Mikey

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[Mikey @MickyCatholic]

A friend: isn’t ideologically captured, has patience with you when you make mistakes, doesn’t look at you as evil and tries not to struggle session you. Is open to talking about subjects without getting emotionally discharged over a different conclusion. Congrats you’re my friend

[لبنى الخميس @lubnaAlkhamis]

📍في هذا العمر .. ما هو تعريفك للصديق؟

[Mikey @MickyCatholic]

I’m sorry

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

‘MICHAEL’ is now Lionsgate's highest grossing film of all time with $898M worldwide.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

“Today the Church shows the world the “Corpus Christi“ - the Body of Christ. And she invites us to adore him: “Venite adoremus“ - Come let us adore him.” —Pope St. John Paul II

[GodLogic_GL @GodLogic_GL]

MUSLIMS: "Avery, go debate the scholars 😭😭😭"

THE SCHOLARS:

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A British psychologist spent her PhD years proving that something as stupidly simple as chewing gum can change how the human brain stores information, and the reason it works is stranger than it sounds.

Her name is Lucy Wilkinson.

She was a PhD student at Northumbria University in Newcastle when she designed the experiment that would put chewing gum into the cognitive science literature for the first time in any serious way.

The paper was published in 2002 in the journal Appetite, and it was one of those rare studies that sounded like a joke when you read the abstract and turned out to hold up the moment you read the data.

The experiment was deceptively simple.

Wilkinson and her supervisors recruited 75 healthy young adults, and divided them into three groups to take a 20-minute battery of memory and attention tests.

The first group was chewing gum the whole session.

The second group moved their jaws as if they were chewing but had no gum in their mouth at all.

The third group sat still, and did nothing with their jaws.

Then everyone took the same tests, which included immediate word recall, delayed word recall, working memory for numbers and spatial memory tasks.

The part nobody had expected were the results.

Gum chewers were significantly better than the no-gum control group on both immediate and delayed word recall. Same words, same test, same brain on the other side of the desk, and the group with a piece of gum in their mouth just remembered more of them.

The weirdest part of the finding was what happened to the second group, the one that was mimicking the chewing motion without any gum in their mouths. They did not gain the same benefit. Just moving the jaw was not enough. But it was something about actually chewing a piece of gum that was causing the effect.

That detail was what made the paper interesting rather than dismissible, because it meant the explanation couldn’t just be that jaw movement keeps people alert. Something deeper was afoot that the field would spend the next 20 years trying to untangle.

The follow-up experiment that explained the most likely mechanism was done by John Aggleton’s team from Cardiff University two years later. One set of participants was asked to chew gum while learning a list of words and then chew gum later on 24 hours later while trying to remember the same words. A second group was asked to chew gum only during learning.

A third group chewed gum just during recall. A fourth group did not eat any.

The group that chewed gum at learning and recall did the best by a wide margin. Those who chewed at only one or the other stage did about as well as the no-gum group.

What the result showed was that chewing gum wasn’t just improving memory in some general way. It was behaving as what psychologists refer to as a context cue.

Your brain does not store memories as isolated bits of facts floating in a void. It saves them with the full context around it . The room you were in , the sounds around you , the mood you were in , even the physical state of your body when you encoded them . When you try to remember something later, your brain goes to those context cues to find the file.

If the context at recall is the same as the context at learning, the memory will come back faster and cleaner. If the context is different the file is more difficult to reach.

One small but reliable physical state that the brain was using as one of those context tags turned out to be chewing gum. The regular motion of the jaws, the flavour of the tongue, the steady low level of mouth activity were being filed away with the words being learned. The brain was quicker at pulling up the file when it was in the same physical state at recall.

And there was a second mechanism built into that. Other studies have looked at blood flow to the brain while chewing and found it to increase about 25 percent. One such study was done in 2001 by Sasaki in Japan.

Other investigators have reported faster times on cognitive processing and improvement on sustained attention tasks while chewing gum. Chewing appears to push the brain into a somewhat more aroused state, making it better able to hold onto information over a task that takes minutes rather than seconds.

The next part is the real part of the story.

Wilkinson’s finding of an improvement in immediate recall was not reproduced in two independent efforts to replicate this in 2004 and 2005. Other studies replicated the context-dependent effect, but claimed that the simple alertness boost was only real under certain conditions, such as when the task was long and demanding, rather than short and easy.

The best evidence from two decades of research is that chewing gum has a measurable effect on cognition, but the effect is conditional and is most reliably observed in tasks requiring sustained attention, working memory under load, and recall benefitting from matching the encoding state to the retrieval state.

What all the critics agree on is the deeper finding under the original headline. Your brain is not a neat filing cabinet, where information is stored separate from the body that took it in. Your physical state at the time you learn is part of the memory itself, so anything you can recreate at the time of recall can give you a small edge in getting the file back.

That is why students who study in the same room that they will take the exam in, often do better. That is why you remember your dreams better if you wake up in the same position you fell asleep in. Which is why a smell can pluck a memory out of decades-old storage faster than any conscious effort can. The index contains the body.

Chewing gum is just the cheapest, weirdest, most available form of that mechanism ever tested by anyone.

Next time you have something difficult to remember, try the experiment yourself. Chew a particular flavour of gum as you study. Before you sit down to review what you learned, have another chew of the same flavour. The gum is not doing the job. The gum is acting as a thread for your brain to follow back to where the information was stored.

The most powerful memory tool you own is not your willpower or your intelligence.

It is the physical state of your body the moment you decide to pay attention.

[Paramount Tactical - Gary Melton @paramounttactcl]

Not AI After All?
From the moment Charlie Kirk was assassinated, wave after wave of so-called “conspiracies” have flooded the internet, not driven by evidence, but by breathless speculation, sloppy analysis, and outright fraud.

The pattern is clear: cherry-picked claims, manipulated timelines, convenient omissions, and leaps that reject basic facts. Yet the grifters and influencers behind them face zero accountability.

This isn’t about legitimate questions. It’s a cottage industry of conspiracy content that thrives on distrust, manufacturing “proof” while ignoring anything that doesn’t fit.

You’re either committed to rigorous truth no matter how ordinary, or you’re helping perpetuate lies that erode public trust for profit.

The American people deserve honest analysis, not manufactured outrage and endless grift.

[JPA @2Philosophical_]

https://t.co/POrmneXBVN

[JPA @2Philosophical_]

The Argument From NDEs

Here I argue that if even a small subset of near-death experiences are genuine, they provide strong evidence favoring theism over atheism. I also argue that the existence of a large and persistent body of NDE reports is itself some evidence for theism 🔗⬇️

[sanstitre (commissions closed) @sanstitre2000]

Roman Backrooms

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First look at gameplay for ‘GEARS OF WAR: E-DAY’.

[InspiringPhilosophy - Michael Jones @InspiringPhilos]

NEW VIDEO! There is a ton of evidence Jesus predicted His death and resurrection. The video is currently available for supporters. Help us create more videos like this and gain access to this video now!
https://t.co/nGkKpxfg7D

[Ascension @AscensionPress]

Happy Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ!

[Catholic Arena @CatholicArena]

🇪🇸 The scenes coming out of Spain for Pope Leo XIV's visit to Madrid are insane

People as far as the eye can see

[Monistic Idealism @monism_idealism]

“Consciousness expresses itself through creation....On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists."

- Michael Jackson, Dancing the Dream

[RTÉ News @rtenews]

Ireland's oldest person, Eileen 'Nell' Hynes, has died at the age of 109
https://t.co/zOiCJjIFzX

[UnHerd @unherd]

‘Social media is not just chipping away at real-world interactions but actively rewarding people for performing loneliness.’

@CarolynGorman_👇 https://t.co/61vR8eRpQO

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Your brain never stops telling your paralyzed legs to walk.

It fires the command every time. A faint electric pulse reaches the skin. The legs just stopped listening years ago.

So a professor in Japan spent 20 years building something that listens instead.

A suit that reads that pulse off the skin and moves the legs the brain can no longer reach. The man thinks walk. The machine hears what his own legs cannot. He stands.

It is called HAL. Japanese health insurance has covered it since 2022. The company that makes it fit its entire mission into four words.

Zero people left bedridden.

Paralysis told him to make peace with the chair.

A lab in Tsukuba spent two decades telling it no.

[Katy Faust @Katy_Faust]

I’m often asked: When we overturn gay marriage, is interracial marriage next?

Nope. Here’s why.

Interracial marriage and same-sex marriage are not the same.

In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down racist marriage bans, reinforcing the basis of husband-wife marriage, not redefining it. The Court removed an illicit barrier that had nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of procreative marriage.

Obergefell v. Hodges did something very different. It created a new “fundamental right” to a same-sex marriage license, something absent from the Constitution’s text, history, and tradition. Because it departed from our legal tradition rather than conforming to it, Obergefell remains open to challenge.

But the differences are not just legal. The outcomes for children are opposite as well.

In an interracial marriage, children remain connected to both of the adults to whom they have a natural right. They are raised by the mother and father responsible for their existence and identity. Nothing about interracial marriage requires a child to lose a parent.

Same-sex marriage does.

Children raised by same-sex couples are necessarily separated from at least one biological parent. They are denied a relationship with half, and sometimes all, of their genetic heritage. They lose either a mother or a father.

Reversing Obergefell would have no impact on Loving. Interracial marriage remains legally secure because Loving upheld the historic understanding of marriage while removing a racist barrier.

Restoring the man-woman meaning of marriage protects what matters most to children: their mother and father.

[Destroyer of Sunnis @destroysunnis]

Juan Andrés, an Islamic Jurist (faqih), son of an Islamic scholar, born in Spain in the 1400s

He converted to Catholicism in 1487 and in his work published in 1515 (Confusion of the Muhammadan sect), he criticizes Aisha's age, compares it to murder; a sin against nature and lust

[ʜᴇʀQʟᴇs @herqles_es]

🇪🇸🇻🇦 | El Papá llama a que los jóvenes se casen y formen una familia:

«El matrimonio también es una vocación. No tengáis miedo del matrimonio y de formar una familia».