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

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)

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.

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. Consciousness registers a fading level of activation in the emotion circuits faintly or not at all. And so the provocative events of the day may leave us with emotional responsiveness waiting beneath our notice. If a man spills coffee on himself, his annoyance is relatively short-lived — on the order of minutes. After the conscious feeling is gone, residual activity in the anger circuits lingers. He will pass into an irritable mood — a quickness to anger, the only reflection of the waning activity in those circuits.