The Cathedral · threshold
A moment on a train
On the train
1 of 10A woman sits across from you on a train, looking at her phone. In a few minutes one of you will stand and leave.
Neither of you will think of this moment again.
Prologue, A Moment on a TrainMind
2 of 10In Libet's experiments, brain activity preparing a simple movement began about a third of a second before people reported deciding to move.
What that timing means for free will is disputed: a later reanalysis suggests the early signal may be background neural noise rather than a decision already made.
Chapter 19, The Mind That Arrives Late to Its Own DecisionsRelationships
3 of 10In chronically lonely people, white blood cells show a shifted pattern of gene activity: inflammation-related genes turned up, antiviral and antibody-related genes turned down.
If she has been lonely lately, this is happening in her now.
Chapter 13, The Social BrainBody and sense
4 of 10Human eyes respond to light between about 380 and 750 nanometres, a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Colour is constructed by the brain from the light that reaches the eye; it is not a property carried by the light itself.
Chapter 7, The Exquisite BottleneckMolecules
5 of 10A human body contains roughly seven octillion (7 x 10^27) atoms.
When cells copy DNA, proofreading and repair bring the error rate down to roughly one mistake in ten billion letters.
Chapter 3, Stardust and Covalent BondsThe cosmos
6 of 10The iron in human blood was forged in stars that died before the Earth formed.
Go far enough down into a person and you come out among the stars.
The Cathedral, Chapter 3, Stardust and Covalent Bonds; The Realm of the GivenThe planet
7 of 10Her atoms are borrowed from the Earth and will be returned. She lives inside a maintained state of air, water and warmth she has never had reason to notice.
A Settlement, Not a LawThe living world
8 of 10She belongs to an unbroken line of descent that reaches back to the earliest life on Earth.
Many affective neuroscientists hold that grief, fear, care and play run on brain circuits humans share with other mammals; constructionist researchers dispute that these are dedicated circuits.
The Ancient FamilyCivilisation
9 of 10She was born into one of more than seven thousand living languages.
The language you grow up in measurably affects how quickly you tell some colours apart.
The Cathedral, Chapter 17, The Cost of Belonging and the Price of Exile and Chapter 18, The Transmission of Cathedrals; What It ReplacedThe platform
10 of 10The doors open. She steps onto the platform, and the ordinary day closes around her like water around a stone. This is what is sitting across from you on the train.
Prologue, A Moment on a Train
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