“That’s why you have to listen to the metaphors,” Mayberg told me. The difference between a smile and laughter. There was a picture in her office of a stream with a deep sinkhole in the middle, where water gushed in from all sides. “A patient sent me that picture to describe her depression.” Another void, a hole. Vertical, inescapable traps. When Mayberg turned the stimulator on, the woman said she saw herself lifted out of the sinkhole and sitting on a rock above the water. She could see her former self in the hole—but she was on a rock, sitting above the hole. “These pictures, these
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