Human behavior

I have over a decade’s worth of eating disorder experience at this point. There were the anorexic years, the binge-eating ones, and the current bulimic ones. The more experience I’ve got, the more I recognize that the body is hardly a reliable reflection of what’s going on inside it.

the gift of desperation compels us to move forward. Without fire in our lives, we sometimes don’t have the internal combustion necessary to change and take risks. We get too comfortable being comfortable—even

Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy.

“The child says: ‘When I am a big boy.’ But what is that? The big boy says, ‘When I grow up.’ And then, grown up, he says: ‘When I get married.’ But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to ‘When I’m able to retire.’ And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it;

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

for example, a depressed brain will show up in cold, brain-inactive deep blues, dark purples, and hunter greens; the same brain when hypomanic, however, is lit up like a Christmas tree, with vivid patches of bright reds and yellows and oranges. Never has the color and structure of science so completely captured the cold inward deadness of