Roughly the size of a deflated volleyball, your brain weighs about 3 pounds. Its 100 billion neurons communicate via minute electrochemical impulses, shifting patterns sparking like fireflies on a summer evening, that produce movement, expression, words. From this ceaseless hubbub arose Ode to Joy, thermonuclear weapons, and Dumb and Dumber.

She was caught in an artificial web and her intelligence is tied to artificial brains that think instances instead of causes, numbers instead of stories.

Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered—and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex.

Dark Glasses (The amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to the loved being, but to what degree he should conceal the turbulence of his passion: his desires, his distresses; in short, his excesses.)

…Yet, to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask.

Brain fart: noun. Quick-and-dirty creative output. The byproduct of a mind stuffed with food for thought that can therefore produce information without effort.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)… can capture pictures of the brain in action. Researchers ask subjects to do something inside the machine—hum a tune, listen to a joke, solve a puzzle—and then track the parts of the brain to which blood flows. What results is a picture of the brain spotted with colored blotches in the regions that were active—a satellite weather map showing where the brain clouds were gathering.

No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought. It can allow a decision maker to do almost nothing but decision making, instead of processing data to get into a position to make the decision.

For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for a literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do. Work is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other peoples' words, rewriting, revising, rewording, Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn't always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address. (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.) Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might he a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do. Whenever I heard myself described as “information-services worker” or a “symbolic analyst,” I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.