Emanuel at fifty-seven is not likely to concoct wholly novel ways to conceptualize lymphoma or breast cancer. His old cortical and subcortical cells—those responsible for solving complex problems—just won’t fire bright enough to light the way. But his insight that his cancer patients all said that cancer taught them what was important in life arose not from complex processing but from experience and the ability to recognize patterns. He couldn’t have made this insight at twenty-five, when the processing centers in his brain were really cooking, because he would not have seen enough patients to
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