My wife’s book group discussed A General Theory of Love, by three Bay Area psychiatrists, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. I read the book after getting a “you might like this… it’s about the brain” recommendation. After reading it, I have several reactions.
They have some core ideas of interest, though I was not always convinced.
While I might wish for a magazine article of New Yorker or Atlantic length instead of this full book, the second and third chapters are genuinely interesting. Through a survey across time of studies and theories about the brain, the authors explain the concept of the limbic brain, which is the unthinking emotional center that (for the authors) is the core of who we are emotionally. Unthinking is not negative, just descriptive. The neocortex, with its conscious thinking, cannot overrule the limbic brain, which developed earlier on the evolutionary timescale. The authors put the common split between the heart and the head all in the brain: the split is between the neocortex and the limbic brain.
These ideas and theories were not entirely new to me, but they were explained well, despite (in some cases) the language. The more evocative leap from there was to the idea of limbic connection, and how central it is to human development. Essentially, if you don’t connect emotionally during childhood, you’re scarred in almost physical ways, at least as far as your brain patterns and social development go. This isn’t news, really. But the emphasis on how mammals depend on these connections for any kind of satisfactory life goes further here than I’ve seen before. It’s not simple, and the authors don’t pretend to explain it fully, but they certainly believe their attention to this concept can carry it far beyond individual development.
Our society overlooks the drain on emotional balance that comes from severing attachments. From the dawn of the species until a few hundred years ago, most human beings lived out their lives in one community. The signature lesson of the twentieth century is that unforeseen complications are ever the faithful companions of technological progress. The convenient devices that enable extensive mobility are problematic because limbic regulation operates weakly at a distance. We have the means to establish a periparetic lifestyle, but we will never have the brains for it.
Statements like this are how we go from the brain to “a general theory of love.” The brain and our changing insights into how it works physically and emotionally captivated me. The attempts at extending these ideas to society as a whole snapped the spell.
This book needed a firmer editor.
Each chapter was dramatically individual in its style. It was jarring to jump from heavier science about brain chemistry, however well described, to anecdotal passages and excerpted poetry and broader extrapolations about society and human development. The authors clearly aimed for a sweeping tone, but it led them astray, in my reading.
The authors should have worked harder to find a consistent tone, or identified themselves for each chapter. I’ve seen that done in some other multi-author works, although it is rare. I did not race through this book, as I’d get bored with some of the flowery language. Which leads me to…
Someone should read some Hemingway.
Maybe old Ernest was too sparse in his language, but after you read a few sentences like this, I was ready to throw myself into the Sea with the Old Man.
As a collection of dense matter betrays its presence through electromagnetic emissions, a person’s emotional Attractors manifest themselves in a radiant aura of limbic tones. If a listener quiets his neocortical chatter and allows limbic sensing to range free, melodies begin to penetrate the static of anonymity.
And there’s plenty more where that comes from. I’ve been known to stretch for a few ten-cent words now and again, but oof!