July back was a horror show for him because fireworks and German artillery make very similar sounds. He told me about how he woke up in a cold sweat well over half a century later hearing the screams of German artillery men being burned alive with flamethrowers, or hearing his own voice apologizing to the young German soldier he stabbed in the heart at Point Du Hoc.

He told me that when he was asked to present at a medical conference in Germany 25 years after the war ended that he was so scared he couldn’t step off the plane, and that his wife had to hold his hand and lead/pull him with her. He said he was not scared because he was worried about being triggered, but because he knew that someone somewhere outside of that plane had the course of their life irreparably altered by his military service. That to someone out there he was the cause of immense suffering and harm. That some unwitting waiter could be the son of the Nazi Officer he stabbed in the heart with a 12-inch hunting knife. That some woman asking questions in the audience would be the daughter or widow of a man he sent to judgement with a .30-06. He was scared that they would hate him.

He knew what the Nazi’s had done, he knew better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d watched the documentaries, he’s seen the PoWs returning from camps, he’d seen the civilians massacred and tortured by their regime, but he also knew that among the monsters were people like him - idealistic 20-somethings who only wanted to make the world better and were ripped away from that life by the Nazi war machine. And he spent his whole life mourning the loss of innocence and peace that was forced on so many people by such a corrupt power.

To be honest I don’t know if I could do that, but he could. He told me he could still feel the dead and lost with him, both when he slept and when he woke. He told me he thought he’d go to his grave never having told a word of this to anyone. That the stories of him and his friends and allies would disappear silently with him and those like him. That he had wanted that until he realized that he didn’t have to sell out to share the stories - that he could give the stories away for free to someone who would love the people in them, and not just the content of them. He didn’t want his stories to be used as Patriotic Pornography by some TV network or magazine. He wanted the people he knew to be respected, he wanted their memories to be honored and loved, and he entrusted me, a 12-year-old “boy” to do that.

He told me for years afterwards that after telling me these stories that he slept better than he ever had. That by sharing the stories with someone who could hear Him over the din of victory and glory and honor and revisionistic history. Someone who could see the man in the story and not just see the plot of a battle being won. He wanted to be human, and he wanted the people he saw die to be human too - everyone, not just the people on his side. He wanted someone to see and to know the anguish of having to look someone in the eye as heartblood muddies the ground beneath them and hope that they understand that this was not an act of love or hatred but an act of desperation. To hope that you had just taken out One Of The Bad Ones instead of a medical student or a poet who had been drafted. He wanted me to see how hard he had worked since then to build a world without scarcity, to build a world of peace. He wanted me to know SO badly that the cost of violence, any violence, even necessary violence, is always ALWAYS paid by both parties involved.

I think about the rise of the new right wing - the new Nazi movement’s traction in politics, and I feel sad and scared - the world that Johnathan J Yobaggy, my neighbor, my friend, and my hero, worked SO hard to build is being done away with by people who do not understand the cost of the path they are entering. I can see brief moments of recognition in the eyes of some of the people I mentioned - The former young men’s president who immediately regrets misgendering me and hen he makes eye contact with me and sees Me staring back at him and not a faceless “ideology.” I can hear it in the voice of my uncle who quietly comes up to me to apologize for some homophobic comment he made absentmindedly. I can see it in the eyes of racists and sexists being interviewed on TV when they realize that they didn’t vote for a concept, they voted for a real thing. And honestly, I have mixed emotions about it. Because while I understand frustration with the status quo, the importance of basic human needs like affordable good and rent, and I know the fear that comes with feeling powerless, I also can’t help but grieve the endless wheel of history bringing us back to this God Damned Fucking Place again. I hope we can avoid this fate, not just for our sake but for the sake of everyone who has ever tried to make the world safer. For everyone who has ever tried to make up for human nature, for everyone who has ever placed themselves on the offering plate to protect others from the cruelty they know lies just under the surface of mankind’s tenuous grip on progress. I want SO badly for there to be a solution to this, for the people who idolize the Nazi party and the impact of fascism to see that the price of this path is paid in more than just blood but in soul. That they’re allowing themselves to be devoured too. I want for the centrists and the fence sitters and the idealists who want to “change it from the inside” to see how dangerous our politics have become. I want them to see that they’re losing the things that make them great in exchange for a security blanket that’s now become far far far too small to ever work for them again.

Safety found in the past is already gone, and safety found in the future is only as real as a daydream. That any ideology that promises that by “joining us now we’ll make things rough so we can make things safe in a decade” is a promise made by those who will not have to fight the battles they send you to.

I don’t know if America was ever really great, but as long as John was alive it felt great to me. There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and fucking humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear. I want to make this all stop but I can’t stop the collective power of tens of millions of people so instead I listen to my MAGA coworker tell me about how sick her kid was last week. I make jokes with my Young Men’s leader. I hug my uncle. I let them see me fully, as a human and not an ideology. As a woman and not the concept of gender. As a whole person and not someone who can be easily summarized or boiled down into something short and quippy. And I let them know I can see them fully too, and I can see all their humanity as easily as they can see mine. I just have to hope that this works - that enough people can See and Hear the people in their lives who matter to them to bring them out of their personal world of forms and into the real world.

I am probably, honestly, just spiraling a little bit. I took my ADHD meds today and in addition to helping me focus they make me a little anxious so I doubt things are as bad right now as they seem. But just in case there’s any truth to the way things seem to be going, remember, and I mean this seriously: Be kinder to each other, be gayer, and read more Terry Pratchett.

And for the love of god day hello to your neighbor.

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And we wonder why scientists go mad.

i think i've said this before but when i first listened to the magnus archives i was descending into madness because my boss (a genomics professor) had loaned me out to a limnology professor for several weeks to work alone in a lab in the basement sorting tens of thousands of tiny macroinvertebrates out of stream samples, one square inch at a time.

for seven hours a day i listened to the magnus archives almost nonstop, staring through a dissecting scope.

i was also dealing with a nightmare living situation & a stalker so i had temporarily moved into a tent in a national forest. so you can imagine the headspace i was in.

my reprieve that kept me going was an upcoming trip to Cornwall to visit my best friends there.

as we were planning our agenda during my lunch break one day, I was temporarily so detached from reality that I opened my mouth to suggest that when I fly into London, we check out the Magnus Institute.

It's funny now but I was so alarmed by this that I took off two days of work to lie on the ground in the woods outside my tent and recalibrate. I thought perhaps that 48 hours without basement insects would help me. However, I kept listening to the Magnus Archives

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lord the peasants are so loud today