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...thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus - a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further...
...requires a lot of calories to keep running. When food intake is cut, the liver steps into the breach, producing glucose and sending it throughout the body - always making sure the brain gets a particularly generous helping. The liver's reserve lasts only about 24 hours, after which, cells begin breaking down the body's fats and proteins - essentially living off the land. As this happens, the composition of the blood - including hormones, neurotransmitters and metabolic by-products - changes. Throw this much loopy chemistry at a sensitive machine like the brain and it's likely to go on the blink...
...prodigious smoker and drinker, Barthelme died in 1989 of throat cancer, having already seen critics begin to dismiss him as a novelty act. In truth, the mistake we made with Barthelme was expecting him to be the beginning of something. He was the end of something--the green flash in the brilliant sunset of modernism. But in his ceaseless reconfiguration of broken words, he gave voice to our longing for unbroken ones and freed us to go off in search of them--like the dwarfs in Snow White who, on the novel's final page, "DEPART IN SEARCH...
...budget action film. He gets into it with the foreign director over an issue with the poor quality of the set, to which the director replies, “He still thinks we’re making Citizen Kane.” As the movie unfolds we begin to see Van Damme’s difficulty getting roles (“They gave it to Steven Seagal....He promised to cut off his ponytail.”) and the repercussions for his personal life, where legal fees from his custody case are piling up. All of this leads...
...trespassing. That would be a hell of a way to miss an inauguration. It turned out we had not trespassed. We emerged from under the Theodore Roosevelt bridge, tromped across Constitution Gardens, and reached the array of virgin portable toilets and as-yet-unmanned police barricades that marked the beginning of the viewing area behind the Washington monument. We were still over a mile from the Capitol steps on which the president-elect would take his oath. Here I broke off from my unticketed acquaintances. My older brother’s hard work on the New Hampshire senate campaign...