1. It can happen that the sensory input you experience over a short interval of time makes no sense to your brain until some last thing happens which reveals the theme and gives context to everything that came before.  At that moment your brain goes back and reprocesses everything that just happened in order to make sense of it.  The feeling is like experiencing a whole chunk of time condensed into one moment together with the satisfying feeling of resolution that comes from making order out of chaos.  Musicians use this trick to great effect.
  2. It’s less of an insult to say someone is “disingenuous” than to say she is a liar.  But we all know that the meaning is exactly the same.  Disingenuous is a more obscure word and there is less common knowledge of its meaning. Given two words that are synonymous is it generally true that the one with the more nuanced connotation is also the one that is longer, rarer, more obscure?
  3. In almost all Western music every note begins and ends K/2^n units of time after the last note for some integers K and n.  Isn’t that rather limiting?
  4. A nurse at my kids’ pediatrician tells them she will count to three before giving them a shot but she actually gives the shot at the count of 2, surprising them.  It seems to make it less painful.  How does that work?