Underrated reasons to be thankful IV

That you can apparently learn to meditate your way into a state of profound relaxation and bliss and pleasure on par with heroin or orgasm, which was certainly not on my bingo card, which is good because bliss is good, and also because it’s cool that there can still be huge updates to your world model just sitting there ignored, and also because people who do this don’t seem to get addicted and meditate until they starve to death which maybe augurs well for what happens after we invent wireheading.

That of all the Hedgehog signaling pathways for embryonic cells, the best studied is the Sonic Hedgehog homologue signaling pathway.

That your brain has a kind of built-in drudgery automation module that gradually takes over as you repeat a learned skill and as I write this all I consciously do is think about high-level concepts and then my fingers seem to autonomously render those concepts into words, which is good because woah and because drudgery is bad and because it maybe gives a hint of what it might feel like to work with new artificial modules.

That while we now have microplastics in all the food we eat and all the water we drink and all the air we breathe and this is decidedly non-awesome, current science suggests that the actual health impact from consuming most types of plastic might well be essentially zero.

Leave a Comment