Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

by Johann Hari

To understand why we feel better in landscapes like this, she said, you have to start with something really basic: “The thing is that we are animals. We keep forgetting that,” and as animals—she indicated toward her body—“this thing is made to move.” When we look for solutions to our bad feelings, she says, we try to find it in language, and in the symbols we have created as a species. But these symbols are—in the long sweep of things—very recent. “We have been vertebrate for nearly five hundred million years now. We’ve been mammals for two hundred fifty, three hundred million years. We’ve been primates for sixty-five [million years].” All those years she spent in the Congolese rain forest, living and sleeping and eating with the bonobos, she explained, she was being educated in how close we are to them. “We have been animals that move for a lot longer than we have been animals that talk and convey concepts,” she said to me. “But we still think that depression can be cured by this conceptual layer. I think [the first answer is more] simple. Let’s fix the physiology first. Get out. Move.”