6) Seriously, put your phone down. I love you, now piss off. 🐝

5) Cook. Nothing fancy, just a meal here and there. Cooking is therapeutic. Learn new recipes, try new ingredients from local stores. Cook for friends. Reduce your consumption of meat by even a single meal a week. Militant veganism won't win any hearts, but temperance will make yours healthier.

4) Spend time away from devices. Yes, the 'world' is on them and you have emails, messages, memes or scary news you can't miss, but there are things the Internet doesn't have: clouds, the smell of spring pollen, overheard chats in a cafe, cool bugs, tangible 3D objects. The world is more than feeds.

3) Be kind. Not performatively, but genuinely. Go out of your way to help those you don't know, smile, be earnest, tell friends you love them. Give when you can, help when others can't. Chasing that good feeling kindness gives you isn't selfish, it's your soul growing back after decades in the dark.

2) Plant something, anything at all, in whatever space you have. Grow mint in a planter on your window sill. If you have a garden, plant a tree. Appreciate the real pace of natural existence and soak up CO2 while you're at it.

1) Stop buying. Like, right now, stop. Deactivate your Amazon account and delete shopping apps on your phone. No, you don't need an iShin or an oat milk stroker. Stop consumerisming, it makes society worse and your existence emptier. Just stop buying.

The pleasure is all his, I'm sure 🐝

Oh yeah. 🧪🐝

For more information, and a fantastic TedEd video, check out these sources:
youtu.be/e7uXAlXdTe4?...
www.scientificamerican.com/article/wher...
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
doi.org/10.1093/texc...

Similarly, people with hippocampal amnesia can't plan for future events.
Meanwhile, hyperphantasia is associated with much stronger connections between the visual and prefrontal cortices.
Essentially, stronger connections between frontal areas, memory and the senses make for better mental imagery! 🐝

You might see a soot-smeared glove crawl round the mantle to the sound of inflating balloons, while another might see nothing at all.

It comes down to how the brains is wired.
Aphantasia, an experience where people have no mental imagery, can be induced by hippocampal or occipital lobe damage.
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By simultaneously activating neural ensembles, the brain create a novel representation. We're so good at this that the number of combinations is functionally infinite!
Why, then, is mental imagery and imagination easier for some people than others?
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According to Hebbian learning theory, the more we encounter a stimuli, the stronger neural ensembles become. This is why clowns are only getting scarier as time goes on.
But remembering some clowns and festive chimneys isn't imagination; we need to synthesise them to make something new.
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When you look at an object, visual cortical neurons in the occipital lobe encode features like edges (sharp), orientation (bowed), shape (triangular) and colour (red). When activated in unison, they construct a collective representation that we can identify as rows of jagged, bloody teeth.
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If you think of a clown crawling down the chimney, your prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning and attention, asks the hippocampus to recall any past encounters with those objects (eg. clown, chimney, comically oversized mallet). To do this, the brain uses something called neural ensembles.
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