A Trilogy of Books
“Reason,” pronounced David Hume in 1738, is “the slave of the passions.” Over a century later, Vincent van Gogh, riding the roller-coaster moods of manic-depression, readily agreed. “Emotions are the captains of our lives,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, in 1889. It remains so today. The capacity for emotion is wired into the old human brain, a pre-verbal means of communication expressed through the muscles of the face. As Darwin described in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, it’s an ability we share with other social creatures, including the family dog. But also, unique among the animals, the human brain is endowed with an extraordinary capacity for reason. We are Homo sapiens – the wise ones. Thus to fathom why we humans behave as we do it is critical to understand both emotion and reason, how and why these qualities of mind are shaped by experience and culture, and how they meld and compete in life to determine our temperament, our habits, and the choices we make.
This, in a nutshell, is what this trilogy of books is about. I begin, with A Mood Apart, by exploring those disorders of mood that magnify the emotional swings that we all experience. These are the “afflictions of the self” that increasingly touch us all, disturbing the essential barometer of everyday life. Through the personal stories of those who have suffered I explain how our brains “work” and our lives “feel” in illness and in recovery, illustrating how reason and emotion shape who we are.
In modern times mood disorder is increasingly prevalent across the world, among both rich and poor nations. Furthermore, despite its great material wealth, the United States is a leader with its citizens suffering epidemic rates of stress, obesity, anxiety and depression. While exhibiting an astonishing appetite for the material life many Americans feel overworked and dissatisfied. Three decades of increasing national wealth has not equated with increased well-being. In American Mania I ask why this should be. Why is more not enough? What role does the migrant temperament play in the creation of America’s laissez-faire, competitive, free-market culture where only more is better? Is human biology equipped to cope with the demands of the 24/7, information-saturated, global, and time-starved culture that we have created for ourselves and now have come to crave, to the detriment of our health and that of the ecology that supports us?
In the face of the seductive opportunities of the consumer society is passion again outrunning reason? Have we lost the capacity for self-command and with it a balanced understanding of ourselves? In the last of the trilogy, The Well-Tuned Brain, I seek to answer these questions and construct a sustainable way forward. Exploring from the perspective of behavioral neuroscience, I first ask who we are? How in the brain are our habits formed and our choices made? There follows the obvious question, based upon this new understanding, of determining “how best to live”. How may we better balance emotion and reason in our individual lives and to the common good? Why are we so fascinated by technology and market competition? What has driven our transition from citizen to consumer? Careful analysis suggests that distracted and confused by the time-starved, demand driven frenzy that serves as modern existence there is much that we have forgotten about ourselves, about the extraordinary human capacity for love and trust, for creating habitat and growing healthy foods, for imagination, artistry, and the accumulation of wisdom. In short, we have lost touch with those qualities that sustain our humanity and are the signature behaviors of our success as a species.
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