Have you ever misplaced something you were just holding? Completely blanked on a famous actor’s name? Walked into a room and immediately forgot why? Neuroscientist Lisa Genova digs into two types of memory failures we regularly experience — and reassures us that forgetting is totally normal. Stay tuned for a conversation with TED science curator David Biello, where Genova describes the difference between common moments of forgetting and possible signs of Alzheimer’s, debunks a widespread myth about brain capacity and shares what you can do to keep your brain healthy and your memory sharp. (This virtual conversation was part of an exclusive TED Membership event. Visit ted.com/membership to become a TED Member.)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Blogger Emma Elsworthy wrote her “Self-Care List.” I’ll tell you a few of her 57 action items, in hopes of inspiring you to create your own list. The coming weeks will be a perfect phase to upgrade your focus on doing what makes you feel healthy and holy. Here are Elsworthy’s ideas: Get in the habit of cooking yourself a beautiful breakfast. Organize your room. Clean your mirror and laptop. Lie in the sunshine. Become the person you would ideally fall in love with. Walk with a straight posture. Stretch your body. Challenge yourself to not judge or ridicule anyone for a whole day. Have a luxurious shower with your favorite music playing. Remember your dreams. Fantasize about the life you would lead if failure didn’t exist.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Some traditional Buddhist monks sit on city streets in Asia with a “begging bowl” in front of them. It’s a clay or iron container they use to solicit money and food from passers-by who want to support them. Contemporary American poet Mariannne Boruch regards the begging bowl as a metaphor that helps her generate new poems. She adopts the attitude of the empty vessel, awaiting life’s instructions and inspiration to guide her creative inquiry. This enables her to “avoid too much self-obsession and navel-gazing” and be receptive —“with no agenda besides the usual wonder and puzzlement.” I recommend the begging bowl approach to you as you launch the next phase of your journey, Taurus.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini-born Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) is today regarded as an innovative and influential painter. But his early years provided few hints that he would ultimately become renowned. As a teenager, he attended naval preparatory school, and later he joined the French navy. At age 23, he became a stockbroker. Although he also began dabbling as a painter at that time, it wasn’t until the stock market crashed 11 years later that he made the decision to be a full-time painter. Is there a Gauguin-like turning point in your future, Gemini? If so, its early signs might show itself soon. It won’t be as dramatic or stressful as Gauguin’s, but I bet it will be quite galvanizing.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): A research team found that some people pray for things they are reasonably sure God wouldn’t approve of. In a sense, they’re trying to trick the Creator into giving them goodies they’re not supposed to get. Do you ever do that? Try to bamboozle life into offering you blessings you’re not sure you deserve? The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to dare such ploys. I’m not guaranteeing you’ll succeed, but the chances are much better than usual that you will. The universe is pretty relaxed and generous toward you right now.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In 2013, the New Zealand government decided to rectify the fact that its two main islands had never been assigned formal names. At that time, it gave both an English and Māori-language moniker for each: North Island, or Te Ika-a-Māui, and South Island, or Te Waipounamu. In the spirit of correcting for oversights and neglect, and in accordance with current astrological omens, is there any action you’d like to take to make yourself more official or professional or established? The coming weeks will be a favorable time to do so.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Author Grant Morrison observes that our heads are “big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there!” That’s why it’s so unfortunate, he says, if we fill up our “magical cabinet” with “little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over.” In accordance with astrological potentials, Virgo, I exhort you to dispose of as many of those sad trinkets and little broken things as you can. Make lots of room to hold expansive visions and marvelous dreams and wondrous possibilities. It’s time to think bigger and feel wilder.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Libran author bell hooks (who doesn’t capitalize her name) has a nuanced perspective on the nature of our pain. She writes, “Contrary to what we may have been taught, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us, but need not scar us for life.” She acknowledges that unnecessary and unchosen suffering does indeed “mark us.” But we have the power to reshape and transform how it marks us. I think her wisdom will be useful for you to wield in the coming weeks. You now have extra power to reshape and transform the marks of your old pain. You probably won’t make it disappear entirely, but you can find new ways to make it serve you, teach you and ennoble you.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I love people who inspire me to surprise myself. I’m appreciative when an ally provides me with a friendly shock that moves me to question my habitual ways of thinking or doing things. I feel lucky when a person I like offers a compassionate critique that nudges me out of a rut I’ve been in. Here’s a secret: I don’t always wait around passively hoping events like these will happen. Now and then I actively seek them out. I encourage them. I ask for them. In the coming weeks, Scorpio, I invite you to be like me in this regard.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “Where did last year’s lessons go?” asks Gillian Welch in her song “I Dream a Highway.” Now I’m posing the same question to you — just in time for the Remember Last Year’s Lessons Phase of your cycle. In my astrological opinion, it’s crucial for you to recollect and ruminate deeply on the breakdowns and breakthroughs you experienced in 2020; on every spiritual emergency and spiritual emergence you weathered; on all the scary trials you endured and all the sacred trails you trod.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn painter Henri Matisse had a revolutionary influence on 20th-century art, in part because of his raucous use of color. Early in his career he belonged to the movement known as Fauvism, derived from the French term for “wild beasts.” During his final years, he invented a new genre very different from his previous work: large collages of brightly colored cut-out paper. The subject matter, according to critic Jed Perl, included “jungles, goddesses, oceans and the heavens,” and “ravishing signs and symbols” extracted from the depths of “Matisse’s luminosity.” I offer him as a role model for you, Capricorn, because I think it’s a perfect time to be, as Perl describes Matisse, both “a hard-nosed problem-solver and a feverish dreamer.”
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity, but distrust it.’” Aquarian philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that, and now I’m proposing that you use it as your motto in the coming weeks, even if you’re not a natural philosopher. Why? Because I suspect you’ll thrive by un-complicating your life. You’ll enhance your well-being if you put greater trust in your instinctual nature and avoid getting lost in convoluted thoughts. On the other hand, it’s important not to plunge so deeply into minimalism that you become shallow, careless, or unimaginative.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In ancient Greek comic theater, there was a stock character known as the “eiron.” He was a crafty underdog who outwitted and triumphed over boastful egotists by pretending to be naive. Might I interest you in borrowing from that technique in the coming weeks? I think you’re most likely to be successful if you approach victory indirectly or sideways—and don’t get bogged down trying to forcefully coax skeptics and resisters. Be cagey, understated, and strategic, Pisces. Let everyone think they’re smart and strong if it helps ensure that your vision of how things should be will win out in the end.
Homework: I’m in the mood for you to give me predictions and past life readings. Send your psychic insights about my destiny. Truthrooster@gmail.com.
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” wrote the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard as he contemplated our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s just as Einstein, Gödel, and the rise of relativity had begun revolutionizing our understanding of time. “Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges proclaimed a generation later in his exquisite 1944 refutation of time. “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
If Borges’s words sound like a song lyric, it is because there is something singularly musical about our perception of time — we speak of our daily rhythms, abide by the metronomic ticking of the clock, and feel the flow of time like one feels the flow of a melody. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the elusive and indomitable nature of time preoccupied not only the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, scientists, and writers, but also one of its greatest musicians: Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003).
Nina Simone, 1969
On October 26, 1969, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City, Simone performed a version of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” written by the English folk-rock singer-songwriter Sandy Denny and popularized by Judy Collins. The version was released a year later on her live album Black Gold and was later included in The Essential Nina Simone.
Simone, who was at least as devoted to civil rights as she was to music, considered this “a reflective tune” that “goes past all racial conflict and all kinds of conflicts,” for it deals with the supreme unifying force of all human existence: the shared experience of time’s inescapable flow. She introduced her cover with a beautiful, simple, profound prefatory meditation on time — please enjoy:
Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, “What is this thing called time?” What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock and your coffee by the clock, and you have to get on the plane at a certain time, and arrive at a certain time. It goes on and on and on and on.
And time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is it alive? And then, one day, you look in the mirror — you’re old — and you say, “Where does the time go?”
WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES
Across the morning sky, all the birds are leaving How can they know that it’s time to go? Before the winter fire, I’ll still be dreaming I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes?
Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving Ah, but then you know that it’s time for them to go But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving For I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes?
But I am not alone as long as my love is near me And I know it will be so till it’s time to go All through the winter, until the birds return in spring again I do not fear the time
Who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes?
COLUMBUS, OH—Smiling while recalling the “fantastic little outing,” local woman Olivia Curtis told reporters that she enjoyed hiking with her neighbors through a densely forested ravine Tuesday despite failing to locate the missing child they were searching for. “It was so nice just to get out into nature, get some fresh air, and get to know some of the folks from our neighborhood a little better, even if we never did find that little girl,” said Curtis, who noted that the three-hour jaunt through the wooded area behind their houses had brought members of the makeshift search party closer together than any block party or backyard barbecue ever had. “While no one saw any sign of the kid, we did see a few chipmunks, not to mention some beautiful cherry trees that were in bloom and just about at their peak. Obviously, it’s horrible for anyone’s daughter to go missing like that, but at least we had great company! Plus, Doug and Barb, who were right next to Cheryl and I in the human chain, invited us over to watch the Cavs tonight, which should be a blast. And the best part is that we get to do it all over again at first light tomorrow!” While stressing that time spent with friends was priceless on its own, Curtis acknowledged that finding the child whom no one had heard from or seen in five days “sure would be the icing on the cake.”
Aeon Video Aristotle was wrong and so are we: there are far more than five senses Subscribe to the Aeon Video newsletter: https://bit.ly/2MfCgqO Watch ‘Barry C Smith: We Have Far More Than Five Senses’ on Aeon Video: https://bit.ly/3jJkYjt Watch more free videos on Aeon: https://bit.ly/35DJcpb Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/2EQf1zv Follow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/2SaTMjt Follow us on Facebook: https://bit.ly/2MgoDrg Follow us on Instagram: https://bit.ly/2tDzsNC Scientists have long known that there’s much more to our experience than the five senses (or ‘outward wits’) described by Aristotle – hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste. Yet the myth of five senses persists, perhaps because a clearer understanding of our sensory experience at the neurological level has only recently started to take shape. In this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series, the British philosopher Barry C Smith argues that the multisensory view of human experience that’s currently emerging in neuroscience could make philosophising about our senses much more accurate, and richer, allowing philosophers to complement the work of scientists in important ways. But first, philosophy must catch up to the major advances being made in brain science. Producer: Kellen Quinn Interviewer: Nigel Warburton Editor: Adam D’Arpino Assistant Editor: Daphne Rustow
More than an insightful psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung was the twentieth century’s greatest articulator of the primacy of mind in nature, a view whose origins vanish behind the mists of time. Underlying Jung’s extraordinary body of work, and providing a foundation for it, there is a broad and sophisticated system of metaphysical thought. This system, however, is only implied in Jung’s writings, so as to shield his scientific persona from accusations of philosophical speculation. The present book scrutinizes Jung’s work to distill and reveal that extraordinary, hidden metaphysical treasure: for Jung, mind, and world are one and the same entity; reality is fundamentally experiential, not material; the psyche builds and maintains its body, not the other way around; and the ultimate meaning of our sacrificial lives is to serve God by providing a reflecting mirror to God’s own instinctive mentation. Embodied in this compact volume is a journey of discovery through Jungian thoughtscapes never before revealed with the depth, force, and scholarly rigor you are about to encounter.
Helen Keller Channel Year – 1954. Helen Keller explains That her Greatest Disappointment in life is that she can not speak normally. TRANSCRIPT: ” In this room sits a remarkable woman. She’s Miss Helen Keller. She does not see the room, or the book she’s reading. She sees nothing . She doesn’t hear the rustling of the curtains behind her. She is deaf… Deaf and blind. But if you enter a room she will know it. Your lightest foot fall will tell her you are coming. It will even tell her who you are, if she knows you. As she knows her old friend Polly Thomson. Polly has been with Helen forty years. For half of these she has been Helen’s only companion. Helen’s eyes and ears on the world. She talks to Helen with a finger system in which each letter has a sign…like this. Reaching out beyond her dark and silent night, Helen depends most on touch. Two other senses remain. There is taste and smell. Scent… the scent of objects and places and people tells Helen much that we learn with eyes and ears. But her hand is her chief link with the outer world, with Polly, with Anne the part time helper. With everyone she encounters. With her hand she reads Anne’s lips. She answers with her voice. It is an un-natural voice, and is her great sorrow. For all her years of effort Helen has never learned to speak clearly. This isn’t strange. For since she was a baby she hasn’t heard a word spoken nor seen lips forming one. But let Helen, with Polly’s help, tell you. (Helen speaking) : “It is not blindness or deafness that bring me my darkest hours. It is the acute disappointment in not being able to speak normally. Longingly I feel how much more good I may have done, if I had only acquired normal speech. But out of this sorrowful experience I understand more clearly all human striving, thwarted ambitions, and infinite capacity of hope.” A captioned version of this video can be watched at my youtube channel.
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Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, “What is this thing called time?” What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock and your coffee by the clock, and you have to get on the plane at a certain time, and arrive at a certain time. It goes on and on and on and on.
