ABSTRACT
Forgiveness involves changing our minds. In the Preface, I mentioned the growth of the neocortex (your fingers, remember?) around the hippocampus (your thumb), which forms about the age of 2. Our capacity for autobiographical memory is the result of this newly formed circuitry. Now we gain a sense of personal history and begin to process a range of human emotions about it. We can recall past events with fondness or rumination. We can remember others with growing affection and affiliation, or with increasing anger and aversion. We integrate our brains as our neocortex grows around our hippocampus, uniting our left-brain functions of language and logic with our right-brain functions of images, associations, and relationships. Our reptilian brain with its emotional energies governing survival is integrated with our neocortex, forming new patterns of thought, reflection, and understanding.
