Reptile Brain

I'm convinced that without awareness and applied effort to counter
it, the typical human consciousness devolves throughout life AWAY
from empathy and compassion and toward dogged self-centered survival
instinct. Nearly everything that makes life valuable gets lost in
that process, pruned away as inessential. You might cite the same
thing in sex, where at first one is overwhelmed by the presence of
the other and knows love, only to abstract from the experience some
habit of using the other toward the end of recapturing bliss. It
bears repeating. A human being is an end in his or herself. "A
person's a person no matter how small..." - Dr. Seuss