The Wire React Quotes

It was actually pretty common for women not to scream or call the cops in rape cases I prosecuted,” Roe said, “at least partly because women aren’t wired to react that way. We are socialized to be likeable and not to create friction. We are brought up to be nice. Women are supposed to resolve problems without making a scene—to make bad things go away as if they never happened.

Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things. We can’t just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.

That’s why in every scene you write, the protagonist must react in a way the reader can see and understand in the moment. This reaction must be specific, personal, and have an effect on whether the protagonist achieves her goal. What it can’t be is dispassionate objective commentary.

Biological instincts are the key to understanding how every single human being is wired. The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life. If you’re conscious about the fact that there lies a complex yet vividly beautiful brain circuit mechanism behind every single impulse of your daily emotions, then you can choose how to react upon each of those impulses. You can thus program your behavioral response in a certain situation.

Therefore, reading and reacting to other people’s behaviors, emotions, and attitudes have been hardwired into our brains. We are not only wired to connect, but we are also wired to attune to, resonate with, and learn from others.

And the best preparation for writing any story is to know with clarity what your protagonists’ worldview is, and more to the point, where and why it’s off base. Thus you have a clear view of the world as your protagonist sees it and insight into how she therefore interprets, and reacts to, everything that happens to her. It’s what allows you to construct a plot that forces her to reevaluate what she was so damn sure was true when the story began. That is what your story is really about, and what readers stay up long past their bedtime to find out.

• What does the story tell us about what it means to be human? • What does it say about how humans react to circumstances beyond their control?

One of the cornerstones of Keltner’s research, which he summarized in his book Born to Be Good, is what he calls “the compassionate instinct”—the idea that we humans are wired to respond to each other’s troubles with care. Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe.

The most-studied evidence, by the greatest number of economists, concerns what is called short-term dependence. This refers to the way price levels or price changes at one moment can influence those shortly afterwards-an hour, a day, or a few years, depending on what you consider "short." A "momentum" effect is at work, some economists theorize: Once a stock price starts climbing, the odds are slightly in favor of it continuing to climb for a while longer. For instance, in 1991 Campbell Harvey of Duke- he of the CFO study mentioned earlier-studied stock exchanges in sixteen of the world's largest economies. He found that if an index fell in one month, it had slightly greater odds of falling again in the next moth, or, if it had risen, greater odds of continuing to rise. Indeed, the data show, the sharper the move in the first, the more likely is is that the price trend will continue into the next month, although at a slower rate. Several other studies have found similar short-term trending in stock prices. When major news about a company hits the wires, the stock will react promptly-but it may keep on moving for the next few days as the news spreads, analysts study it, and more investors start to act upon it.

When we lose our fucking minds on a regular basis, we are wiring our brains into a constantly heightened state that eventually fries our circuits (and pushes away everyone we love in the process). We program ourselves to always be on the alert. So we react with far greater speed than we used to, and perceive more situations as being dangerous, hostile, or threatening. We are constantly jumping at shadows. Our brains never get to rest and recharge and we start struggling with many other conditions associated with this wiring change. Added up, those conditions are known as autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Many common health problems (heart disease, high blood pressure, food allergies) as well as many common mental health issues (depression, anxiety, PTSD) are related to a continued heightened response.

The Cycle of Addiction (What Keeps Us Stuck) The cycle of addiction, the second part of the Two-Part Problem, is a response to what’s happening at the root—that brings with it its own set of problems. Addiction is essentially a symptom of those root issues that becomes its own “disease”—when we use any substance or behavior to manage our underlying pain, and use it repeatedly, we enter into a cycle, or a feedback loop. To understand what the cycle of addiction is, or in the case of alcohol what would be classified as Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), we need to look at how alcohol dependence is formed. When we consume alcohol, our body reacts to the substance by releasing artificially high levels of dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemical of wanting and motivation, and it lives in the midbrain—the part of our brain that is tasked with ensuring our survival. Typically, our midbrain releases dopamine when we encounter something that keeps us alive or that aids in procreation, like when we eat a piece of chocolate or have good sex. Dopamine is released in order to tell our brain that some activity or substance is good for survival, and the higher the levels of dopamine that are released, the more we are programmed to repeat the activity. When dopamine floods into the brain, it sends a signal that the activity is good for survival, and in order to make sure we repeat the behavior, our brain releases another neurochemical called glutamate to lock in the memory of the event, so that we are wired to do it again.

fiercely loyal to the people they love and trust. They will go through leaps and bounds for the other person to make them feel loved and content. Empaths can spread joy and happiness. This can infect the people that they are surrounded by. Being in a loving relationship will exponentially increase this sense of joy which in turn will spread to their partners. Empaths extremely genuine about what they say and do. Being wired to sense feelings and thoughts make them that way. Because of this, empaths love unconditionally and understand the needs of their partners. Empathic people have empathy! Instead of being angry and reacting, they will try to understand, this makes them far more loving and peaceful in nature. Empaths are natural optimists. It is a survival strategy against all the negativity of the world. Being with an empath means you will always get to see the brighter side of things. Empaths have the innate ability to inspire others and change the world. They can affect positive change the partners that they are in a relationship with. Empaths are so in tune with emotions and feelings. Because of that, they are honest and open about them. This gives an empath’s partner security in knowing where they stand. An empath will not play games with someone’s emotions and will always be kind and thoughtful. Empaths are creative because they are so in tune with the world. This makes them good at solving problems and finding solutions for people and situations. Empaths are able to connect with others on a much deeper level. They are so in tune with energies and feelings to the point where they are unable to distinguish it from their own. Being in a relationship with an empath will mean that you will always be understood. Once an empath falls in love with a person it will be unconditionally. They will accept all the failings as well as the merits of that person.

Since our brains are wired to make us emotional creatures, your first reaction to an event is always going to be an emotional one. You have no control over this part of the process. You do control the thoughts that follow an emotion, and you have a great deal of say in how you react to an emotion—as long as you are aware of it.

Imagine that you are in your house—no—you are locked in your house, cannot get out. It is the dead of winter. The drifted snow is higher than your windows, blocking the light of both moon and sun. Around the house, the wind moans, night and day. Now imagine that even though you have plenty of electric lights, and perfectly good central heating, you are almost always in the dark and quite cold, because something is wrong with the old-fashioned fuse box in the basement. Inside this cobwebbed, innocuous-looking box, the fuses keep burning out, and on account of this small malfunction, all the power in the house repeatedly fails. You have replaced so many melted fuses that now your little bag of new ones is empty; there are no more. You sigh in frustration, and regard your frozen breath in the light of the flashlight. Your house, which could be so cozy, is tomblike instead. In all probability, there is something quirky in the antiquated fuse box; it has developed some kind of needless hair trigger, and is not really reacting to any dangerous electrical overload at all. Should you get some pennies out of your pocket, and use them to replace the burned-out fuses? That would solve the power-outage problem. No more shorts, not with copper coins in there. Using coins would scuttle the safeguard function of the fuse box, but the need for a safeguard right now is questionable, and the box is keeping you cold and in the dark for no good reason. Well, probably for no good reason. On the other hand, what if the wiring in the house really is overloaded somehow? A fire could result, probably will result eventually. If you do not find the fire soon enough, if you cannot manage to put the fire out, the whole house could go up, with you trapped inside. You know that death by burning is hideous. You know also that your mind is playing tricks, but thinking about fire, you almost imagine there is smoke in your nostrils right now. So, do you go back upstairs and sit endlessly in a dark living room, defeated, numb from the cold, though you have buried yourself under every blanket in the house? No light to read by, no music, just the wail and rattle of the icy wind outside? Or, in an attempt to feel more human, do you make things warm and comfortable? Is it wise to gamble with calamity and howling pain? If you turn the power back on, will you not smell nonexistent smoke every moment you are awake? And will you not have far too many of these waking moments, for how will you ever risk going to sleep? Do you sabotage the fuse box? I

Our children need repeated experiences that allow them to develop wiring in their brain that helps them delay gratification, contain urges to react aggressively toward others, and flexibly deal with not getting their way.

Humans going into altered states of consciousness all react the same way, no matter where they come from. It is part of the way the human brain is wired. There are three stages of altered consciousness that have been recognised by laboratory experiment (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989: 60–67). In the first stage, people see zig-zags, dots and whorls. In the second stage this develops into a deeper trance experience, and the subjects see and feel a world more familiar to them, and can hear water, experience thirst, etc. The third stage is the deepest, and people in deep trance talk about entering a hole in the ground and seeing ‘real world’ imagery of animals and people. These different stages have been recognised in the rock art: stage one with grids, zig-zags, mesh shapes (such as nets); stage two with nested ‘U’ shapes and buzzing (interpreted as beehives); stage three with snakes coming out of the rock face, people with animal heads, etc. This last stage accompanies visual images of trancers in the dance, which include the ‘bent-over posture’ assumed by the shaman when dancing, and bleeding from the nose, which would occur when the shaman was physically under stress when entering the spirit world (Figure 4.4). Interviews with shamans have reported that at the moment of the climax, the power shoots up the spine and out of the top of the head. This, among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of Nyae Nyae, is called kia (Katz 1982), as we have seen in Chapter 3.

It was clear that while ACEs might be a health crisis with a medical problem at its root, its effects ripple out far beyond our biology. Toxic stress affects how we learn, how we parent, how we react at home and at work, and what we create in our communities. It affects our children, our earning potential, and the very ideas we have about what we’re capable of. What starts out in the wiring of one brain cell to another ultimately affects all of the cells of our society, from our families to our schools to our workplaces to our jails.

But I was still watching Kip. I saw how he had frozen. How his hand, powder-dusted and taut, still gripped the door. When I reached him he still hadn’t moved. It took me a while to make out what he was staring at, particularly as Zoe, joining us, blocked out the last of the light from the doorway. When I did see what was inside, for a moment I didn’t understand why Kip had reacted like that. It looked innocuous at first: a cabinet mounted on the wall, its cover blasted or fallen off. From inside it, snaking out into the darkened room, was a mass of wires, their colors faded but still distinct: red, blue, yellow. Some were bundled together, others hung loose. It wasn’t a dramatic sight: just another piece of detritus from the unfamiliar world of the Before. That’s when I realized it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. I remembered the wires snaking along the wall above the tanks. Bundled together in places, elsewhere branching out like ungainly ivy. The wires, the cords, the tubes. And the scar in Kip’s wrist, perfectly round and still visible, where one of the tubes had entered his body.

trolling rhetoric is an extremely effective countertrolling strategy. This strategy—of actively trolling trolls—runs directly counter to the common imperative “don’t feed the trolls,” a statement predicated on the logic that trolls can only troll if their targets allow themselves to be trolled. Given that the fun of trolling inheres in the game of trolling—a game only the troll can win, and whose rules only the troll can modify—this is sound advice. If the target doesn’t react, then neither can the troll. But even this decision buys into the trolls’ game. The troll still sets the terms of their target’s engagement; the troll still controls the timeline and the outcome. The dynamic shifts considerably if the target counters with a second game, one that collapses the boundary between target and troll. In this new game, the troll can lose and, by taking umbrage at the possibility, falls victim to his or her own rigid rules. After all, it’s emotion—particularly frustration or distress—that trips the troll’s wire. In most cases, the troll’s shame over having lost, or merely the possibility that he or she could lose, will often send the troll searching for more exploitable pastures.

If you’ve never tested this, please do. Men react like Pavlov’s dog. I know I do. Our emotional wiring isn’t all that complicated. That’s exactly the problem for some women; they try to make it complicated when men are in fact pretty easy to steer once you know how.

Science and Scripture both show that we are wired for love and optimism[5] and so when we react by thinking negatively and making negative choices, the quality of our thinking suffers, which means the quality of our brain architecture suffers.

As a result, we are wired for a “negativity bias”—a tendency to react to negative stimuli more intensely than positive experiences. This is true even when we don’t face the same life-threatening scenarios. Our life-threatening situations come in the form of rumination, regret, and worry.

unlike a computer, the brain is controlling our every movement, breath, heartbeat, and blink of an eye, and even our every emotion. And all the while it’s taking in massive amounts of sensory information—nonstop. Your retina alone has over one hundred million cells constantly relaying visual information to your brain; in ultra-high definition I might add. If a computer had to monitor and manage your every bodily function and download, process, and react to this never-ending barrage of information, it would melt.

Since we’re hard-wired to experience emotions before we can respond to them, it’s the one-two punch of reading emotions effectively and then reacting to them that sets the best self-managers apart.

Lessons happen at every age, but twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Remember the 'uneven' twentysomething brain from a couple of chapters ago? The one in which the hot, reactive, emotional part of the brain is fully developed while the cool, rational frontal lobe where we counteract emotion with reason is still wiring up? That's the brain that twentysomethings take to work every day and this is why young workers like Danielle often respond emotionally, rather than rationally, when things at the office go wrong. … With age comes what is known as the ‘positivity effect.’ We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter.

Illness is a socially patterned behaviour, far more than people realize. How a person interprets and reacts to bodily changes depends... Personal and societal role modes create expectations of health... Our brains are wired through experience to respond in a certain way to certain provocation.

Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly and persistenly than to equivalent good things. We can't just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.

Our bodies are wired to react first; that’s why we fall victim to ads from Amazon and goodies from the grocery store, even if we know they’re not best for us long-term. In this way, our brain and our heart (really our executive functioning part of the brain and our reptilian brain) do compete when making decisions. Is there a simple fix for this? Not really, but there is a strategy: indulging in just a little bit of patience. That is, if you can delay your emotional decision—even for just a few minutes in some cases—it will allow you time to let your executive function process the information, weigh the options, and make the very best decision for you.

Ryan smiled, and my entire body reacted like the two were hard-wired to one another.

I don't really believe in fate. But I do believe certain things are hard-wired into our genes. We're programmed to act and react in a certain way, and that's what shapes our lives. We're incapable of changing it, just like our eye colour or propensity to freckle in the sun.

We are wired, as human beings, to react to stories of danger and to seek protection. We click on the story, which in turn sends a signal to the content provider that they have captured our eyeballs, and so they send us more of whatever we just clicked on. We click on those, too, and the provider sends us more. Soon, we are in an anxiety spiral of reading, clicking, finding more horror, clicking, reading again, and on and on, never realizing that the terrifying world we have entered is a chamber of horrors we built for ourselves, to our own precise specifications. And then, exhausted, we sit back and think: Our form of government cannot keep us safe. Democracy has failed us. We need something stronger.

Choices! You don’t get choices, you get…situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you’ve got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.’ You’re a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it’s got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don’t. You don’t have free will, sonny.” “Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—” “Bullshit. If—” The older Marrity was panting. “If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every ‘choice’ you’d make in any moral quandary.

In a neurological sense, you have your habit because of how you react to your own thoughts or urges. When you act on an urge, you strengthen the wiring of the habit in your brain.

childhood reprimands and swearing are the two categories of language that are most often retained, even after strokes that rob the sufferer of all other types of speech. In their study, Professors Catherine Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeği, and Jean Berko Gleason wired thirty-two native Turkish speakers to galvanic skin-response monitors. Importantly, none of these volunteers had learned English before the age of twelve, so all their tellings-off in childhood had been heard in Turkish. The scientists had them hear or read words that were neutral (e.g., “door”), positive (e.g., “joy”), negative (e.g., “disease”), taboo (e.g., “asshole”), and childhood scolds (e.g., “Don’t do that!” and “Go to your room!”). The scientists found that the volunteers didn’t react particularly strongly to the neutral, positive, or negative words, regardless of language. They reacted similarly strongly to the taboo words that they heard, regardless of whether they were in English or Turkish; their exposure to swearing in late adolescence had been enough to make English swearing an emotionally effective part of their language. However, the volunteers did respond very differently to the childhood reprimands depending on the language used. Even though the volunteers all understood the reprimands, their skin conductivity remained low—they showed no stress—when they heard the words in English. When they were exposed to the tellings-off in Turkish, and in particular when they heard rather than read them, their galvanic skin response went through the roof. Being told off in their native language was enough to make these volunteers (average age twenty-eight) break out in a cold sweat. This shows that understanding a word and feeling its emotional impact are two very different processes. We have to have experience of the emotional consequences of words if they are going to affect us.

For a while Ignatius was relatively still, reacting to the unfolding plot with only an occasional subdued snort. Then what seemed to be the film’s entire cast was up on the wires. In the foreground, on a trapeze, was the heroine. She swung back and forth to a waltz. She smiled in a huge close-up. Ignatius inspected her teeth for cavities and fillings. She extended one leg. Ignatius rapidly surveyed its contours for structural defects. She began to sing about trying over and over again until you succeeded. Ignatius quivered as the philosophy of the lyrics became clear. He studied her grip on the trapeze in the hope that the camera would record her fatal plunge to the sawdust far below. On the second chorus the entire ensemble joined in the song, smiling and singing lustily about ultimate success while they swung, dangled, flipped, and soared. “Oh, good heavens!” Ignatius shouted, unable to contain himself any longer. Popcorn spilled down his shirt and gathered in the folds of his trousers. “What degenerate produced this abortion?

Loss of Privacy and Self-Direction While loss of privacy may not seem like a serious “survival” hazard, it can defeat one’s efforts to prepare for or deal with threats as an individual. To a true survivalist, survival is more than a biological imperative. If a human is completely observed, monitored, and directed by a system or network, no matter how benign, then he or she is no longer free and therefore has not survived. Technology has evolved to the point where it is using people, rather than being used by people. Those who frequent the internet, carry smartphones, and respond to various online programs are profiled by massive computers to analyze how they think and therefore how they react to various ideas. Human engineering and logarithms can manipulate buying habits, political preferences, social associations, and even emotions. Think about the implications of being wired to systems that have their own agendas. If you dismiss this as simply paranoia, then you are exhibiting typical addictive behavior. This is one of the most insidious and stealthy hazards to humanity.

In workshop, we talk a lot about "raising the stakes" of a story. Semyon just did this. There was a bare wire labeled "Marya" and a bare wire labeled "Peasants in a Teahouse" and electricity was coursing through each but they were laid out parallel to one another, several feet apart. Semyon, by reacting to the swearimg, just crossed them. Marya and those gathered peasants had nothing to do with one another, were not in relation. Now they do, and are.

have also noticed that many people with ADHD or strong traits of it have the ability to see the “big picture” and not get bogged down in details. If something is too complicated or cumbersome, they often react immediately and don’t settle for the explanation “that’s the way we do it here”; instead, they ask how processes can be improved and simplified.

When my mother’s antique diamond ring from her grandmother disappeared along with the tennis bracelet Ollie had given her, my mother fired our cleaning lady. But the suspicion lingered: would Ollie really have taken the jewelry? My father went to as many pawnshops as he could find in a sixty-mile radius. He came home empty-handed, bereft. He couldn’t shake the image of all that stuff in those stores: wedding bands, retirement watches, cameras, a bugle. He said it broke his heart, imagining people breaking off parts of themselves to survive. He briefly considered buying a pair of bronze baby shoes mounted on bookends. “Imagine having to pawn your child’s baby shoes?” he said. “They’re using the money to buy drugs,” my mother countered. “I wouldn’t shed any tears.” My father’s kindness and even keel had always been my mother’s ballast. Now those same qualities inflamed her. She wanted my father to react, to share her emotion, feel her indignation and frustration. Of course, he was heartbroken that his beautiful daughter was locked away in a loony bin. For as long as he could, my father would rescue Olivia, bail her out, wire her money, take her to a different hospital, bring her home.