Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Steven Lesk M.D.

Quote by Steven Lesk M.D.

Work

Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Steven Lesk M.D.

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Steven Lesk M.D.. more

You May Also Like

“It makes sense to pay heed to our past even though the demands we place on our bodies (and minds) are now vastly different. We are still in the midst of the course correction that's happening all around us, but we don't see it. We do notice it when things screw up the process. Illnesses can be considered evolutionary misfires if they do not meet the criteria of Darwin's rules regarding genetic principles that usually lead to extinction.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image

“Out of chaos comes order. And order is supplied by the ego with the help of dopamine suppression in the context of our spiffy new operating system. When order is lost, the chaos of entropy -which lurks behind this process, seeking disorganization and lower energy states - again reigns. All of this goes along with dopamine de-suppression as the fulcrum of organized thinking painfully reverses.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image

“At some point in our infancy, we draw a curtain across this terrorizing mental state and put it behind us. Freud called this infantile amnesia, and it was said to happen around age five. We forget the gruesome terror and brutality of that drama. Civilization is based on pushing it aside, perhaps delusionally, to create acquiescent civility. When we regress to psychosis, that door is opened up again and often reveals feelings that have been submerged since infancy: the door to the psychotic id. Is civilization based on a delusion of safety? Perhaps, or possibly just the need to maintain a sense of security that promulgates itself, in fragile pose, like a ballerina en pointe too long. The maintenance of this civilized state of calm has much to do with the suppression of dopamine.”

MindLanguageEvolutionCivilizationHorrorTerrorEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image

“We are no longer in that primitive state of mind. We have an expectation of survival and have conquered most of the obvious predators that plagued us day to day with our superlative contemplation skills born of language. We sit in our comfy heated houses while the snow flutters like butterflies around us and we bask in a feeling of general contentment.”

MindPsychologyEvolutionBehaviorDopamineEvolutionary Psychopathology
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image

“The definition of meditation is to learn to live in freedom. Meditation means to break all chains and destroy all walls that surround you. Meditation is to come out of the prison of the mind into the open sky of the heart. The heart is capable of knowing freedom. To be free one has to move from the mind to the heart. Living in the heart you learn the ABC of freedom. You go beyond the boundaries step by step, and you taste the beauty of freedom.”

MindHeartTruthFreedomMeditationEgo
Book:Man is Part of the Whole: Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Compassion, Freedom and Grace
Create image

“Our minds have advanced from the brutal, terrified, survivalist ethos of Mr. Caveman to the secure plateau of modern-day living. We now expect to survive into our eighties or beyond, to not endure brutal conditions, and to be able to negotiate a society that provides pathways toward success and even happiness, which is one reason I assert that happiness is a modern invention. It is when societies begin to break clown and fail in their promises that we begin to question this exchange.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisHomo SapiensSchizophreniaNeanderthalAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image

“I assume, that the rules changed after language's fortuitous appearance. Natural selection's decision was a no-brainer so to speak. The brain of modern sapiens with their more intense cognitivity, hierarchically structured mind, and conceptual consciousness trumped Mr. Neanderthal's primitive brutality. Homo sapiens proved that. But the primitive organization's old ways are still trying to recapture territory, the territory between our ears.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisHomo SapiensSchizophreniaNeanderthalAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image

“This book forwards the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a product of very recent evolutionary events. Although humans, or something like them, have been around for some six million years, language has been extant for a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years. The onset of language was afforded by skyrocketing advances in brain development, the central nervous system ballooning incrementally over eons of time to the point where the fetus's little head could barely navigate Momma's birth canal. The Horno sapiens brain profited from a unique folding of the cerebral cortex, allowing for greater speed and a sly adeptness at symbol formation that led to speech.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisHomo SapiensSchizophreniaNeanderthalAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
Create image