The Amygdala Made Me Do It - NYTimes.com
- These books possess a unifying theme: The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.
- Why now? To pose the question that psychiatrists ask their patients, why are we preoccupied all at once with the how instead of the why of things?
- But of course what one “feels,” as we’ve learned from all these books, could well be — indeed, probably is — an illusion. As Timothy Wilson puts it with haunting simplicity: “We are strangers to ourselves.” Strangers who can learn how to be friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment