I’ve been very lonely in my isolated tower of indecipherable speech.

Lester, Being John Malkovich

Our culturally adapted way of life depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation.

Jerome Bruner, Acts Of Meaning

The only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing.

Without that, it’s simply not possible.

Ted Chiang, Story Of Your Life

I am aware that we hold a multitude of emotions at once.

They are not contradictory; they are siblings.

One minute I can hardly breathe—and in the next, I am in gales of laughter.

Humor is the match I strike to see where I must go, especially when my vision is blurred by sorrow.

At my core, I am feral. This is how I survive.

These essays are my howl.

Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion

The cat cannot predict which way the rat will turn, but there are not nearly so many possibilities as in a human interaction. And no hidden agendas—the rat wants to live, but what on earth does another person in a conversation want?

And of course the rat can usually only express its drive to live in two dimensions, running on the plane of the ground. Likewise for the boxer, there is just a left and a right hand to worry about, and certain sequences and trajectories for each.

But the social brain needs a new mode of function, still requiring swiftness yet also operating along an enormous number of dimensions, running in a regime where a little bit of new information should be able to tip the observer into an improved model of the other individual.

Temporal precision is clearly essential, as much for social interaction as for anything else in biology—severely pressuring the circuitry responsible for imposing the odd and ponderously slow pace of consciousness, that two-hundred-millisecond delay.

One possible solution, to speed the give-and-take, would be a pre-modeling, a gaming-out of events ahead of time in the brain.

This feat could be achieved if the social being had many models of the world—and of the social partner—running at once, under the surface, that predicted the other’s actions and feelings well into the future.

Each model would provide and prescribe actions, replies, forks into the future—moves and countermoves—over many moments, in a conditional hyperchess of the mind.

Karl Deisseroth, Projections

Rocky: I’m gonna leave you two alone for a while—good luck.

You resume shadowboxing (shadow-wanking, more like) in mirror.