But he was there, on Hawthorne, today. Embodying a nonsequitur. Playing. I thank him for adding random cross connections to my neural networks, for jolting me out of the ordinary and into the realm of possibility. Thanks also to the authors of A General Theory of Love, for their excellent storytelling, and to Oliver Sachs whose book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is firing many of the brain cells I have left, and in new combinations. Thank you.
In A General Theory of Love they write of attractors, those being the sets of neurons that have been fired together often enough to get wired together. In the limbic system, the mammalian brain which forms attachments and is so rich with emotion, we form limbic attractors as infants that influence our relationship choices for life. This quote captures some of what I am learning from experience in life:
QotD: The reach of limbic Attrators stretches beyond the moment. The sine qua non of a neural network is its penchant for strengthening neuronal patterns in direct proportion to their use. The more often you do or think or imagine a thing, the more probable it is that your mind will revisit its prior stopping point. When the circuits are sufficiently well worn such that thoughts fly down them with little friction or resistance, that mental path has become a part of you--it is now a habit of speech, thought, action, attitude. Ongoing exposure to one person's Attractors does not merely activate neural patterns in another--it also strengthens them. Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book. pages 143-144.