miscellaneous

What all the soups had in common, and what piqued Grub’s curiosity, was that they had all been made from the same soup base, which Pickowicz had been continuously cooking and feeding with new ingredients. She calls it her “Soup Mother.” As a technique, the idea of a never-ending stew has been around, quite literally, forever…

Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections — all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness — the focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than play.