If a language encodes events as simultaneous wholes rather than linear sequences, learning it can restructure cognition so that the speaker experiences past and future as co-present. In 'Story of Your Life' the narrator, having internalized the aliens' nonlinear script, knows her daughter's eventual death yet still chooses to have her, because foreknowledge does not feel like coercion but like participation in an already-whole story.
In 'Hell Is the Absence of God,' a man named Neil Fisk loses his wife when an angel's visitation (a routine, physics-like event in this world) kills her as a side effect; to rejoin her in Heaven he must come to love God. He finally achieves genuine, unconditional love of God in the instant before dying, then is sent to Hell anyway, where he goes on loving God eternally with no reciprocation.
A neural procedure, 'calliagnosia,' selectively suppresses the brain's automatic aesthetic response to human faces while leaving face recognition intact. The story uses it to argue that perception of beauty is a discrete, physiologically isolable function whose social effects (bias toward the attractive) could in principle be switched off.
Treat a mathematical system's internal consistency as something that could, in principle, collapse: if a proof showed arithmetic to be inconsistent, it would not merely be an error but a trauma that invalidates a life's work and the felt certainty of reason itself. In 'Division by Zero' this is mapped onto a marriage, where one partner's loss of faith in mathematics is incomprehensible and alienating to the other.
In 'Seventy-Two Letters,' names (sequences of Hebrew letters) animate matter by specifying form, and the discovery that human sperm contain no infinite nested generations means the species will go sterile within generations unless a name for self-reproduction is found. Creation is modeled as information: whoever controls the naming language controls which bodies, and which classes of people, get to exist.