Jennifer

“We also have a problem because sometimes we wanted to do stuff with other people, and they are not as accommodating. We wind up not going, and it looks like we chose not to go, but really we couldn’t go because there were all these factors that needed to be in place for us to go on vacation with them. We couldn’t [get them in place], and they didn’t want to bend a little bit, so we couldn’t do it. When family members have expectations that are unrealistic, parents can be placed in an awkward position of having to adapt to these expectations or explain that the expectations are unrealistic.”
― Kate E. Fiske, Autism and the Family: Understanding and Supporting Parents and Siblings

“By and large, transsexual refers to a person who identifies as the opposite sex of that which he or she was assigned at birth. Transgender, on the other hand, includes transsexual people, but the term also encompasses many more identities that are discussed later in the book. Many people use the terms transgender and transsexual interchangeably, but on a technical level this is incorrect. All transsexual people are transgender, but not all transgender people are transsexual.”
― Nicholas M. Teich, Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue

“Moreover, sleep deprivation starts to starve the brain. There is a reason why we start to eat comfort food—doughnuts, candy—when we’re tired: our brains crave sugar. After twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of 6 percent in glucose reaching the brain.9 But the loss isn’t shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we need most for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.10 To Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is downright dangerous.11 He’s amazed by today’s work cultures that glorify sleeplessness, the way the age of Mad Men once glorified people who could hold their drink.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril