Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors —as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise. For example, Disney calls its employees “cast members.” This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization:

• Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.

• When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.

• People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.

• Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes.

In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

Interestingly, one of its core postulates is that the essential sociality of us all, or the universal human impulse to relate to others. In so far as we are relationship-seeking beings, then, what is the connective tissue that actually binds people together, that gives effect to this relational striving? In contrast to the popular belief that knowledge precedes action, I argue that emotions are what prompt and sustain human interactions - and not emotions in the conventional sense, of private feeling states stored inside our heads, each with its own unique biochemical correlate. I regard emotions, instead, as intersubjective phenomena that can be said to exist between people. How else does one explain being moved by a piece of music, a spellbinding movie or a superb novel, if not that some mysterious element - an emotion - has connected to the heart of the composer, the director or the author to the heart of the listener, the watcher or the reader?

Most important is that feelings are so interwoven with thinking that to allow one and not the other is to diminish both. We can listen to words and we can listen to tears. It is all the same thing. I know that at the moment the world of brain talk is full of the separation of these two systems. But that will pass soon enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is everything all at once. Even space is stuff that hugs us. Life is one lavish act of touching. Thinking and feeling are no exceptions. So we can rejoice.

And when someone is thinking along and starts to cry, let’s just be glad they felt psychologically safe enough with us to do that. And then watch the fresh thinking that follows. And the bright eyes that say so.

When you listen to strong, melancholic music or contemplate a sad piece of art, you are taking your attention beyond mere sensation to the interior meaning of your mood. You are educating yourself in your emotion, so that you not only get past it ultimately, but you gain from it from having penetrated deep into its nature.