Ideas, vision, and courage

“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. / Decline of Heroes

If you’re ready, willing, and able to find out why it takes so much courage (and so little intelligence) to grasp a breakthrough that eludes scientists, a good place to start is with a basic understanding of dopamine and the links between the manipulative brain chemical and Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Dopamine Primer

“A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.” – Thomas Carlyle

When it comes to neurotransmitters, there are so many real and imagined complications, experts argue that only trained professionals are capable of understanding how dopamine manipulates behavior. Dopamine for DIMwits will help you understand how nothing could be further from the truth and why delusional types, hiding behind credentials and conceits, don’t know, or want to know, the real and only reason. And that reason is because everything everyone believes, refuses to believe, do, and/or avoid comes down to protecting and triggering dopamine flow, including the experts inability to grasp how their need to pretend they know better involves triggering gratuitous dopamine while their need to protect dopamine flow keeps them from admitting what they don’t want to know.

The ultimate “Wonder Drug” “Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.”- Thomas H. Huxley The more scientists learn about dopamine, the more they wonder what else there is to discover. Dopamine is a vital neurotransmitter and hormone connected to a surprising array of neurological functions: cognition, learning, attention, memory, desire, pleasure, punishment, reward, motivation, sleep, mood, behavior, and voluntary movement. Dopamine is released when we experience stress. It is involved in impulsiveness, hyperactivity, emotional reactions, lactation, and mother-child relationships. In insects, it helps form aversive memories. It is also signaled when we fulfill the basic survival needs. Every time we experience sex or food, we are rewarded by a shot of dopamine. Dopamine is so powerful that it is even released when we simply expect a reward, think about sex, or sniff a favorite food. It is the oil that keeps our brain’s survival system running. Evolutionarily speaking, dopamine is very old with a long history of successfully encouraging countless invertebrates and vertebrates to behave in ways that support survival and procreation. The time-tested physical and psychological triggers delivering dopamine are called sensors, receptors, nerve endings, taste buds, nipples, genitals, instincts, feelings, memories, fantasies, and emotions, starting with fears. This primitive system has worked for millions of years and is responsible for getting Homo sapiens into the 21st century. It continues to work with creatures who lack the ability to comprehend how brain chemicals foster life-sustaining behaviors.

Dopamine dysfunction “One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.” – E. T. Jaynes The one species these proven triggers are failing is the only species gifted with the capacity to understand how brain chemicals manipulate behaviors. That species is ours. And the reason is our dopaminergic system was rendered dysfunctional somewhere along the evolutionary path. Dopamine dysfunction has been linked to several pathological disorders, such as autism, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), psychoses involving delusions and paranoia, and every acknowledged behavioral and drug addiction. What it hasn’t been linked to are a handful of common, destructive, unacknowledged addictions DIMwits pretend are admirable traits, acceptable habits, respectable customs, hallowed traditions, and revered religions. Unacknowledged addictions

“The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution’s countless mistakes.” – Arthur Koestler