Limbic Quotes & Sayings

The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Because loving is reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other's emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been fought off in the fortified state of togetherness. (208) — Thomas Lewis

There are cognitive processes and limbic reactions associated with basic emotions. And you can change brain chemistry, but you're still not going to change memories and experiences in a human being. — Helen Fisher

New research shows that emotions have a separate system of nerve pathways, through the limbic system to the cortex, allowing emotional signals to avoid conscious control. — Robert E. Ornstein

You never want one thing at any given moment of life. Your mind always comes up with at least two choices. If your limbic system wins, the choice you make seems to be pleasurable at first but in the long run ends up being the wrong one. And if your prefrontal cortex wins the choice you make may appear rough at first, but in the long run it turns out to be the right one. — Abhijit Naskar

Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger. — Nancy Gibbs

Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close. — Peter Landesman

Even after a peak parenting experience, children never transition to a fully self-tuning physiology. Adults remain social animals: they continue to require a source of stabilization outside themselves. That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own - not should or shouldn't be, but can't be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. (86) — Thomas Lewis

The heart is a muscle. You 'know' in your limbic system. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes it buy things. — William Gibson

Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love. Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationship today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it. (177) — Thomas Lewis

evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging showing that patients with BPD have hyperactivity in the limbic areas of the brain, especially the amygdala, and hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex [and] in complex interaction with childhood trauma common among borderline patients, can result in the . . . behavior recognized as the symptoms of BPD: impulsive aggression, lack of affective control, and a profound mistrust born out of early disruption in the development of emotional attachment.8 Obviously, psychological theories for BPD — Cathy Wiseman

Become loving and become courageous. Become the inspiration which you seek outside. Bring the metaphorical heart of your limbic system in sync with the analytical powerhouse of the prefrontal cortex. From your mind shall rise the inspiration. From your mind shall rise the love. From your mind shall rise the greatest education of all. — Abhijit Naskar

The brevity of mini (psycho)therapies is another efficient forestaller of healing. The neocortex rapidly master didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. (189) — Thomas Lewis

Our limbic system sets the mind's emotional tone and stores our highly charged emotional memories. — Tian Dayton

Given that the limbic area shapes how we appraise the meaning of events, knowing the hand model and seeing the limbic area's distinct location from the higher areas of the cortex can help us realize that sometimes a "feeling" is indeed not a fact. — Daniel J. Siegel

Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots. — Jonathan Nolan

A recent invention, vocal language may date back only ca. 200,000 years. As human primates, we have not fully come to grips with the prolonged, face-to-face closeness required for speech. Speaking to a stranger, e.g., stresses our autonomic nervous system's sympathetic (i.e., fight-or-flight) division, which a. speeds our heartbeat, b. dilates our pupils, and c. cools and moistens our hands. The limbic brain's hypothalamus instructs the pituitary gland to release hormones into the circulatory system, arousing our blood, sweat, and fears. — David B. Givens

[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out More! More! Give me more! — Daniel J. Levitin

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.
Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.
Feeling is frightening. — Jeanette Winterson

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of "contact," of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system's emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict. — Michael Shermer

Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us? — Carl Sagan

I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, ... But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, but a deeper terror. I don't want to be left alone. And I am ready to defend Ossie against whatever monster I encounter, ... and save her for myself. — Karen Russell

If you are a parent, teacher, camp counselor, or school resource officer and you see children severely change or restrain their arm behavior around their parents or other adults, at a minimum it should arouse your interest and promote further observation. Cessation of arm movement is part of the limbic system's freeze response. To the abused child, this adaptive behavior can mean survival. — Joe Navarro

When you say to someone "follow your heart", it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain. — Abhijit Naskar

The trouble is that everybody, myself included, has a brain in which the centers concerned with reason and logic are sitting on top of the socalled limbic system which we inherited from our reptilian ancestors and which never evolved past crude instincts and emotions. And that is why we have not yet arrived at the sate of homo sapiens. — Paul Watzlawick

Because cells are surrounded with a lipid membrane, essential oils are attracted to and able to penetrate the cell membrane to deliver nutrients to the cell nucleus.[103],[104],[105],[106],[107] This suggests that essential oils can affect cell function and behavior, thus influencing overall well-being. At the same time, the aroma of the essential oil that is inhaled travels to the limbic system where a cascade of psychophysiological effects is triggered in response. — Scott A. Johnson

The elementary self system in the brain stem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal. To people who are reliving a trauma, nothing makes sense; they are trapped in a life-or-death situation, a state of paralyzing fear or blind rage. Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Fear and Love are the two emotional pillars of survival. — Abhijit Naskar

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself. — Ann Patchett

The sentiment indicators that we will examine later prove that market participants herd. By definition, herding means that the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system, is in charge. Remember, this is the same part of the brain that controls fighting and the emotion of love. Do you ever think rationally when it comes to fighting or love? Similarly, the neocortex (rational thought) is subservient in financial speculation. Therefore, the study of sentiment indicators, or the study of crowds, is more important than the study of economic indicators, if you wish to make money trading. The — Jamie Saettele

The parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more "calculating" part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year's resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused. — Abhijit V. Banerjee

People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it doesn't count for much in the neural systems that evolved before understanding existed. Ideas bounce like so many peas off the sturdy incomprehension of the limbic and reptilian brains. The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, prevents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. The sheer volume and variety of self-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it. (118) — Thomas Lewis

The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us. — Walter Mischel

the worry habit is reinforcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since people worry about many things that have a very low probability of actually occurring - a loved one dying in a plane crash, going bankrupt, and the like - there is, to the primitive limbic brain at least, something magical about it. Like an amulet that wards off some anticipated evil, the worry psychologically gets the credit for preventing the danger it obsesses about. The — Daniel Goleman

Once in a while dancing is immaculate, a perfection: you understand why raves exist: when you've timed the drinks correctly and they lift your mood and your energy, the songs are ones you all know, and you look around at the girls, their happy lost faces, their beautiful bare stomachs, their jangly long earrings, something limbic, their skin just damp with sweat to the touch, the whole thing ... — Charles Finch

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots ... but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement. — Jeanette Winterson

(When we force a smile, we activate facial muscles with our prefrontal cortex. But when we smile because we are in a good mood, our nerves are controlled by our limbic system, which activates a slightly different set of muscles. Our brains can tell the subtle difference between the two, which was beneficial for our evolution.) — Michio Kaku

I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support. — Neal Stephenson

In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love. — Thomas Lewis

I function as an asterisk in the limbic system. — S. Kelley Harrell

Why are we so addicted to social media?
Because, our limbic system is craving for rewards, pleasure, acceptance and expansion through mind. — Saurabh Sharma

Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life. — Carol Muske-Dukes

It is interesting to note that although our limbic system functions throughout our lifetime, it does not mature. As a result, when our emotional "buttons" are pushed, we retain the ability to react as though we were a two year old, even when we are adults. As our higher cortical cells mature and become integrated in complex networks with other neurons, we gain the ability to take "new pictures" of the present moment. When we compare the new information of our thinking mind with the automatic reactivity of our limbic mind, we can reevaluate the current situation and purposely choose a more mature response. — Jill Bolte Taylor

I have sympathy for any human being that's driven by their limbic part of their brain. We all know that exists in a person. — Dennis Miller

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world. — Jasper Fforde

The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years. — Robin Marantz Henig

Following a trauma at any age, there's a reduction in the number of neural pathways between the limbic system (pertaining to feelings) and the cortex system (managing thought and cognition). So after being traumatized, you're less aware of your feelings. — Doreen Virtue

The limbic connectedness of a working psychotherapy requires uncommon courage. A patient asks to surrender the life he knows and to enter and emotional world he has never seen; he offers himself up to be changed in ways he can't possibly envision. As his assurance of successful transmutation he has only the gossamer of faith. At the journey's end, he will no longer be who he was, and his guide is someone he has every reason to mistrust ... only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen. (190) — Thomas Lewis

The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187) — Thomas Lewis

.. although there are certain limbic system (emotional) programs that can be triggered automatically, it takes less then 90 seconds for one of these programs to be triggered, surge through our body, and then be completely flushed out of our bloodstream... within 90 seconds from initial trigger, the chemical components of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. — Jill Bolte Taylor

You'll feel afraid at times. You'll feel weak at times. But remember, fear and weakness are not your enemies. They are forms of evolutionary wisdom in the face of danger. Take some time to assess the situation and shake the weakness and fear off your limbic system. — Abhijit Naskar