"It’s the leftover humans. The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off of them, but now and again, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling along the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair and surprise. The have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs."

"They were like people who run to meet holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong, they passed each other and kept running."

"Ever heard of chaos theory?
It’s a science, tries to determine underlying patterns in chaotic systems like weather, ocean currents, blood flow sort of things. But it turns out that are few things more chaotic than the beat of a human heart.
Its beating up, slowing down. Pretty face, flirty stares.
It’s always changing on what’s happening to ourselves out there.
It’s an erratic son of a bitch. But underneath all of that bump-da-bump mess, there is in fact a pattern, the truth, and it’s love.
Most important thing about love is that we choose to give it, and we choose to receive it.
Making it the least random act in the entire universe.
It transcends blood, it transcends betrayal and all the dirt and makes us human."

Good Connection Really Does Lead to Mind Meld (Wired) ↘

psychotherapy:

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

 

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronization is a result of that connection, not its cause. And while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear. But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

The researchers didn’t test brain synchronization during phone calls or video conferencing, but Hasson speculates that “coupling would be stronger face-to-face.” He also thinks dialogue will produce especially strong forms of synchronization, and plans to run scans of people engaged in deep conversation, rather than telling or listening to long stories.

“But first, we’ll look at cases where there’s a failure to communicate,” said Hasson.

"Haven’t you got any romance in your soul?” said Magrat plaintively.
“No,” said Granny. “I ain’t. And stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference."