All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
Interpretation
Human emotions and thoughts are deeply connected to our brain's organic functioning.
This quote highlights the idea that all human experiences, whether they be emotions like happiness and sadness or cognitive processes like problem-solving and creativity, are rooted in the brain's organic states. It suggests that our mental states are dynamic and constantly evolving, influenced by the biological and neurological processes within us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a psychology class to discuss the relationship between brain states and emotions.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.
Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.
A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that thatβs a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isnβt insane. We are only doing philosophy.
...let us recognize that extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere. Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights. For the first time in history, in this age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, we have the power to save humanity from this shameful scourge. Let us summon the will to do it.
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