928 books
—
2,451 voters
Yash Desai
https://www.goodreads.com/yashd93
There’s nothing more boring than life, nothing more depressing than light, nothing more bogus than reality. For me every waking was a dying—living was being dead.
“For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
“In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering – indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived.1 And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.”
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
“Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.”
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.”
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
― The Body: A Guide for Occupants
“I had to stop taking my
rheumatism medication when I first started taking the pills for my heart.
‘When it really comes down to it, it’s not a hard choice between your
heart and your joints, is it?’ the locum doctor had asked with a smile.
Dying of a heart attack probably wouldn’t be a bad way to go, I had time
to think, before he interrupted my thoughts.”
― When the Cranes Fly South
rheumatism medication when I first started taking the pills for my heart.
‘When it really comes down to it, it’s not a hard choice between your
heart and your joints, is it?’ the locum doctor had asked with a smile.
Dying of a heart attack probably wouldn’t be a bad way to go, I had time
to think, before he interrupted my thoughts.”
― When the Cranes Fly South
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