"...your heartbeat has two distinct components, a 'diastolic' beat where your heart opens valves to your 'veins' that carry blood inwards towards the heart, and expands to draw in blood, then a 'systolic' beat where your heart closes those valves and opens valves to the 'arteries' that carry blood outward, and contracts to force the blood it drew in outwards."
"Or in more detail, it's really more of a four-stage process where blood gets pulled inward from your body, pumped outward to your lungs to get Element-8 restored from the air you breathed in and exchange 'two-8s-one-6' to your lungs for you to exhale, pulled back into your heart, and pumped out to the rest of the body, except that the two pulling-in stages from body and lungs, and the two pumping-out stages to body and lungs, happen simultaneously... I can draw a diagram if for some reason it's important."
"I think I'd actually rather return to the thing it was a metaphor for: sensory information coming in to our brain-hearts from the environment-body, us thinking, which you could see as a kind of lungish metaphor thing, actions going out of the brain-heart to the environment-body, interacting with the environment, and we then see what happened when the sensory information comes back in. Only as a continuous process rather than in distinct stages -"
"You know, actually, forget that entire metaphor."
"Just remember that improving things and understanding things are distinct tasks, and you can often make more headway by separating out the 'understanding' part so you can explicitly pursue it as a task in itself."
