Thomas Lewis Quotes

"When anxiety becomes problematic, most people try vainly to think their way out of trouble. But worry has its roots in the reptilian brain, minimally responsive to will. As a wise psychoanalyst once remarked of the autonomic nervous system (which carries the outgoing fear messages from the reptilian brain), "It's so far from the head it doesn't even know there is a head." (49)"

If the attachment fabric of a civilization frays, if people cannot get from their relationships the emotional regulation that those bonds were designed to furnish, they will commandeer whatever means of limbic modulation they can lay hands on. Their hungering brains will seek satisfaction from a variety of ineffectual substitutes — alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and their cousins.

Arising somewhere between 100 million and 150 million years ago, monotremes demonstrate the beginnings of the departure from a reptilian way of life. Although it was far from obvious to early taxonomists, the feature that distinguishes mammals from reptiles is the appearance of a new brain within their skulls — the limbic brain. The echidna possesses not only nature’s most primitive uterus, but also her most primitive limbic apparatus. Of all mammals, echidnas alone lack one limbic process: they do not dream during sleep.

Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming’s eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it — a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria — and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory?

The scientific basis for separating neocortical from limbic brain matter rests on solid neuroanatomical, cellular, and empirical grounds. As viewed through the microscope, limbic areas exhibit a far more primitive cellular organization than their neocortical counterparts. Certain radiographic dyes selectively stain limbic structures, thus painting the molecular dissimilarity between the two brains in clean, vivid strokes. One researcher made an antibody that binds to cells of the hippocampus — a limbic component — and found that those same fluorescent markers stuck to all parts of the limbic brain, lighting it up like a biological Christmas tree, without coloring the neocortex at all. Large doses of some medications destroy limbic tissue while leaving the neocortex unscathed, a sharp-shooting feat enabled by evolutionary divergence in the chemical composition of limbic and neocortical cell membranes.

The purpose behind discerning the nature of love is not to satisfy ivory tower discussions or to produce fodder for academic delectation. Instead, as our work makes all too clear, the world is full of live men and women who encounter difficulty in loving or being loved, and whose happiness depends critically upon resolving that situation with the utmost expediency.

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 cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play. Scientists have proven, for example, that good mothering can override a disadvantageous temperament.

Recordings of encephalographic electrical waves show, amid their jagged spikes and hieroglyph swirls, a signature downward dip signifying that a neuronal mandate for motion is under way: the so-called readiness wave. While the motor cortex produces motion, the readiness wave appears to signal intent. So we should look here for will.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

Advances in communication technology foster a false fantasy of togetherness by transmitting the impression of contact- phone calls, faxes, e-mail- without its substance. And when a relationship is ailing from frank time deprivation, both parties often aver that nothing can be done. Every activity they spend time on (besides each other) has been classified as indispensable: cleaning the house, catching the news, balancing the checkbook.

The vocation of psychotherapy confers a few unexpected fringe benefits on its practitioners, and the following is one of them. It impels participation in a process that our modern world has all but forgotten: sitting in a room with another person for hours at a time with no purpose in mind but attending. As you do so, another world expands and comes alive to your senses — a world governed by forces that were old before humanity began.

Like any other momentous shift in emotion, depression is not an occupation by a foreign army; it is civil insurrection, the subversion of identity's republic from within. A depressed person loses more than energy and appetite — he loses himself and the capacity to make the decisions his former, pre-coup self would have made.

An ironic revelation of the television-computer age is that what people want from machines is humanity: stories, contact, and interaction.

Knowing someone is the first goal of therapy. Modulating emotionality - whether by relatedness or psychopharmacology or both - is second. Therapy's last and most ambitious aim is revising the neural code that directs an emotional life. (176)

The benefits of deep attachment are powerful - regulated people feel whole, centered, alive.