Feeling alive

Our society underplays the importance of emotions. Having allied itself with the neocortical brain, our culture promotes analysis over intuition, logic above feeling. Cognition can yield riches, and human intellect has made our lives easier in ways that range from indoor plumbing to the Internet. But even as it reaps the benefits of reason, modern America plows emotions under - a costly practice that obstructs happiness and misleads people about the nature and significance of their lives.

That deliberate imbalance is more damaging than one might suppose. Beyond the variegated sensations and the helpful motivations, science has discovered emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the content's of each other's minds. Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another. For human beings, feeling deeply is synonymous with being alive.

- Thomas Lewis, MD, Fari Amini, MD, Richard Lannon, MD - A General Theory of Love