Thomas Lewis Quotes

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.

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

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.

Evolution is a wandering process wherein multiple simultaneous influences, including chance and circumstance, shape biological structures over eons. A more capricious designer than any committee, evolution is a story full of starts, setbacks, compromises, and blind alleys, as generations of organisms adapt to fluctuating conditions.

Encountering an early series of consistent instances can implant an erroneous generality in a child's mind. This mental machinery distills and does not evaluate; it cannot detect whether the larger world runs in accordance with the scheme it has drawn forth from the emotional microcosm of a family. Just as grammatical English emerges from our lips automatically, a structured pattern of emotional relatedness emanates from each of us.

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.

Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own.

Thwarted attachment and limbic disconnection thus encourage superficiality and narcissism. People who cannot see content must settle for appearances.

The emotional mind likewise transcends the facile and appealing dualism separating its psychological and biological aspects. Physical mechanisms produce one’s experience of the world. Experience, in turn, remodels the neurons whose chemoelectric messages create consciousness. Selecting one strand of that eternal braid and assigning it primacy is the height of capriciousness.

The limbic connectedness of a working psychotherapy requires uncommon courage. A patient asks to surrender the life he knows and to enter and emotional world he has never seen; he offers himself up to be changed in ways he can't possibly envision. As his assurance of successful transmutation he has only the gossamer of faith. At the journey's end, he will no longer be who he was, and his guide is someone he has every reason to mistrust...only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen. (190)

The skill of becoming and remaining attuned to another's emotional rhythms requires a solid investment of years.

Because other mammals have expressions, does that mean they have feelings — a subjective experience of the emotional states they display? That idea was scientifically risible not so long ago. Now some emotion scientists endorse the proposition that other mammals possess emotional consciousness — that they feel. This reversal delights animal advocates eager to make an argument for panprotoplasmic parity. But when the zoophile Mark Derr writes, “The question of whether animals possess consciousness, intelligence, volition, and feelings has long been settled in the affirmative,” he must be reporting the consensus from a species other than our own. Animals may have decided the matter to their own satisfaction, but human beings, as far as we know, are still debating it.

Limbic pursuits sink slowly and steadily lower on America’s list of collective priorities. Top-ranking items remain the pursuit of wealth, physical beauty, youthful appearance, and the shifting, elusive markers of status. There are brief spasms of pleasure to be had at the end of those pursuits – the razor-thin delight of the latest purchase, the momentary glee of flaunting this promotion or that unnecessary trinket – pleasure here, but not contentment. Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America’s values. These rebels will necessarily forgo exalted titles, glamorous friends, exotic vacations, washboard abs, designer everything – all the proud indicators of upward mobility – and in exchange, they may just get a chance at a decent life.

The brevity of mini (psycho)therapies is another efficient forestaller of healing. The neocortex rapidly master didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. (189)

Will lectures on the evils of chemical dependency deter teenagers from a life of substance dependence? Don’t believe it. While their end is worthy, such talk targets the neocortical brain, not the limbic one. Pain is too potent a motivator for facts to undo. Pretending otherwise is a threadbare illusion convincing only to those who already feel basically well.