the.com/fixation
the brain's stuck-record button, looping one thought until you either solve it or snap.
means An obsessive or persistent preoccupation with one thing, idea, or person that the mind keeps returning to.
from From Latin 'fixus,' the past participle of 'figere' — to fasten, fix, or drive in (the same root that gives us 'fix' and 'affix'). The medical and psychological sense — a mind stuck on one object — was popularized in the early 20th century by Freudian psychoanalysis, which spoke of becoming 'fixated' at a stage of development, as though some part of the self had been nailed in place and refused to move on.
- eye trick
- Stare hard and stillness slips into shimmering blur
- Freud's word
- He blamed it on arrested psychosexual stages
- nitrogen too
- Plants fixate it from air into food
- survival edge
- Obsessive focus invented vaccines and skyscrapers alike
- chemistry sense
- Fixatives lock cells frozen for the microscope
captain ahab's white whale — moby dick's obsessive pursuit across the novel, destroying his ship and crew in 1851
elon musk mars colonization — two decades of spacex focus on making humans multiplanetary, billions invested since 2002
howard hughes spruce goose — billionaire's $7 million obsession with building the world's largest wooden aircraft in 1947