FUTURE LEGEND

Achronogeneritropic Spaces

Nowhere/everywhere/timeless places such as airports.

Airport-Induced Identity Dysphoria

Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveller of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise.

Aloneism

A recognition of the fact that it is a burdensome amount of work to be an individual, and also that many human beings were not necessarily cut out to be individuals and are much happier being lost inside a collective environment or a self-denying belief system. Individualism may, in fact, be a form of brain mutation not evenly spread throughout the population, a mutation that poses a threat to those not possessing it, hence the ongoing war between religion and secularism.

Ambivital Consensus

The fact that there’s really no common consensus on where “life” begins, or what is living: cells and bacteria are easy, perhaps, but what about eggs and sperm, which are each only 50 percent of a human, yet seem quite alive? Meanwhile, scientists, still not finished haggling over viruses, have now discovered nanobes, tiny filament structures that some argue represent the smallest living organism yet.

Ameteoric Landscape

Describes the incredibly small extent to which the earth’s surface, protected by a thick defensive atmospheric layer, is defined by meteoric impacts compared to its moon, to Mars, and to the solar system’s other moons. There have been some minor incidents since the last great meteor, broken into pieces, collided with the earth sixty-five million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs and two-thirds of all life and leaving a number of craters across the planet’s surface. That was just the most recent of numerous meteor strikes that caused mass extinctions and drastically altered life on earth over hundreds of millions of years.

Androsolophilia

The state of affairs in which a lonely man is romantic-ally desirable while a lonely woman is not.

Anorthodoxical Isms

The isms that pose the greatest threat to inflexible religious orthodoxies:

Humanism
Cultural Relativism
Moral Relativism
Secularism

The Anthropocene

A term recognizing that human intrusion on the planet’s surface and into the atmosphere has been so extreme as to qualify our time on earth as a specific geological epoch. Along with vast increases in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, which have drastically raised the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, our human footprint now covers more than 83 percent of the earth’s surface, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Anthropozooku

Small haiku-like moments during which human and animal behaviours exhibit total overlap.

Antifluke

A situation in the universe in which rigid rules of action exist to prevent coincidences from happening. Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of antifluke.

Attack-Moderates

The result of a common political tactic used by members of extreme orthodoxies. By forcing people in the political middle to polarize over issues about which they don’t feel polar, the desired end state is achieved — one in which the hyperamplification of what was not very much to begin with creates a tone of hysteria amid daily cultural discourse. This resulting hysteria becomes a political tool used by the instigators to push through agendas that would never have been possible in a non-hysterical situation.

Bell’s Law of Telephony

No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.

Binary Subjective Qualities

Subjective human qualities that most of us take for granted but which remain elusive for some people with brain anomalies. These include humour, empathy, irony, musicality, and a sense of beauty. Subjective sensitivity is often regulated by specific nodes in the right side of the brain that fine-tune and contextualize the information we take in. (See also Cartoon Blindness; Cloud Blindness; Metaphor Blindness)

Blank-Collar Workers

Formerly middle-class workers who will never be middle-class again and who will never come to terms with that.

Capillarigenerative Memory

The tendency of history to remember people who invent new hairstyles: for example, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, and the Beatles.

Cartoon Blindness

A brain connectivity issue that makes a person dislike cartoons or information presented using illustration. Specific versions include an aversion to Saturday morning children’s television and the inability to understand and appreciate New Yorker cartoons. Seriously.

Catastrophasic Shifts

Enormous, life-changing decisions that are delayed until a crisis has been reached. In most cases this is the worst time to be making such decisions.

Centennial Blindness

The inability of most people to understand future time frames longer than about a hundred years. Many people have its cousin, Decimal Blindness — the inability to think beyond a ten-year time span — and some people have the higher-speed version, Crastinal Blindness — the inability to think past tomorrow.

Christmas-Morning Feeling

A sensation created by stimulus to the anterior amyg-dala that leaves one with a strong sense of expectation. (See also Godseeking)

Chronocanine Envy

Sadness experienced when one realizes that, unlike one’s dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forward.” (See also Sequential Thinking)

Chronophasia

An inability to maintain stable circadian rhythms or to approximate time or time sequencing, possibly caused by irregularities in the 20,000-cell region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Chronotropic Drugs

Drugs engineered to affect one’s sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short-term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

Cloud Blindness

The inability of some people to see faces or shapes in clouds. Like prosopagnosia, or “Face Blindness,” the cause can be traced to impairment of the fusiform gyrus of the inferior temporal lobe. Fun fact: the psychological phenomenon of seeing faces in clouds or perceiving as significant other vague and random stimuli is called pareidolia.

Collapse Attraction

The situation in which people are usually at their most attractive and interesting shortly before a total personality collapse. While some of us are attracted to those who are vulnerable — because it makes us feel good by comparison, or it makes us feel good to be able to help, or to think we can help — it also turns out that if you are convinced that nobody could possibly like you, you often become less inhibited. Not caring gives you a bulletproof aura of mystery and aloofness.

Complex Separation

The theory that, in music, a song gets only one chance to make a first impression. After that the brain starts breaking it down, subdividing the music experience into its various components — lyrical, melodic, and so forth.

Connectopathy

Idiosyncratic behaviour that stems from idiosyncratic neural connections.

Cover Buzz

The sensation felt when hearing a cover version of a song one already knows.

Crazy Uncle Syndrome

Or, for that matter, Crazy Aunt Syndrome. One of the few genuine indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of their crazy genes, you don’t end up crazy yourself — you merely end up different. And it’s that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful. (See also Trainwreck Equilibration Theory)

Crystallographic Money Theory

The hypothesis that money is a crystallization or condensation of time and free will, the two characteristics that separate humans from other species. (See also Time/Will Uniqueness)

Dark-Age High Tech

Technical sophistication is relative. In the eleventh century, people who made steps leading up to their hovel doors were probably mocked as being high tech early adopters.

Deharmonized Sin

Seven deadly sins vs. the Ten Commandments vs. every other way of counting transgressions — the inability to scientifically count and calibrate sin.

Denarration

The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story. (See also Limbic Trading; Narrative Drive; Sequential Dysphasia)

Deomiraculosteria

God’s anger at always being asked to perform miracles.

Deromanticizing Dysfunction

Writes Alice Flaherty, “All the theories linking creativity to mental illness are really implying mild disease. People may be reassured by the fact that almost without exception no one is severely ill and still creative. Severe mental illness tends to bring bizarre preoccupation and inflexible thought. As the poet Sylvia Plath said, ‘When you’re insane, you’re busy being insane — all the time when I was crazy, that’s all I was.’”

Deselfing

Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)

Dimanchophobia

Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but, rather, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord’s Day.

Dimanchophobia is a mental condition created by modernism and industrialism. Dimanchophobes particularly dislike the period between Christmas and New Year’s, when days of the week lose their significance and time blurs into a perpetual Sunday. Another way of expressing dimanchophobia might be “life in a world without calendars.” A popular expression of this condition can be found in the pop song “Every Day Is Like Sunday,” by Morrissey, in which he describes walking on a beach after a nuclear war, when every day of the week now feels like Sunday.

Drinking Your Own Spit

That’s what it feels like to see yourself on TV.

Dummy Pronoun

The word it, as in “It’s raining” or “It’s six o’clock.” Not to be confused with Itness. (See also Itness)

Ecosystemic Biology

Biology that looks at bodies, both human and animal, as ecosystems as opposed to discrete entities. This way of thinking is bolstered by the fact that the average body has roughly ten times as many outsider cells as it has of its own.

Eternal Divide

Unlike the future, Eternity, by its very definition, cannot be limited by the vagaries and unknowns of time. At best we can understand Eternity as existing outside of time, as timelessness — an infinite present. Which makes you rethink that eternal afterlife you were counting on. But don’t worry, because another name for timelessness is nirvana. So it’s all good.

Exosomatic Memory

Memory stored in externalized databases, which at some point will exceed the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there will be more memory “out there” than exists inside all of us. As humans we will have peripheralized our essence.

Fate Is for Losers

A state of being whose opposite is Destiny Is for Winners.

Fictive Rest

The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction. Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack one’s own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.

Field Denial

The near absence of any discussion around the fact that while fields exist (for example, magnetic fields) nobody actually knows how they work, nor are we any longer trying to figure them out.

Frankentime

What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is being spent working with and around a computer and the Internet. (See also Time Snack)

The Future of Labour

The fact that there is no word in the Chinese language for a “me day.”

General Anesthetic Afterlife

The concept that death must be akin to being under general anesthetic. A variant of the belief that because you don’t remember anything from before you were born, you need not worry about what happens after you die.

Goalpost Aura

The ability of places and objects, such as football goalposts or artwork in a museum, to possess an indescribable aura. An application of the more well-known process of sacralization — wherein places such as churches and mosques are understandably transformed through human emotion, thought, and belief into sacred places — to seemingly random elements of our lives.

Godseeking

An extreme version of Christmas Morning Feeling. Significant scientific literature has postulated that religious experience stems largely from a God module based in the temporal lobe. Additionally, for those who believe, as many physiatrists do, that our ideas of God are heavily influenced by our infant memories of giant, all-powerful beings — our parents — the hippocampus, encoder of those memories, must also be important for religious experience. And finally, there is evidence that the parietal lobe plays an important role in all mystical experience. All of which leads us to the primary objection to localizing religious activity in the brain, the reductionist “nothing but” argument: that if religious states are brain states, they are nothing but brain states, and the experience of God is simply a neurological phenomenon.

Grim Truth

You’re smarter than TV. So what?

Guck Wonder

The brain has always been poorly understood. Warriors on ancient battlefields must have wondered what the grey guck was that spilled out when they lopped off the top of someone’s skull. At least with a heart you could tell it was doing something useful. Maybe they saw the brain as filler material the gods used to fill skull cavities, the way pet food manufacturers bulk up tinned meat products with grains.

Humanalia

Things made by humans that exist only on earth and nowhere else in the universe. Examples include Teflon, NutraSweet, thalidomide, Paxil, and meaningfully sized chunks of element number 43, technetium.

Iddefodial Storage

The brain’s way of protecting itself from itself. To whit, if our subconscious is so wonderful, why do our bodies work so hard to keep it deeply buried?

Ikeasis

The desire in both daily and consumer life to cling to generically designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information. (See also Invariant Memory)

Indoor/Outdoor Voice

A very quick test one can use to understand the expressive world of people further along the autistic spectrum than others. People unable to modulate their voices to suit the environment are just that much further along. (See also Internal Voice Blindness; Preliterary Aural Bliss)

Inhibition Spectrum

From the centre to the right:

“normal” → shy → quiet → reclusive loner → scary loner → hermit → Unabomber

From the centre to the left:

“normal” → talkative → life of the party → no off button → rants → talks to self → madness

Instant Reincarnation

Most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for total radical change in their lives. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.

Internal Voice Blindness

The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue, a fact that undermines the conventional wisdom that one’s inner voice is one’s own. Witness the universal confusion when non-professionals hear recordings of their own voice. In fact, the tone of one’s inner voice is almost impossible to nail down.

Curiously, what artists commonly refer to as their muse — a seemingly external voice that guides them in their work — is actually a defective and/or amplified inner voice mechanism, a function regulated by the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes, which are responsible for speech and auditory processing.

Interruption-Driven Memory

We remember only the red traffic lights, never the green ones. The green ones keep us in the flow; the red ones interrupt and annoy us. Interruption: this accounts for the almost universal tendency of car drivers to be superstitious about stoplights.

Intraffinital Melancholy vs. Extraffinital Melancholy

Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely or to be lonely within a dead relationship?

Intravincular Familial Silence

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Invariant Memory

The process whereby the brain determines when looking at an animal whether it is a dog or a cat. There exists no perfect model of a cat or a dog, yet we can instantly tell which is which by rapidly moving up and down long lists of traits that define cat-ness and dog-ness. The brain’s ability to form invariant representations is the root of all intelligence. Some people refer to invariant memories as idealized Platonic forms or as generic forms.

Itness

The ability of one agent to create the perception of an object, person, or event as possessing “it” — for example, not wanting to be “it” in a game of tag — or even the ability of a dog owner to create instant itness when choosing a stick to be thrown for retrieval.

Karaokeal Amnesia

Most people don’t know the complete lyrics of almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)

Limbic Trading

The belief that the need for stories comes from deep within the brain’s limbic system — where memory and emotion percolate, and where stories are first processed before they are passed on to the left hemisphere, the home of intuition, imagination, and inspiration — and that storytelling is one limbic system’s way of communi-
cating with that of another person.

Limited Pool Romantic Theory

The belief that one can fall in love only a finite number of times, most commonly six.

Lyrical Putty

The lyrics one creates in one’s head in the absence of knowing a song’s real lyrics.

Malfactory Aversion

The ability to figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then to stop doing it.

Mallproof Realms

Realms where shopping never happens. For example, Star Trek characters never go shopping. Also, universes that wilfully exclude commerce.

Mechanics of Friends and Influence

The fact that people will like and respect you for no other
reason than that you give the illusion of remembering their names.

Me Goggles

The inability to accurately perceive ourselves as others do.

Memesphere

The realm of culturally tangible ideas.

Metaphor Blindness

An exceedingly common inability to understand metaphor, which often leads to avoidance of art forms, such as novels, where metaphor might be encountered. (See also Poetic Side Effects)

Metaphor Spectrum

Confusion in the noun centre of the brain that leads to schizophrenic or delusional thinking:

Napoleon was a general → Napoleon is great → I think I am great → I am Napoleon

Monophobia

Dislike of feeling like an individual.

Nanoexploitative Industry

Pretty much everything invented after the year 1900 is based on our knowledge of things that are incredibly tiny and processes that occur at atomic or subatomic levels.

Narrative Drive

The belief that a life without a story is a life not worth living — quite common, and ironically accompanied by the fact that most people cannot ascribe a story to their lives.

Negative Nonprocessing

The fact that the brain doesn’t process negatives. Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel, the smell. Try — you can’t.

Next-Flight-Homers

People who click on the Internet but not in real life when they go to meet their hookup at an airport cocktail lounge; related to but not the same as Room-Getters — people who click both on the Internet and in real life.

Ninetenicillin

A pill that makes one feel as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred. A variation of Millennial Tristesse, a longing for the twentieth century.

Nonrotational Dreamlessness

The theory that dreams are largely a biological response to the planet’s rotation, so citizens of planets that do not rotate most likely do not dream.

Noun-Nouning

By repeating a noun twice, one invokes the noun’s generic form, its invariant-memory form. “No, I don’t want blue khakis with pleats. Just give me clean generic beige khaki-khakis.” Or, “Officer, I’ve tried to remember what kind of car the getaway car was but I can’t — it was just a car-car.”

Omniscience Fatigue

The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.

Omnislut

Mitochondrial Eve — the “universal mother” — a female who lived about 200,000 years ago, to whom all human beings are related via the mitochondrial DNA pathway. “Superdog,” a.k.a. Y-Chromosomal Adam, the universal father, lived 60,000 years ago.

Pathologography

A new strain of biographical writing that acknowledges the importance of performing forensic analysis of the subject’s physical and mental states. Biology is not destiny, but it can certainly open and close a few doors.

Permanent Halloween

The ultimate expression of individuality is to arrive at a point where one wears a Halloween costume every day of the year. Writes Louise Adler, “The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become. This is most obvious in people whom society no longer keeps in line; the eccentricity of the very rich or of castaways.”

Phantom Point

An object that exists but, when you really think about it, does not; for example, a corner or an edge. Also known as “virtual tangibles,” phantom points must be considered when contemplating theoretical geometry. For example, the head of a pin — a point that obviously exists and yet does not — is theoretically no different than the state of the universe before the Big Bang. It encompasses everything and nothing.

Poetic Side Effects

The result of looking at a water molecule and being able to predict rainbows, or inventing the motor vehicle and predicting that dogs will cheerfully stick their faces out into the oncoming wind.

Point Mesmerization

Deflection by dispersion. The manner in which a lion tamer controls a lion, keeping it mesmerized by holding a chair up to its face, legs first. The lion, unable to relinquish its instinctual and powerful ability to focus, stares at the ends of the chair legs, its eyes darting back and forth between the four of them to the exclusion of the larger picture.

Polydexterity

Handedness isn’t just about writing or throwing a ball. It can be applied to almost all body activities: winking, crossing the legs, guitar playing, sleeping on one’s side, and so forth. No person is ever universally monodextrous.

Pope Gregory’s Day-timer

Doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it certainly would have been interesting to see.

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome

The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-to-21 age range. “Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.”

The inability of teens to consider the consequences of risky action is due to the fact that their brain’s development is only 80 percent finished. The cortex matures from back to front, leaving connection and development of the frontal lobe incomplete until somewhere in the mid to late twenties. Not surprisingly, the frontal lobe is home to reasoning, planning, and judgement.

Post-human

Whatever it is that we become next.

Preliterary Aural Bliss

The notion that what you think of as your inner voice is actually a rather new “invention” created by the printed word, solitary reading, and a text-mediated daily environment. In the old days — say, a thousand years ago — people didn’t have an inner voice. Citizens inhabited a mental universe that had more to do with sound effects than speech. Words and voices might pass through your head, but it wasn’t necessarily you that was speaking. Maybe the king or the gods or something, but not you.

Proceleration

The acceleration of acceleration.

Propanolol

A beta blocker used by the military that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.

Proscenial Universe Theory

The notion that time simply provides a medium — an arena — within which emotions are able to play themselves out. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “Time is the element in which we exist. We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”

Proteinic Inevitability

The tendency for life-forming molecules to aggregate and create life the first moment they possibly can. So dedicated are they to this cause, recent research suggests that in the beginning stages of life on earth, small molecules acted as “molecular midwives,” assisting in the formation of life-creating polymers and appropriate selection of base pairs for the DNA double helix.

Pseudoalienation

The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”

Punning Syndrome

The medicalization of what was previously considered merely an annoying verbal tic displayed by a limited number of people. Punning is an almost inevitable side effect of connectopathies within the brain’s verbal nodes, somewhat akin to Tourette syndrome.

This leads to a larger discussion about the concept of spectrum behaviour: sliding scales of behaviour connected by clinical appearance and underlying caus-ation, ranging from mild clinical deficits to severe disorder. Psychiatric disorders understood along spectrums include autism, paranoia, obsessive compulsion, anxiety, and conditions that result from congenital malformations, brain damage, and aging. There are many more, however, and each category itself can be broken down into more specific spectrums.

Quantum-DNA Link Theory

The belief that DNA is not just a blueprint or recipe for life, but that the physical DNA molecule acts as a quantum-level transmitter or homing device communicating with other life-forming molecules in the universe — similar molecules that act as blueprints for other sentient beings that are aware of space and time and the role of themselves within it. This theory presupposes that countless sentient beings exist throughout the universe, and that life is the universe’s raison d’être. It is a lot to believe in, but ultimately this line of thought resonates with swaths of belief systems, from “the Buddhist concept of Indra’s net, Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the noosphere, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, to Hegel’s Absolute idealism, Satori in Zen, and to some traditional pantheist beliefs. It is also reminiscent of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.” Thank you, Wikipedia.

Random Sequence Buzz

The small, pleasant chemical reaction experienced in the brain when hearing the next song in a randomly sequenced finite song list. Not to be confused with radio sequence buzz, wherein songs are drawn from a reasonably well defined yet still open-ended supply of music.

Rapture Goo

The stuff that gets left behind. The fact that the only thing that really defines you is your DNA. Jesus gets your DNA. That’s all he gets, roughly 7.6 milligrams of you. All the blood and guts and bones and undigested food and everything else within the ecosystem that is your body will simply grace the floor.

Red Queen’s Blog Syndrome

The more one races onto one’s blog to assert one’s uniqueness, the more generic one becomes.

Romantic Superstition

Dislike of having the romantic notion of personality reduced to a set of brain and body functions.

Rosenwald’s Theorem 

The belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.

Sequential Dysphasia

Dysfunctional mental states do stem from malfunctions in the brain’s sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “no good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.

Sequential Thinking

The ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows have been shown to sequence). Dogs, while highly intelligent, still cannot form sequences; it’s the reason why the competitors at dog sports shows are led from station to station by handlers instead of completing the course themselves.

Sin Fatigue

When hearing about the sins of others ceases to be compelling, a condition most commonly experienced by religious and medical professionals.

Situational Disinhibition

A social contrivance within which one is allowed to become disinhibited, that is, a moment of culturally approved disinhibition. This occurs when speaking with fortune tellers, to dogs and other pets, to strangers and bartenders in bars, or with Ouija boards.

The Social Question

If you were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it facing the city or facing the ocean? In answering, one is forced to wonder about the absolute extent to which social behaviour is embedded in the human psyche. “True suicides” don’t care what side of the bridge they jump from. If one gets up there and considers the question “Do I face the city or the Pacific Ocean?” then the implication is that the suicide attempt is not a hundred percent genuine.

Somnimural Release

The ability of dreams to prevent you from remembering that the dead are dead, or that vanished friends have vanished.

Somnitropic Drugs

Drugs engineered to affect one’s dream life.

Standard Deviation

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness, yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.

Star Shock

The disproportionate way in which meeting a celebrity feels slightly like being told a piece of life-changing news.

Stovulax

A micro-targeted drug of the future designed to stop fantastically specific OCD cases, in this case a compulsion involving the inability of some people to convince themselves after leaving the house that the stove is turned off. As science further maps the brain, such micro-targeted drugs become ever more plausible.

Technological Fatalism

An attitude positing that the next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen no matter who invents them or where or how. The only unknown factor is the pace at which they will appear.

Time Lance

Suppose one could send a particle a millionth of a second ahead in the future. By knowing its direction and speed, one could then determine the net overall expansion direction and speed of the universe.

Time Snack

Often annoying moments of pseudo-leisure created by computers when they stop responding in order to save a file, to search for software updates, or, most likely, for no apparent reason.

Time/Will Uniqueness

The belief that awareness of time and the possession of free will are the only two characteristics that separate humans from all other creatures.

Torn-Paper Geography

The phenomenon in which, if you take a sheet of paper and rip it in half, both pieces will probably resemble an American state or Canadian province. If one continues to rip the paper, the phenomenon continues — a reflection of New World geopolitics versus the Old World. European and Asian borders are delineated by rivers, watersheds, and battlefields. New World borders are most often a mixture of rivers and the nineteenth-century Cartesian grid. Old World = people before property; New World = property before people.

Trainwreck Equilibration Theory

The belief that in the end, every family experiences an equal amount of trials, disorders, quirks, and medical dilemmas. One family might get more cancer, another might be more bipolar or schizo, but in the end it all averages out into one big train wreck per family.

Trans-human

Whatever technology made by humans that ends up becoming smarter than humans.

Trans-humane Conundrum

If technology is only a manifestation of our intrinsic humanity, how can we possibly make something smarter than ourselves?

Trigenerational Amnesia

The reluctance of most people to investigate their family tree back more than three or four generations. There are more reasons for not wanting to know than to know. Too much research could possibly destabilize one’s beliefs about oneself, beliefs that may or may not be correct.

Unchecked

“Unchecked, science and monotheism both mean to vanquish nature” — a lovely quote from Christopher Potter in You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe.

Undeselfing

The attempt, usually frantic and futile, to reverse the deselfing process.

Universal Sentience

The notion that apprehension of the universe by humans or other intelligence is, in a fundamental sense, the universe’s raison d’être.

Unwitting Permanence

The notion that when you, say, throw a Coke bottle off a ship’s deck to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, that bottle will remain there, unambiguously, until the sun eats up the planet. Most of the world’s landfills display unwitting permanence.

Vision Dysphasia

The counterintuitive manner in which people born blind, given vision later in life through medical advances, tend to very much dislike that vision.

Weather Test

If human beings had never existed, would the weather outside your window right now be exactly the same? Of course not. So we’ve obviously changed things. So it becomes an issue of figuring out how different the earth would have been minus human beings.

Web-Emergent Sentience Theory

The belief that globally linked computer systems will one day erupt into some new form of overriding post-human sentience. Sometimes referred to as singularity.

Web Sentience Release

The belief that this newly evolved web sentience will relieve people of the crushing need to be individual.

Why We Keep Our Distance

Once you’ve seen a person go psycho, you can never look at him or her the same way ever again.

Witness Elimination Program

The myth is that witness relocation exists, whereas people who “enter the program” are simply shot.

Zoosomnial Blurring

The notion that animals probably don’t see much difference between dreaming and being awake.