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Cerebrum...While there are many ways to enjoy the possession of a cerebrum, we can only achieve maturity by forcing upon it management of the conflicting impulses of our brain stem and limbic system. The processes that allow us to focus our cerebral capacities must be extended to the brain stem and the limbic system. We need to learn to control our emotions. This is hard. It is really hard. It may be impossibly hard for the population as a whole. Our emotions - and particularly the emotions of the brain stem - are triggered by primitive wiring that couples directly to the rest of our anatomy. That coupling tends to reinforce our emotionality by flooding the body with hormones to establish modes of operation that are normally suppressed because they exhaust our physiological resources. Achieving emotional control happens in three threads. First, we must train our minds to avoid magical thinking, which indulges the emotions. This means exercising and developing the capacities of the cerebrum that allow us to plan and construct successful experiences. In parallel, we must learn to frustrate our hormonal responses. Vicarious experience is a good place to start: go to movies, read books, and lean on a caring shoulder. In such a threat-free environment, allow your emotions to run free, and practice curtailing your physiological responses. When you've succeeded in that, turn back on the ones you enjoy! Finally, we need to learn to manage our emotions. This means using memories and dreams to marshal emotional energy, and making certain the cerebrum applies bounding conditions (Don't cry! Don't hit him! Don't back down!) when faced with sudden surprises. To repeat: this is hard. The names we give to emotions trivialize the complexity of our responses, which are better likened to musical cords of varied harmony or discord. This imprecision makes it difficult for us to communicate meaningfully about our emotional existence, and therefore to learn from each other's experience. Furthermore, when we learn to control our emotions, we have access to an entirely different range of states, characterized by the ambiguous "ecstasy", "transport", and "ineffability". We may simply not have words adequate to describe those relatively inaccessible modes of experience. |
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