Some might think it strange that a book on the psychobiology of love opens with a poem, but the adventure itself demands it. Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding—and so does the bulk of emotional life. More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing.
Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why.
Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives.
The same rift makes the mysteries of love difficult for people to penetrate, despite an earnest desire to do so.
Because of the brain's design, emotional life defeats Reason much as a poem does.
Both retreat from the approach of explication like a mirage on a summer's day#1338•
"Man is a credulous animal and must believe something, " wrote Bertrand Russell. "In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." Wherever and whenever they are, people vastly prefer any explanation (however flawed or implausible) to none. When Freud announced that he had plumbed once and for all the inky depths of human passions, a world desirous of reassuring certainty flocked to his vision.#5880•
As in politics, the factor determining the longevity and popularity of these notions was not their veracity but the energy and wit devoted to promoting them.#5879•
First, a curious correlation has prevailed between scientific rigor and coldness: the more factually grounded a model of the mind, the more alienating. Behaviorism was the first example: brandishing empiricism at every turn, it was thoroughly discomfiting in its refusal to acknowledge such staples of human life as thought or desire.
Cognitive psychology bristled with boxes and arrows linking perception to action and had nothing to say about the unthinking center of self that people most cherish.
Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind's Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage—including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.#5870•
Modern neuroscience has been equally culpable of propagating an unappealing and soulless reductionism. If the psychoanalysts spun an intangible castle in the air for humanity to inhabit, neuroscience has delivered a concrete hovel. Is every mood or manner best understood as the outcome of molecular billiard balls caroming around the cranium? When emotional problems arise, is a steady diet of Ritalin for children and Prozac for adults to be our only national response? If a woman loses her husband and becomes depressed, does her sorrow signify, or is she just a case of chemistry gone awry? Science is a newcomer to the business of defining human nature, but thus far it has remained inimical to humanism.
Seekers of meaning are turned away at the door.#5836•
If empiricism is barren and incomplete, while impressionistic guesswork leads anywhere and everywhere, what hope can there be for arriving at a workable understanding of the human heart? In the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there can be no science without fancy and no art without facts. Love emanates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry.
But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly.
In spite of what science teaches, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind.
To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism and baseless credulity, one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable.
Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.#5831•