A General Theory of Love (Vintage) by Thomas Lewis & Fari Amini & Richard Lannon

Author:Thomas Lewis & Fari Amini & Richard Lannon [Lewis, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

This is the Kanisza triangle, but the apparent three-point polygon is pure figment: a trio of Pac-Men, six segments, no triangle. Yet the mind’s conviction of triangularity is irresistible, because these suggestive impostors conspire to activate the brain’s hardwired neuronal shortcuts leading to the perception of lines and edges. Try to see only what is really there, and you will find the truth disappearing behind the simpler, less accurate world your brain is determined to deliver.

Or read the following:

The central “letters” in both words are identical, ambiguous twins—duplicates of the fifth figure displayed to our neural network. In the first word, the brain’s learned Attractor for “THE” forces the equivocal figure into an unsteady “H,” while in the second, a different Attractor makes the same lines merge into an incomplete “A.” Although every bit as valid from the perspective of realism, not many people will see “TAE CHT.” Nobody will see the truth: “T?E C?T.”

Einstein’s relativity theory proved that a local concentration of mass warps space, angling the arrow flight of nearby objects, even bending the trajectory of light. The fabric of space, he said, is not a rigid plane like a billiard table or a bowling lane, impervious to the presence of the bodies traveling its surface. Instead, space is like a taut sheet of rubber indented by matter—dimpled lightly by the pea-size mass of a planet, a deep concavity stretching out from the enormous density of a sun.

The brain’s habit of concentrating experience into Attractors likewise makes the mind a pliable Einsteinian fabric strewn with incurvations. At the bottom of each force field well is an Attractor, convoluting the plain, true line of thought and standing ready to exert its influence on information patterns venturing close enough to be twisted or trapped. Even time flows differently in the neighborhood of a mass, as it does in the vicinity of a strong Attractor.

Wallace Stevens on time, heart, and mind:

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

With time as a stallion loose in the heart, each Attractor compels a bend in the road that horse follows. While sifting through the sensory present, the brain triggers prior knowledge patterns, whose suddenly reanimated vigor ricochets throughout the network. Old information comes alive, and a person then knows what he used to know. Because people are neural beings, the past is potentially vibrant within them.

The limbic brain contains its emotional Attractors, encoded early in life. Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural systems that view the emotional world and conduct relationships. If the early experience of a limbic network exemplifies healthy emotional interaction, its Attractors will serve as reliable guides to the world of workable relationships. If a diseased love presents itself to a child, his Attractors will encode it and force his adult relationships into that Procrustean bed.

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