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Lights and shadows continually flit across the inward sky of our minds, and we often know neither where they come from nor where they go. In a notebook entry from a spring day in 1840, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that he neither inquired too closely into these internal phenomena nor sought to interpret them with earthly language. He believed it was dangerous to examine such fleeting feelings with excessive scrutiny, for doing so might transform a shadow into a rigid, solid substance. Instead, Hawthorne argued that one should wait for the soul to make itself understood naturally. A century later, the French philosopher Simone Weil, who possessed uncommon insight into the depths of the human soul, contemplated a similar paradox regarding friendship. She observed that it is a fault to wish to be understood by others before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.
For one consciousness to truly understand another—to grasp exactly what it is like to be someone else—represents the supreme challenge of communication and coexistence. This difficulty exists because we move through life being only half-opaque to ourselves. We aim our analytical mind, that magnificent instrument that took millennia to evolve, at this opacity. However, the lens of self-understanding is obscured by something far more primeval: emotion smudges the eyepiece of life. We often do not even realize this is happening. Emotion changes what we see, making us react not to what is actually present, but to what we perceive through a distorted lens. Anyone with moderate self-awareness can relate to the experience of having an irritable, indignant, or melancholy mood descend upon them seemingly out of the blue. In reality, these moods coalesce out of an invisible and pervasive atmosphere of unprocessed feeling. Who among us has not, in a human moment, aimed a flash of fury at the wrong person for the wrong thing because something entirely else is filling the sky of the mind with its charged nimbus of wrongness.
The reason why emotion so easily clouds the lens of experience is explored by a trio of psychiatrists: Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, throughout their book A General Theory of Love. This public library-recommended work is a revelatory inquiry into the neurological nature and psychological nurture of why we feel what we feel and how this shapes who we become. In a long life of reading, it remains the single most illuminating inquiry into the subject. Drawing an analogy to music—which might be so elemental to our sense of aliveness because it shares a fundamental neuropsychological mechanism with emotion—Lewis, Amini, and Lannon examine the composition of feeling out of neural notation. They illuminate the interdependence of, and the difference between, emotion and mood. They explain that emotions possess the evanescence of a musical note. When a pianist strikes a key, a hammer collides with the matching string inside the instrument and sets it to vibrating at its characteristic frequency. As the amplitude of vibration declines, the sound falls off and dies away. Emotions operate in an analogous way: an event touches a responsive key, an internal feeling-tone is sounded, and it soon dwindles into silence. The figures of speech "pluck at one's heartstrings" and "strikes a chord in me" have found a home in our language for just this reason. Rising activity in the emotion circuits produces not sound, but, among other things, a facial expression. When the neural excitation exceeds a shadowy threshold of awareness, what emerges is a feeling—the conscious experience of emotional activation. As neural activity diminishes, feeling intensity decreases, but some residual activity persists in those circuits even after a feeling is no longer perceptible. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, an emotion appears suddenly in the drama of our lives to nudge the players in the proper direction, and then dissolves into nothingness, leaving behind a vague impression of its former presence.
Against this haunted backdrop of feeling, the dance of mood plays out, twirling us into tumult with its persuasive percussion. The authors explain that moods exist because of the musical aspect of an emotion's neural activity, specifically the lower portion that is imperceptible to our conscious ears. A mood is a state of enhanced readiness to experience a certain emotion. Where an emotion is a single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, a mood is the extended, nearly inaudible echo that follows. Consciousness registers a fading level of activation in the emotion circuits faintly or not at all. So, the provocative events of the day may leave us with emotional responsiveness waiting beneath our notice. Since the neural activation that creates a given emotion decreases gradually, provoking it again is easier within the window of the mood. A musical tone makes physical objects vibrate at its frequency, a phenomenon of sympathetic reverberation. A soprano can break a wineglass with the right note as she makes unbending glass quiver along with her voice. Emotional tones in the brain establish a living harmony with the past in a similar way. The brain is not composed of string, and there are no oscillating fibers within the cranium. But in the nervous system, information echoes down the filaments that join harmonious neural networks. When an emotional chord is struck, it stirs to life past memories of the same feeling. A particular emotion revives all memories of its prior instantiations. Every feeling, after the first, is a multilayered experience, only partly reflecting the present, sensory world.
Over the sweep of time, our lived experience rewires the brain, generating a forceful momentum of emotional habit. What we have felt comes to shape what we most easily and readily feel, unstringing the harp of reality. We come to perceive the world not as it is, but as we are. At the heart of this reality-discord are what Lewis, Amini, and Lannon term Limbic Attractors. These are pre-conditioned patterns of interpretation of incoming sensory data, densely networked and deeply ingrained in the limbic brain. They are activated so reflexively and powerfully that they can obscure and overwhelm the raw signal of reality. Limbic Attractors are the source of the blindness that makes us so opaque to ourselves. Yet, they are also a portal to transcending our own limitations by linking up to other minds that are sympathetic and sonorous with different feeling-tones. Through such mutual harmonics—nowhere more powerful than in the limbic linkage we call love—we can recompose our own patterned soundtrack of emotion. The authors write: "Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. Our minds are burdened by an informational inertia whose headlong course is not easy to slow." No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought itself. However, because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is part of a local network that shares information, including Attractors. Through the limbic transmission of an Attractor's influence, one person can lure others into his emotional virtuality. All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.
In any such binary star system, this limbic resonance allows two people to harmonize their Attractors. They can fine-tune the respective musical tones that most easily flow from each consciousness. This brings to mind Pythagoras's music of the spheres and Kepler's celestial harmonics, right here on Earth, in the infinite universe of the human heart. 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. It is the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love. As our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love. Through the deep connections of love, we do not merely share feelings; we actively reshape the neural architecture of those we care for. The emotional history stored in the limbic system is not a fixed record but a dynamic field that responds to the resonance of another's presence. When we enter a relationship, we bring our own histories, our own Attractors, and our own unresolved moods. These are the shadows that Hawthorne spoke of. Yet, when we encounter a partner whose internal rhythms can harmonize with ours, or even gently challenge our dissonant tones, a transformation occurs. The brain, in its desire for connection, begins to rewire. New pathways form, and old, rigid patterns of reaction soften. The "informational inertia" that once trapped us in repetitive cycles of anger or fear begins to shift. We learn to see the world through the eyes of someone who offers a different, often more peaceful, perspective. This is the true magic of the human heart: the ability to rewrite the past by living in the present with another. The music of our lives, once a lonely or chaotic solo, becomes a duet, a complex and beautiful composition where two distinct melodies support and enhance one another. In this shared space, the lights and shadows of the inward sky are no longer mysterious forces beyond our control, but notes that we can play together to create a new song.