What is love, and why are some people un/able to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What do we do about it both logically and emotionally? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do? What makes one’s “narrative” authentic? or Who's real and who's a fraud? What distinguishes parental love from romantic love? Survival requires different tactics in different environments. What measures do the characters in the novel adopt to carry on?So, we all loved A General Theory of Love. It’s a “keeper.” I have six pages of quotes below, and another page with just some of the research highlighted.
We shared stories on our childhood/parent relationships, our current relationships (who we attract into our lives), drugs and friendships (not necessarily in combination), children, and therapy. And, in general, what we know and self-reflect about ourselves.
We talked about the changes in the brain which psychotherapy causes being the same changes that pharmacology can provide. The therapist relationship redoes the neuropathways. A therapist takes on a lot of sadness sand emotion and has to use boundaries, act as witness, and check themselves to not share too much of their own emotion.
We reflected on the importance of the infant attachment relationship. A child looks to their parent and asks, “Am I okay?” because they haven’t figured out those limbic emotions/feelings yet. No one cares for you like parent (or other important relationship). As a result, a child can grow to be extremely whiney or distant and not securely independent. When the attachment is “broken” therapy can help repair it.
I can’t capture the richness of the discussion, but Sex in the City seems to sum it up “If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone who loves the parts of you which you like the best” and they won’t discourage or stop you and might even encourage you to be those best parts.
Get out your dictionary; these authors are highly intelligent, eloquent thinkers who combine art and science facts to understand love. They use research and emotional real life experiences to explain love. The writing, for three doctors, is amazing and beautiful, not to mention all the technical information. This book is a powerfully humanistic look at the natural history of our deepest feelings, and why a simple hug is often more important than a portfolio full of stock options. Their grasp of neural science is topnotch, but the book is more about humans as social animals and how we relate to others--for once, the brain plays second fiddle to the heart.
The first sentence is:
What is love, and why are some people unable to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do?
Here is the Table of Contents (also known as CHAPTERS) with some quotes to capture the content
Preface
“The book demonstrates that where intellect and emotion clash, the heart often has the greater wisdom.” p. viii
“As individuals and as a culture, our chance or happiness depend on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves – invisibly, improbably, inexorably – around love.” p. viii
“Love makes us who we are, and who we can become.” p. viii
The Heart’s Castle: Science Joins the Search for Love
“It has been said that neurotics build castles in the sky, while psychotics live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent. But it is the psychiatrists and psychologists who have been living within a palace of theory suspended over a void. When they build their understanding of the emotional mind, the brain was a cipher. The foundations of the edifice had to be fashioned out of the only substance in plentiful supply – the purest speculation.” p. 6
“And so the towers and walls of the Freudian citadel sprang into midair, where they remain: the looming turret of the censoring superego, the lofty arches of insight, the squat dungeon of the id.” p. 6
According to Freud (the authors will dismantle this thought), “the heart binds love inextricably to sexual pleasure and perversion – indeed, it holds that love is but a convoluted representation of forbidden, repellent, incestuous urges.” p. 7
“Freud’s logic was a veritable Mobius strip of circularity… equating denial with confession… such revolving door reasoning could corroborate any proposition, no matter how faulty.” p. 8
“Freud’s collapse in the last decade of the twentieth century has rendered our yearnings, desires, and dreams, if not inexplicable, then at least unexplained.” p. 10
“Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind’s Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage – including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.” p. 10.
“…only a few things worth knowing about love can be proven, and just a few things amenable to proof are worth knowing at all.” p. 11
“One must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the improvable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.” p. 12
“Before we were through scavenging, we had gathered together elements from neurodevelopment, evolutionary theory, psychopharmacology, neonatology, experimental psychology and computer science.” p. 12
“Those who attempt to study the body without books said an uncharted sea, William Osler observed, while those who only study books do not go to sea at all.” p.13
“Within that structure, we found new answers to the questions most worth asking about human lives: what are feelings, and why do we have them? What are relationships, and why do they exist? What causes emotional pain, and how can it be mended – with medications, with psychotherapy, with both? What is therapy, and how does it heal? How should we configure our society to further emotional health? How should we raise our children, and what should we teach them?” p. 13
“The evidence of that pain surrounds us, in the form of failed marriages, hurtful relationships, neglected children, unfulfilled ambitions, and thwarted dreams …these injuries combine to damage our society, where emotional suffering and its ramifications are commonplace. The roots of that suffering are often unseen and passed over, while proposed remedies cannot succeed, because they contradict emotional laws that our culture does not yet recognize.” p. 13
“No multilettered neuroanatomical diagrams lurk within these pages. We have set out not to map the mind in numbing detail, but to lead an agile reconnaissance over landscapes that lie hidden within the human soul.” p. 14
Kits, Cats, Sacks, and Uncertainty: How the Brain’s Basic Structure Poses Problems for Love
Heisenberg “introduced scientists to an uncomfortably indefinite world – where the extent of the knowable disappointingly dwindles, and such intangibles as point of view and method questioning permeate previously solid truths.” p. 17
Heisenberg the questions we ask change the world we see.” p. 18
“When people say that someone is afflicted with a ‘chemical imbalance’ (now synonymous with 'undesirable behavior beyond voluntary control’) they refer to one half of the signaling process, an unintended slight to a neuron’s electrical potency.” p.19
“…the planet’s longest-lived organism – the giant redwood tree of northern California, with a span of four thousand years – lives every minute of its nearly interminable life without the ability to react quickly to anything.” p. 20
“Mammals, in other words, take care of their own. Rearing and caretaking are so familiar to humans that we are apt to take them for granted, but these capacities were once novel – a revolution in social evolution. The most common reaction a reptile has to its young is indifference; it lays its eggs and walks (or slithers) away. Mammals form close-knit, mutually nurturant social groups – families – in which members spend time touching and caring for one another.” p. 25
Mammals have “limbic hardware” p. 26
“Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system in moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so.” p. 31
Einstein says “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.” p. 32
“A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right things, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. …Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.” p. 33
Archimedes’ Principle: How We Sense the Inner World of Other Hearts
“Our society underplays the importance of emotions. Having allied itself with the neocortical brain, our culture promotes analysis over intuition, logic above feeling. Cognition can yield riches, and human intellect has made our lives easier in ways that range from indoor plumbing to the Internet. …modern American plows emotions under – a costly practice that obstructs happiness and mislead people about the nature and significance of their lives.” p. 37
“…feeling deeply is synonymous with being alive.” p. 37
“In the mid-1960’s, however, a handful of researchers revived Darwin’s original concept of emotion as a heritable neural advantage.” p. 38
Ekman found “culture doesn’t determine the configuration of facial expressions: they are the universal language of humanity.” p. 39
“…a mood is a state of enhanced readiness to experience a certain emotion. Where an emotion is a single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, a mood is the extended, nearly inaudible echo that follows.” p. 45
“Children born today with a diminutive level of worry – those whose emotional physiology undereacts to stress, novelty, and threat – grow up to become criminals much more often than average. Criminality has long been known to be particularly heritable, and a worry volume set to low in the reptilian brain is part of the mechanism. Anxiety deters people from high-risk acts. Thos who do not experience the emotional weight of adverse consequences will not be sufficiently warned off.” p. 49
“…in response to limbic stimulation, small muscles on the mammalian face contract in precise configurations. The face is the only place in the body where muscles connect directly to skin.” p. 52
“The sensory experience flashes to the limbic brain, which will sift the event for its significance and prepare physiology to meet that singular moment.” p. 53
“…it takes neocortical genius to formulate the theory of relativity, but not to be sad after a loss, or to be thrilled at seeing the person you love across a crowded room. But while the neocortical brain does not produce emotionality, it does have a role in modulating feelings and integrating them with some of its own symbolic functions.” p. 57
“While having emotions is under limbic control, speaking of them falls under the jurisdiction of the neocortex. That division of labor creates translation troubles.” p. 57
“It isn’t just his mother’s beaming countenance but her synchrony that he requires – their mutually responsive interaction.” p. 62
A Fiercer Sea: How Relationships Permeate the Human body, Mind, and Soul
Lorenz “used the word imprinting for the tendency of birds and mammals to lock on to an early object.” p. 68
Frederick II found that “all infants died before uttering a single world …children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” p.69
Réne Spitz rediscovered in the 1940’s that “a lack of human interaction – handling, cooing, stroking, baby talk, and play – is fatal to infants.” p. 70
John Bowlby in the 1950’s produced attachment theory, a model that draws parallels between the bonding behavior of humans and animals.” p. 70
Harry Harlow worked with monkeys and found “Milk, whether a reinforcing reward or an id-satisfying elixer, failed spectacularly to establish any bond. In trial after trial, the more a doll could be made to resemble a mother monkey, the more infatuated the little monkeys became.” p. 72
“An identical mechanism weaves the ties between people who share a traumatic experience, as in wartime or a disaster. Designers of boot camps, and fraternity and sorority initiations, with varying degrees of consciousness exploit the same process to forge affiliations between dissimilar strangers who must be made to cohere.” p. 73
People hug each other on departures and arrivals – an act so familiar we might think it nothing more than a custom. But this style of embrace contains silent evidence of attachment; an imposed separation, or the threat of one, reflexively makes people want to reestablish skin-to-skin contact.” p. 73
p. 74 is about secure child, insecure-avoidant child, and insecure-ambivalent toddler.
Mary Ainsworth proved “that what a mother does with her baby matters.” p. 75
“Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair. p. 76
“Grief can give some insight into what it is like to have a major depression. Despair and depression are close cousins, enough so that despair in laboratory animals is often used as a model for human depressive illness. The disease state we call major depression in human beings may be a twisted variant of the despair reaction.” p.79
“Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decision on a rumored phantom like attachments (support groups). The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” p. 80-81
“…people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.” p. 86
“Limbic regulation makes expulsion from the company of others the cruelest punishment human beings can devise.” (reference to banishment of Romeo) p. 87
“Monkeys reared without their mothers often survive, but their neural systems are permanently maimed.” p. 87
Gary Kraemer found that “monkeys raised alone cannot engage in reciprocal interactions with normal monkeys, who consistently reject them (isolation syndrome).” p. 88
“The lack of an attuned mother is a nonevent for a reptile and a shattering injury to the complex and fragile limbic brain of a mammal.” p. 89
p. 92-96 “crucial chemical players: serotonin, opiates, oxytocin.” Serotonin helped a woman “leave her lover without intolerable suffering.” “People who deliberately injure themselves in minor but stinging ways …have one thing in common: an exquisite, lifelong sensitivity to separation’s pain. …Opiates provoke the lesser pain to trick the nervous systems into numbing the unendurable one. …human contact also generates internal opiate release.”
Gravity’s Incarnation: How Memory Stores and Shapes Love
Ewald Hering says “Memory collects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole; and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the attractions of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory.” p. 100
“Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity.” p. 101
“First a memory is not thing. Cardiac muscle fibers are objects but the heartbeat they generate is a physiologic event, a collective flutter that propels life but nevertheless has no mass and occupies no space. …Memories are the heartbeats of the nervous system.” p. 103
“New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain areas as imagination.” p. 104
“A healthy mind flees backward in time every second… The hippocampus is a key player in creating explicit memories, but the memories themselves reside elsewhere.” p. 106
“If people form memories without realizing it, how could we ever know? Only by observing actions change from experience, and thus deducing what someone must have learned, regardless of what he says.” p. 107
“Even though subjects didn’t understand what they were doing or why it worked, they were still able to do it. They gradually developed a feel for the situation and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.” p. 108
Knowlton, Squire, Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory “…conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but now how well they did it. …They could only say they were using their intuition.” p. 110
“When confronted with repetitive experiences, the brain unconsciously extracts the rules that underlie them.” p. 111
Antonio Damasio found that when forced to choose whom someone would ask for gum or cigarettes, a person stuck with “Good Guy” more often than chance predicts. Without event memory, without the ability to remember a name or a face, a person retains an emotional impression. p. 115
“If a child has the right parents, he learns the right principles – that love means protection, caretaking, loyalty, sacrifice… If he has emotionally unhealthy parents, a child unwittingly memorizes the precise lesson of their troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million other crippling variations.” p. 116
“All things appear to us as they appear to us, and it is impossible for them to appear otherwise.” p. 119
A Bend in the Road: How Love Changes Who We Are and Who We Can Become
“One manifestation of these orchestral evocations is the immediate selectivity of emotional memory. Gleeful people automatically remember happy times, while a depressed person effortlessly recalls incidents of loss, desertion, and despair. Anxious people dwell on past threats; paranoia instills a retrospective preoccupation with situations of persecution. If an emotion is sufficiently powerful, it can quash opposing networks so completely that their content becomes inaccessible – blotting out discordant sections of the past. Within the confines of that person’s virtuality, those events didn’t happen. To an outside observer, he seems oblivious to the whole of his own history.” p. 130
“Other people are troubled by emotional-memory networks that are simply too ready to pass around the signals that comprise negative feelings. Such a person finds he can’t shake an unpleasant emotion once it gets going. Rather than dwindling within minutes as they should, an emotion and its associated repercussions may drown out the rest of his mind for days. That kind of limbic sensitivity make the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to well nigh unbearable.” p. 131
Ulric Neisser interviewed forty-four students the morning after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, then repeated the questions two and a half years later. None correlated. One third were wildly inaccurate. In a neural network, new experiences blur the outlines of older ones. The reverse is also true the neural past interferes with the present. Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see. p. 135
“In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love." p. 144
The Book of Life: How Love Forms, Guides, and Alters a Child’s Emotional Mind
“The limbic systems has discernible emotional attributes – a disposition to chronic depression, an inability to assert oneself, a lifetime spent loving inattentive partners.” p. 146
“Certain stains of mice are thirty times more anxious than others; so are some human families. One brain’s blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive.” p. 152
“While genes are pivotal in establishing some aspects of emotionality, experience plays a central role in turning genes on and off. DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the card in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play” p. 152
“The inverse also holds: inadequate nurturance can disrupt a healthy limbic inheritance, imposing anxiety and depression on someone who had the genetic makings of a happy life.” p. 153
A child trusts his parent’s assessment of his tumble more than his, he can feel his pain and fright and disappointment but cannot gauge them. p. 155
“But a person cannot know himself until another knows him.” p. 157
“The child of emotionally balanced parents will be resilient to life’s minor shocks. Those who miss out on the practice find that in adulthood, their emotional footing pitches beneath them like the deck of a boat in rough waters. They are incomparably reactive to the loss of their anchoring attachments – without assistance, they are thrown back on threadbare resources. The end of a relationship is then not merely poignant but incapacitating.” p. 158
“Letters and phone calls are a salve on the wound, but they are insubstantial substitutes for the full-bandwidth sensory experience of nearness to the ones you love. To sustain a living relationship, limbic regulation demands sensory inputs that are rich, vivid, and frequent… limbic regulation operates weakly at a distance.” p. 158-159
“If a parent loves him in the healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful and hurts are soothes as best they can be, then that is how he will relate to himself and others. Anomalous love – one where his needs don’t matter, or where love is suffocating or autonomy intolerable – make its ineradicable limbic stamp. Healthy loving then becomes incomprehensible. p. 160
“A relationship that strays from one’s prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation. Loneliness outweighs most pain. These two facts collude to produce one of love’s common and initially baffling quirks: most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a “nice” relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect.” p. 161
“Some people carry that tale (boys meets girl like mother and they fight and resent each other) in their hearts, and whether they find a player for the part of not, the piece can only come to grief… a child can form influential Attractors from relationships not just with mother and father, but also with siblings, nannies, even the family as a whole. In a home with ten children, for instance, each may extract a version of the local truth that there isn’t enough love to go around in the world, that you must fight fiercely and ceaselessly and still your heart will go hungry.” p. 162
“The plasticity of the brain – the readiness of neurons to sprout fresh connections and encode new knowledge – declines after adolescence… New lessons must fight an uphill battle against the patterns already ingrained…” p. 163-164
Between Stone And Sky: What Can Be Done to Heal Hearts Gone Astray
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
“The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy IS physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn’t beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness. Evolution has sculpted mammals into their present form: they become attuned to one another’s evocative signals and alter the structure of one another’s nervous systems. Psychotherapy’s transformative power comes fro engaging and directing these ancient mechanisms. Therapy is a living embodiment of limbic processes as corporeal as digestion or respiration. Without the physiologic unity limbic operation provides, therapy would indeed be a vapid banter some people suppose it to be.” p. 168
“Therapy should not seek to overrule the primeval forces predating civilization, because, like love, therapy is already one of them.” p. 169
“When people are hurting and out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations: groups, clubs, pets, marriages, friendships, masseuses, chiropractors, the Internet. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. Together, those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapists on the planet.” p. 171
“Depression often leads a person to shun social contact, nullifying the regulatory impact of his affiliative ties. Even when he does interact, a depressed person is likely to avert his gaze, cutting himself off from the interchange of emotional signals. And depression shuts down limbic circuits…” p. 172
“A person cannot choose to desire a certain kind of relationship, any more than he can will himself to ride a unicycle, play The Goldberg Variations, or speak Swahili.” p. 177
“A determined therapist does not strive to have a good relationship with his patient – it can’t be done. If a patient’s emotional mind would support good relationships, he or she would be out having hem. Instead a therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open into whatever relationship the patient has in mind – even a connection so dark that it touches the worst in him.” p. 178
McClelland’s work with r-l in Japanese demonstrates not only that the adult brain retains sufficient plasticity to encode fresh Attractors, but also that a specialized experiential environment can instill neural lessons when ordinary life cannot. Psychotherapy performs the same process on emotional discriminations.” p. 180
“Therapy does not clarify the object of desire so an intoxicated traveler can spend the rest of his life dodging it. Therapy worthy of the name changes what he wants. When he finishes, his heart tends in a healthier direction, the allure of former pathology diminishes and what once was barely noticeable becomes his new longing.” p. 181
“People who bond share unspoken assumptions about how love works, and if the Attractors underlying those premises need changing, they are frequently the last people in the word who can help each other.” p. 181
Freud says “The physician should be opaque to the patient, and like a mirror, show nothing but what is shown to him.” p. 184
A therapy’s results are particular to THAT relationship. A patient doesn’t become generically healthier; he becomes more like the therapist. New-sprung styles of relatedness, burgeoning knowledge for relationships and how to conduct them… dogma may determine what a therapist THINKS he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he IS. Thus the urgent necessity for a therapist to get his emotional house in order. His patients are coming to stay, and they may have to live there for the rest of their lives.” p. 186-187
A Walk in the Shadows: How Culture Blinds Us to the Ways of Love
“Twenty years of longitudinal data have proven that responsible parenting confers apparently permanent personality strengths. Primate rearing studies have detailed the neural devastation that follows early isolation, as well as the subtler derangements that persist in a young monkey’s brain from placing his mother under emotional stress.” p. 199
“Who but an enthralled parent will attend so closely that he learns all of a child’s subtle cures, picks up on the tiniest signals, and enters into the creation of a personal limbic dialect? Who else will feel the spontaneous ardor, fascination, and patience that are the requisite attendants to every complicated, creative endeavor?” p. 200
“Parents who receive inadequate love have less to give – to anybody, including their children… And youngsters who grow up without knowing the fullness of love will be fighting the odds when they mount their own struggle to establish a life bond with another. The emotional fate of children is inextricably bound to the ability of their parents to love one another…” p. 204
“In this time and place, our culture promotes as self-evident the notion that employable adults must have jobs and careers that children do fine with less… If we ask a parent to consider that modern lifestyles may deprive his child of a vital limbic ingredient, a neural vitamin, an emotional vaccine against later illness – then we risk arousing guilt and distress… The implication is clear: love doesn’t accomplish; it does nothing we need done… On one side, conservatives dismantle welfare so that single mothers must set children aside and return to work – not the labor of raising children, but the REAL world our culture values and upholds. On the other hand, liberals champion child care initiatives calling for an expansion in institutionalized surrogate care.” p. 202-203
“The skill of becoming and remaining attuned to another’s emotional rhythms requires a solid investment of year.” p. 205
Jean Giraudoux: “If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows – it becomes a month, a year, a century, it becomes too late… And when a relationship is ailing from frank time deprivation, both parties often aver that nothing can be done.” p. 205
Couples… are encouraged to achieve, not attach… our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being IN LOVE while discounting the importance of LOVING… IN LOVE rewrites reality as no other mental event can… True relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the waning of its intoxicating predecessor… adult love depends critically upon KNOWING the other.” p. 206-207
“…regulated people feel whole, centered, alive. With their physiology stabilized from the proper source, they are resilient to the stresses of daily life, or even to those of extraordinary circumstance.” p. 208
Withholding reciprocation cripples a healthy partner’s ability to nourish him; it poisons the well from which she draws the sustenance she means to give. A couple shares in ONE process, ONE dance, ONE story. Whatever improves that ONE benefits both; whatever detracts hurts and weakens both lives.” p. 209
A culture wise in love’s ways would understand a relationship’s demand for time. It would teach the difference between IN LOVE and LOVING; it would impart to its members the value of the mutuality on which their lives depend. A culture versed in the workings of emotional life would encourage and promote the activities that sustain health – togetherness with one’s partner and children; homes, families, and communities of connectedness. Such a society would guide its inhabitants to the joy that can be found at the heart of attachment – what Bertrand Russell called ‘in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.’” p. 209
“Close early relationships instill a permanent resilience to the degenerative influence of stress, while neglect sensitizes children to those effects.” p. 211
“But the real battle our country fights is not against drugs per se but limbic pain – isolation, sorrow, bitterness, anxiety, loneliness, and despair… Study after study has shown that children with close familial ties are far less likely to become entangled in substance abuse.” p. 212-213
“The insouciance of Just Say No assumes that the human brain and will are separable. They are not.” p. 214
“Gathering like people together to share their stories imbues a wordless strength, what Robert frost called in another context ‘a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but a momentary stay against confusion.’ The limbic regulation in a group can restore balance to its members, allowing them to feel centered and whole.” p. 214
“Natural limbic inclinations include loyalty, concern, and affection. ‘When you love,’ wrote Ernest Hemingway, ‘you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.’ Within their designed environment – a family – these impulses make fertile ground wherein healthy relatedness takes root and grows. The workplace bears strong resemblance to the home – indeed, for most of humanity’s history, the work environment WAS the home. In both settings, one encounters amiable companions, authoritative overseers, shared travail.” p. 215
“…most of what makes a socially functional human comes from connection – the shaping physiologic force of love.” p. 218
American medicine has come to rely on the intellect as agency of cure… The ‘alternative’ healers proliferated in response to the demand for a context of RELATEDNESS. These limbically wiser settings are friendlier to emotional needs – they involved regular contact with someone who participates in close listening, and often, the ancient reassurance of laying on hands.” p. 219-222
The Open Door: What the Future Holds for the Mysteries of Love
“Limbic resonance, regulation, and revision define our emotional existence; they are the walls and towers of the neural edifice evolution has built for mammals to live in. Our intellect is largely blind to them. Within the heart’s true edifice, those who allow themselves to be guided by Reason blunder into walls and stumble over sills. They are savants who can see too little of love to escape painful collisions with its unforgiving architecture.” p. 229
JUST THE RESEARCH
“And so the towers and walls of the Freudian citadel sprang into midair, where they remain: the looming turret of the censoring superego, the lofty arches of insight, the squat dungeon of the id.” p. 6
According to Freud (the authors will dismantle this thought), “the heart binds love inextricably to sexual pleasure and perversion – indeed, it holds that love is but a convoluted representation of forbidden, repellent, incestuous urges.” p. 7
“Freud’s logic was a veritable Mobius strip of circularity… equating denial with confession… such revolving door reasoning could corroborate any proposition, no matter how faulty.” p. 8
“Freud’s collapse in the last decade of the twentieth century has rendered our yearnings, desires, and dreams, if not inexplicable, then at least unexplained.” p. 10
“Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind’s Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage – including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.” p. 10.
Heisenberg “introduced scientists to an uncomfortably indefinite world – where the extent of the knowable disappointingly dwindles, and such intangibles as point of view and method questioning permeate previously solid truths.” p. 17
Heisenberg the questions we ask change the world we see.” p. 18
“Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system in moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so.” p. 31
Einstein says “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.” p. 32
“In the mid-1960’s, however, a handful of researchers revived Darwin’s original concept of emotion as a heritable neural advantage.” p.38
Ekman found “culture doesn’t determine the configuration of facial expressions: they are the universal language of humanity.” p. 39
Lorenz “used the word imprinting for the tendency of birds and mammals to lock on to an early object.” p. 68
Frederick II found that “all infants died before uttering a single world …children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” p.69
Réne Spitz rediscovered in the 1940’s that “a lack of human interaction – handling, cooing, stroking, baby talk, and play – is fatal to infants.” p. 70
John Bowlby in the 1950’s produced attachment theory, a model that draws parallels between the bonding behavior of humans and animals.” p. 70
Harry Harlow worked with monkeys and found “Milk, whether a reinforcing reward or an id-satisfying elixer, failed spectacularly to establish any bond. In trial after trial, the more a doll could be made to resemble a mother monkey, the more infatuated the little monkeys became.” p. 72
Mary Ainsworth proved “that what a mother does with her baby matters.” p. 75
Knowlton, Squire, Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory “…conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but now how well they did it.
Antonio Damasio found that when forced to choose whom someone would ask for gum or cigarettes, a person stuck with “Good Guy” more often than chance predicts. Without event memory, without the ability to remember a name or a face, a person retains an emotional impression. p. 115
Ulric Neisser interviewed forty-four students the morning after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, then repeated the questions two and a half years later. None correlated. One third were wildly inaccurate. In a neural network, new experiences blur the outlines of older ones. The reverse is also true the neural past interferes with the present. Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see. p. 135
McClelland’s work with r-l in Japanese demonstrates not only that the adult brain retains sufficient plasticity to encode fresh Attractors, but also that a specialized experiential environment can instill neural lessons when ordinary life cannot. Psychotherapy performs the same process on emotional discriminations.” p. 180
Freud says “The physician should be opaque to the patient, and like a mirror, show nothing but what is shown to him.” p. 184
No comments:
Post a Comment