Ok so today my post is going to be a little short because, well, I’m not doing so hot mental health wise and my body is feeling the effects from it. So today’s whimsical learning is about something I’ve been reading and learning about for months while I walk on my walking pad: batteries.

Holy shit there is so much going on in batteries.

First let’s try to explain how a battery works. Listen. I am not a battery engineer but this shit is cool as fuck so I’m gonna do my best. My understanding of a battery goes like this: A battery has two ends and gap between them.

Those parts are the Cathode, Anode, Separator (the thing between the two), and the electrolyte. I would say electrolyte solution but we’ll get to that.

So let’s think of it like this. Imagine a battery is a SAW trap. The charged lithium ions are basically the victims trapped in the basement. They can see out a small window that there is a shining, glimmering hopeful place just out of reach. They want to go there, so bad.

But then a switch flips, the battery is on and this tunnel opens up right? PASSAGE. Safe, sweet passage. They are thirsty for it, starved from their isolation, desperate to escape. They rush down the tunnel into that sweet sweet paradise the Cathode, giving up all their energy along the way.

Only to lose all hope again once the battery is plugged back in to charge and they are forced, kicking and screaming, back down the tunnel into the anode. “NO DONT MAKE ME GO BACK THERE,” they say. The battery doesn’t care, the battery delights in using their suffering to let you watch Reels and doomscroll.

And that’s how batteries work!

All the cool science really revolves around changing one of those pieces out for a different material.

When you hear about Silicon Carbon, Carbon, or Graphite batteries *that* is the anode they’re discussing changing. The Anode is basically these sheets of materials that trap the lithium ions between them. That’s the basement prison.

When you hear about Sodium batteries or other Lithium materials, what they’re talking about is the Cathode, where that lives when it’s discharged vs the anode when it’s charged. That’s the house they think they’re going to be safe at if they can just escape.

And when you hear people talk about solid state batteries, the holy grail, they’re usually talking about replacing the electrolyte solution through which these poor ions attempt to escape.

Currently the most common electrolyte solution is a lithium salt liquid. It is… let’s say highly volatile and might allow the lithium ions a rather violent escape route if the battery is compromised in any way.

So Solid State batteries switch out this explosive medium for, hopefully, something that allows the ions to flow through it without being an explosive liquid. You probably haven’t heard of any of these materials for constructing that escape tunnel yet but basically they are: sulfide based ones, garnet based ones, polymers (plastics) mixed with lithium slats) and so on. Perhaps the most famous one is “ceramics” which can actually be either sulfide or oxide based. It’s usually oxide based.

Point is, there’s a ton of super cool science going on out there to let you torture ions endlessly to power your devices. Happy browsing!

Today’s whimsical learning, typed from my phone while my wife plays Town to City, is about a recent pet fascination of mine: CUTTING BOARDS.

Now look, don’t cut from this post just because you’re board. *snicker*

No doubt you own a few of these things but holy moly you might be fascinated to learn there’s a lot going on here. Like some of them will fuck your knives up, some doubled as a human rights violations, and some of them fill your body with tiny shards of material and today I’m gonna be telling you about which is which!

Believe it or not the history of the cutting boards basically goes like this historically: stone slabs or tree bark for cutting, followed by mother fucking bread, followed by splintered wood, followed by plastic.

Let’s skip the oldest stuff and go to my favorite piece of cutting board history and the direct grandpa to today’s charcuterie boards: the trencher.

The trencher was a large, flat piece of bread that had been allowed to go stale. You would then use it either as a personal plate or like a communal cutting board. The juices from all of the meat and stuff would soak into the bread which would then be served to the poor or the dogs.

Not coincidentally trenchers were also used as personal plates. So… your plate and your cutting board share a common ancestor. Darwin would be proud.

Not fucking kidding. Because these were communal and folks were slicing meats and whatnot on it with their own personal knives it’s also not unlikely these helped to spread lots of illnesses to the poor since folks saliva, molds and spoiled foods were on them.

Ain’t that just fucked up?

Anyway the trencher later evolved to be made of wood because who wants to share with poor people, right? Keep it classy, France.

And that led to the use of sycamore butcher’s blocks which were weirdly prone to splitting but, alas.

Then we get to good old fashioned 1880s USA where some folks were like “man maybe we should be cutting on things that turn to splinters in our food” and they got a patent on a new kind of butcher’s block that used wood with the grain pointing upward in tiny blocks that were glued together. Because these grain was pointed upward instead of splitting it the knives would go into the fibers that would then compress back together after the knife was removed.

Which was honestly a great idea. Props. But the. We had to fuck it up in the 20th century with plastic because I guess it was cheap but they wanted you to think it was safer because the board was easy to wash and wouldn’t hold onto all those juices.

Little did we know every time you used the thing it was shaving tiny bits of plastic into your food. Also it turned out that they weren’t even better for cleanliness. Dangerous bacteria were drawn into the wood fibers and wouldn’t multiply there so… this was just another instance of the USDA talking out of its ass.

And then instead of going back to wooden blocks like sane people we decided to go with marble, glass, bamboo, teak, and tons of other things that are varying degrees of porous and will absolutely destroy your knives’ edges.

And now, finally, we’re returning to some common sense and lots of really great affordable wooden cutting boards are making it back into our homes.

Truly sometimes it ain’t worth fucking with a good thing. Also follow Joshua Weissman on YouTube his rant is what sent me down this rabbit hole weeks ago

Well ok that’s a little dramatic but like hear me out there’s this skin care wonder drug called Urea that you might know about because podiatrists recommend that shit all the time.

And for good reason. Scientists who want to sound like they’re avoiding telling you to put pee on your feet call it Carbamide but we’re going to come back to that in a little bit because the only thing I know about organic chemistry is that Carbon loves going to a kinky little biology party and bonding with anything it can.

Science is a bit of an art and way back when people used to believe in something called Vitalism. That is to say, chemistry was divided very neatly into two separate camps: inorganic compounds that can be synthesized and organic ones that cannot and can only come from living things.

And then this dude in 1828, Friedrich Wöhler, was like “Shit man let me cook up some salts to make ammonium cyanate,” and instead whatever he was cooking up turned into Urea. Sorry. “Carbamide.” Where are my manners.

Anyway, this dude should have been a poet because he writes his mentor and is all “I can no longer, so to speak, hold my chemical water and must tell you that I can make urea without needing a kidney, whether of man or dog; the ammonium salt of cyanic acid is urea.”

And for that bit of wordplay, our man goes down in history books as the first person genuinely excited to have accidentally made a tinkle in his lab.

But it gets better. Urea does some weird double duty depending on how much if you put on. You know how like… you invite a few friends over and it’s a cool hang out but then it turns out MORE of your friends show up and it turns into a completely different rager experience?

Urea is that. In low concentrations if you put the magic pee on your elbows or chapped nipples or whatever it’s a boss moisturizer that works great on your chapped hands and whatnot.

But then you add a bit higher of a concentration of it in the same place and at some point the switch flips and now it’s destroying keratin. Keratin is the tough, hard stuff under nails and also that forms on the bottom of your feet after years of not moisturizing and cleaning them properly. When the concentrations get close to 40% that stuff can be used for calluses, those annoying bumps on your arms, psoriasis, and more.

But don’t worry, there’s no big science kidney making the stuff that is great for your skin. Instead scientists ake it from scratch using a process that combines ammonia with carbon dioxide under serious heat and pressure. And the ammonia itself comes from yanking nitrogen straight out of the air and marrying it to hydrogen. So the urea in your most expensive, most beautifully packaged skincare is, if anything, less connected to bodily fluids than the urea your own sweat glands produce.

So get out there and take care of your skin by putting manufactured pee on it. Your feet especially will thank you.

Today’s whimsical learning, delivered hours later than I have been for entirely topical reasons, is about the power of video games to help with trauma and flashbacks. This is topical because the reason I was late to the party tonight was because I had a shit day in therapy and then spent the rest of the day asleep on the couch.

We’re mostly talking about Tetris, an unholy Frankenstein’s monster (if you’re a traumatic memory).

First we gotta remember the difference between a memory and a flashback. A memory is sort of an internal dialogue. It’s something you have access to and can call back. Your brain recognizes it as the past and you are aware that you and the memory are a separate thing. Because a memory is more or less summoned up it is held at arm’s length, right?

Flashbacks are the Koolaid man to Memory’s well behaved guest. They smash your fucking wall in and take over everything else that is going on in your body and mind. Your body and mind don’t know “this is the past.” It feels urgent. Now. Etc., and even if you are cognitively able to be like “this isn’t happening this isn’t happening” your body and the more primal parts of your mind are checked the fuck out.

And in 1984 someone played by Taron Egerton was like “Fuck that noise, I’m making a video game that doubles as penicillin for trauma.” He didn’t know that. Nobody knew that. Shit we’re just figuring out the extent of this.

How does it work?

Well Tetris (and presumably other visual-spacial games like Bejeweled, Candy Crush, Your Mom, etc.,) take over all the mechanisms that flashbacks need. Let me build a picture for you.

Your brain is a buffet of resources right. You are the Golden Corral. Flashbacks are that one really obnoxious guy who shows up, complains about everything, takes all the food even when the rest of your brain processes are trying to get some and generally is a loss for the establishment.

Tetris sorta does the same shit tbh, but it’s not as ultimately harmful to you. Tetris is the well behaved family that visits the Golden Corral of your mind and each of them takes their own fair share and they’re having a good time. When they’re in the house, the restaurant is just super busy but nobody is mad about them being there.

Both of them take over your visual spacial systems, just one of them is a welcome guest and the other one is an asshole who “knows the owners.”

So how’s this work?

Well there are two windows where visual spacial games have been helpful. One is RIGHT after the traumatic incident. Think handing a person who has just been in a car crash a game boy while they’re waiting in the ER for a checkup. The other is the spookier cousin that’s part of the reason eye witness testimony can’t be trusted. It’s called reconsolidation.

Turns out when you active a memory, like reminding someone about that horrific car crash, for a time the memory is malleable and can be altered in substance and texture. When you call something up it’s fresh in the mind and gets re-stored. This is where Tetris can help.

When you call up the traumatic memories and then get the patient to play Tetris, something happens that when it’s re-encoded it somewhat magically loses the ability to just barge into your mental buffet whenever you want by making sure the family gets to the buffet before the asshole does. We don’t really know WHY but after that the intrusive memories and flashbacks just completely stop in most people.

A 2026 study of frontline health workers found that up to 70% of them stopped having the intrusive memories of that event after a *single fucking session*.

Isn’t that shit wild? Now this isn’t the answer for all trauma. Obviously you need to be able to remember it, so for someone like me with dissociative amnesia it’s almost impossible to pull those things back up in the first place.

Trust me if I could just be jamming my gacha games in my head to weaken my trauma I’d be doing that non stop. But it is helpful for a lot of people and I think that’s pretty fucking whimsical. I vote we call this Tron Therapy.

This flower is called a Canterbury Bell. The Latin Name is Campanula crescamlibet.

I’m just kidding. That translates to “I’ll grow when I feel like it.” Sorta. I’m not good at Latin but I tried.

Campanula medium is its actual name and that translates to “medium sized little bell” because people naming this shit in the 1500s were like “What if adjectives meant nothing.”

What makes this flower cool? Well for starters it’s gorgeous, gets bees absolutely hammered on nectar, and you can *literally* drink from it. The blooms come up in purple, blue, pink, or white and they look like a shot glass Tinkerbell would use. These things are SO committed to the bit that there is a variety that grows with their own saucers attached.

These little whimsical shot glasses grow natively in the Alps bordering Italy and France but they’re perhaps more famous for their cottage core aesthetic in English period dramas because, well, history has never conceived of a people so committed to their aesthetic that once they saw a flower shaped like a teacup they said, “that shall be ours.”

But you can grow them yourselves and here’s where the “I’ll grow when I feel like it” bit comes into play.

They’re biennial. They take two years to grow and then they just *die.* So if you really want to have these as a regular feature of your garden (and you should) you want to let them go to seed so you get plenty of volunteers. You’ll also want to plant them two years in a row to make sure you’re getting some blooms every year.

Since they’re biennial, they play nice with most things and don’t invade your garden like, idk, freaking mint or something.

**So how do you plant them?**

Well they’re actually pretty easy to plant. You gotta remember nature doesn’t really have opposable thumbs to bury stuff 1/4inch deep in the soil and these things will remind you of that because if you do that to them they will die.

Instead you just sorta spread the dust on the soil and make sure they’re getting light and enough water (but not too much water) and they will bury themselves when they’re ready. Then BOOM flowers when you least expect it… two years later.

Anyway, they’re totally great to have around for just *so* much whimsy.

Today’s Whimsical Learning is actually on topic for the page. I’m going to teach you about how DID is actually a lot more like a structural brain change than a mood disorder or anything like that. I’ve actually been sitting on this one for a while but today seems as good a day as any to talk about some heavy stuff. Stick to the end and you’ll learn ya some stuff.

Let me first hit you with some fucking knowledge right. You know all about neuroplasticity right? It’s that idea that your brain literally changes in response to things you learn and experience. That’s part of what makes your brain a beautiful, efficient, machine. It changes its hardware to suite what you’re experiencing rather than changing the underlying software and hoping that’s enough.

In children they aren’t born with whole personalities, right? They’ve got a series of different neural networks that handle different issues. In a well socialized, safe environment with some stability they merge together into what’s known as the Default Mode Network.

That *should* happen between the ages of 6-9 years old.

But when that safety is interrupted and primary caregivers are a threat your mind is hit with a paradox: your defense says to flee your attacker but your attachment system says to go to them for care. This is something your brain cannot resolve.

Repeated exposure to this sort of situation floods the brain with cortisol and stunts the growth of the hippocampus and physically alters the structures responsible for memory storage and to bind context and time to memories.

But you’re still a human and you still have to function, so the brain uses the prefrontal cortex to forge “firewalls” to suppressive traumatic memories and forces those separated neural networks to take turns running your body. And the more your brain has to do this, the more permanent each of those “networks” becomes, each one growing more distinct the more often it has to be use while the brain’s neuroplastic pruning eliminates the unused pathways that would bring those different networks together.

The end result? Different personalities, each with distinct access to different memories in different ways, take turns running the body. They may be very similar to each other or very different depending on what was needed for your survival.

And this has actually been demonstrated on PET scans. Dr. A.A.T.S. Reinders in the Netherlands put people with this diagnosis into the scans. They were able to measure, physically, these different networks waking up and even the process of switching between them: literally the brain changing blood flow to respond to the situation most appropriately using involuntary systems that simply cannot be faked.

Every persona has a different fingerprint of brain activity, lighting up some areas and shutting down others.

In my own personal experience, I was first diagnosed when I was in my early 20s. The only one I knew about was J, who I thought was a poltergeist previously. But over time I learned that when I could feel her “thinking” or preparing to come to the surface that literally showed itself as a feeling of pressure on the back of my head. Not a headache, just a sensation almost like someone was poking my brain on the inside right in the back right of my skull.

I now know that isn’t a fabricated symptom, but rather the sensation of my brain moving blood around. Every single “alter” someone has (though I loathe that word) is their own unique combination of the Default Mode Network, Central Executive Network (which handles thinking and processing), and the Salience network (aka the “threat” network. So for instance, one persona who is essentially programmed to fight to protect the body will light up the salience network and motor control areas: literally preparing to fight. A younger persona may light up a configuration where emotional management networks seem more in line with what you expect in a child. Because they are a child. Everything BUT their body is essentially a child.

Which brings us to the mechanics of switching and the headaches:

Because this disorder comes from a ton of trauma, as we discussed, it’s almost a guarantee that everyone who has it also has PTSD.

Which brings us to the famous “headaches.” During the “Switch” from one to the other, the brain has to change plumbing and move blood around in different ways, rapidly constricting some blood vessels and rapidly dilating others. This is essentially exactly what happens in a vascular migraine.

This has other costs too, especially if you’re switching frequently, your brain drains its power faster than a normally developed brain might and burns through its oxygen and glucose much more quickly leading to crazy fatigue and fog and a dull, crushing feeling over the skull.

Normally these switches should only happen in response to current conditions and should more or less go away when those conditions end, but there’s an issue of metabolic exhaustion, threat locking, and other effects causing the body to simply not have the energy to “switch back” to the default persona or even a different one under “safe” conditions, leaving the current persona “stuck” until the brain has enough energy to do the thing.

Congrats! You now know more about DID than basically 99% of people.

I have been running this series on FB and I’ve decided to bring it to another audience that might love it. While this isn’t my usual trans learning, this will bring you one fun or interesting factoid a day. Why? Because my education has never been exclusively about LGBTQ+ people, but about the humanity we all share. Helping people be more human and enjoy being human more, you know?

This is also another part of my experience and my history that I’m bringing to you. Part of my nature is I love sharing cool things I learn with people. This is an extension of me.

So every day I’ll be sharing a whimsical factoid with your inbox, but don’t worry the big learning articles and so on are still coming too. This just helps me keep writing as a habit and bring a little of my whimsy to the world.

What if I told you that you could be enjoying food way more with this One Simple Trick!

So here’s a lesson I never forgot: When I was living at monastery (Theravada Buddhist) the monks gave us a lecture on the first day about food, or rather how westerners eat food. They told us how our forks make it easy to shovel huge, full bites into our mouth, one after the other, faster than our minds can process robbing us of the enjoyment of flavor and the experience of fullness.

I’m sure they didn’t need to be told, but science like TOTALLY agreed with them.

Turns out there have been a bunch of studies on the difference between Forks and Chopsticks that showed all sorts of cool shit.

Chopsticks are precision eating tools. Even if you’ve been using them your entire life they require a degree of focus and fine motor skills that slow you down. The result is, ultimately, that people eating with chopsticks eat less food and feel as full or fuller because they are slowing you down and bringing your mind to your food. After all with those you can only ball up so much rice on them or maybe a couple pieces of a vegetable. Goku’s ability to pound food with chopsticks is because he’s not human. Do not follow his example.

Turns out that time matters a lot!

When you eat slower and have to consider each bite more, your hormones (the ones that tell you to feel fully, happy, and sated) have time to catch up because normally it takes about 20 minutes for the food to hit. With a fork, you can absolutely shovel that shit in faster than your body knows what to do.

This is where I could give you the talk about mindfulness and eating but fuck that noise, but us westerners pretty much ruined the word “mindfulness” for a generation so… I’ll skip it.

Now you might be thinking, “Evey, fuck you for thinking I want to eat slower. I want to enjoy my food.” And to that I say, Planted Audience Member I Made Up For The Hypothetical (that’s her government name) this shit actually increases your enjoyment of food.

In a famous study at the University of Chicago, they looked into this same phenomenon by asking people to eat a bag of popcorn with their hands and having another group use chopsticks.

The chopstick users significantly enjoyed their food even more. Why you might be saying?

Well here’s the bit. The vast majority of the FLAVOR you experience is not on your tongue but in your nose (which is why COVID killed so many folks senses of taste because well it was hitting the areas where taste actually happened). This is called Retronasal Olfaction. As you chew your food, it heats up and releases more and more of the compounds that bring you taste.

But when you’re pounding fistfuls of potato chips into your mouth, you don’t get time to do that because you gulp down a much larger amount of food all at once. Taking smaller bites and chewing longer literally makes food taste better.

And if you’ve ever been mindlessly watching TV and downed a bag of chips, you know that you did’t really enjoy them. Your attention was all focused on your glowing screen. Because chopsticks require more attention to use and force you to target the food you’re looking for, you stop this from happening and you get to enjoy every single bite.

But this isn’t the only place where we do this. Media Theorist Marshal McLuhan noted we shape our tools and then the tools shape us right the fuck back. That’s not how he said that. I am paraphrasing.

You ever feel like you’ve moved to a place and you don’t actually know your way around very well even though you’ve been there a minute? Turns out that shit is because GPS has been robbing your brain of its spatial reasoning skills. No joke.

Nietzsche and Hemingway both recognized this in their own ways, as well. Let’s start with Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was going blind right, so writing by hand was giving him horrific headaches. To help he bought a typewriter, a pretty fancy one. It allowed him to keep writing but it changed his style and everyone noticed — including himself. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Hemingway observed this as well, I wrote my thesis on this dude’s writing style, so this part is etched into my memory a ton. Hemingway believed you could not easily use a typewriter for serious fiction and he insisted on writing that with a pencil to get the famous “three sights”: first when you write/read it over, second when you type it again, and again in the “proof.” Writing slower, more thoughtfully, gave him the opportunity to edit. If Hemingway was nothing else, he was a true master of the craft of using his environment to shape himself and his results.

He switched to typewriters when he was writing something to other people as journalism, letters to others, or final polishes.

But he didn’t stop there, he wrote standing up but only when he used his typewriter. When he wrote with a pencil he put sheets of it on a clipboard which he would use at a table or on a reading board.

I’m sure you’ve gotten the gist of what I’m saying here. Using tools that increase speed and efficiency seems to have an affect on our humanity. The joys of life, the joys that so many other people knew in older eras, came from using tools that kept them flowing, mindful, and engaged with the task they were doing because other tools ultimately efficiencied the humanity right the fuck out of it.

Like the rats in Ratatouille.

So if you’re having trouble slowing down, reading a book at a nice speed like an audio book reads at the speed of human speech, etc., then maybe, just maybe, take a lesson from chopsticks.