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" The computer model will be replaced by an organic model, in which the brain-mind is embodied - part of a whole, dynamic, living organism: one driven by emotional forces, not only cognitive ones. "

Siri Hustvedt

Living

Only

Will

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" I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly. "

Siri Hustvedt

Support

Writing

" I have not been diagnosed with epilepsy. I did have an MRI of the brain, and they found no abnormalities in my brain. Now, there are people with epilepsy who have completely normal MRI's, too. I just think also, you know, epileptic seizures can be triggered by emotional stress, by all kinds of things, lights. "

" While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.' "

" There are no rules in art. "

" I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive. "

" Both depression and anxiety disorders, for example, are repeatedly described in the media as 'chemical imbalances in the brain,' as if spontaneous neural events with no relation to anything outside a person's brain cause depression and anxiety. "

" I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom. "

" Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow. "

" My parents were gigantic influences on me. I had a deep hunger to impress my father, who was a professor and an intellectual. I wanted his approval. "

" The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences. "

" As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young. "

" My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families. "

" I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that. "

" If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York. "

" Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions. "

" Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both. "

" Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business. "

" I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location. "

" With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career. "

" Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation. "

" I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject. "

Siri Hustvedt

Physician

Interested

" The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine. "

" Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves? "

" It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant. "

" Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself. "

" Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial. "

" Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon. "

" I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash. "

Siri Hustvedt

Personality

High

" When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from. "

" There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help. "