h2>Dating : Pleasure and Mind
Imagine yourself owning a huge chemical factory under your name, i mean just how cool it feels. Unfortunately, not everyone can own a chemical factory in life. However, Let me install this into you, “you really have an invisible chemical factory inside yourself”. Your brain is your personal chemical factory. Why not own it?
Wondering how does this makes sense?
Your brain cells produces and passes on millions of different chemicals into different areas, in a balanced manner to make you conscious in life. Your brain communicates with different parts to decode reality.
In other words, right now you being conscious while you reading this, your brain is communicating with itself quickly and efficiently through chemical messengers, resulting in alot of thoughts to rise in your conscious mind, to help you decode the meaning and understand your own idea of this article.
Plus, this also means that every individual will take his own unique meaning, after reading this or any other story/article.
Sounds amazing, isn’t it?
Thanks to your 1.5kg(only) sized brain inside your skull.
If we look back into history, the human brain has adapted and developed alot through evolutionary process. However the basic concept for life has not changed, which is to observe, adapt, consume and reproduce. Like every other animals/birds we need to make more of ourselves to sustain our species.
Anyway, you might wonder what induces us and other animals, to consume food or to reproduce? Obvious answer to this is our brain, but let’s look at it more scientifically.
Dopamine(neurotransmitter).
Dopamine is a chemical neurotransmitter that is released for instant pleasure/gratification to sustain our basic survival needs. For instance, the feeling of urge to eat the mango in your hand is due to dopamine rush.
Anyway, due to evolution we now have moved from the jungle to cities, forming a society. Due to this our needs also changes. Simply, we do not have to be on alert/survival mode to move through life anymore, unlike living in the jungle.
As a result, we have more time to be calmer, enjoy and relax in life. This is an amazing opportunity from god to humans only, to explore what’s outside of the survival box.
This can be why in spiritualism, they say a soul has to go through all living animals/birds form to finally become a human body, since only with a human brain, the soul can comprehend god/nature.
So let me ask you since we live in “so called civilized peaceful cities”. Honestly are you stress-free, enjoying and relaxed in your current life?
Majority, I guess not!
If we look deeper we can understand what it means to be in a concrete made “jungle” compared to the actual jungle itself. In fact, we are still under the lens of survival mode but with a different purpose, unlike the jungle needs. Instead of hunting food in the jungle, which used to be our main goal, we now hunt money to “buy” food. In other words, we are surviving, not from predators but from our societies eye.
“The jungle in the word concrete jungle actually makes sense, now more than ever”
Living in a concrete jungle to gain more money/power/status instead of food was what evolution had to offer?
In this case, i highly doubt, if we are civilized and evolved.
Let’s dive deeper!
Humanity faces wars and depression because of our own chemical factory (brain) working against us.
Simply, we are the servants of our brains now, instead of our brains being our servants.
For instance, let’s imagine you have a carrot in your left hand, and a chocolate slab in the other, which one will you consume first?.
Chocolate is the obvious answer. The reason for this is because, your brain mentally calculated the levels of dopamine release on both of these subjects individually and finally concluded that chocolate produces more dopamine than carrot, all of this within a millisecond. In fact, this is why you eat the chocolate first, although you know carrots are natural and healthy for the body.
Likewise, dopamine affects our daily activities and choices. For example, let’s say, you have a video game and a book to choose, majority of you will choose the video games instead of the book or if you chose an iPhone over android, is the result of higher dopamine levels and mental comparison between them that led you to your choice.
Few of my questions i was interested to know in my childhood.
1) Have you ever wondered how you see your grandfathers/grandmothers reading books over books for hours without getting bored, while our generation binges on Netflix, social medias and YouTube?
2) Similarly, have you ever thought, why you have no patience to read a book/story for that many hours, instead of watching your favorite Youtube video?
3) Have you ever questioned yourself, why it feels hard to sit and study/focus on something for an hour?
4) Likewise, why does playing video games or with friends feel more rewarding than studying maths or chemistry?
The answer is simple. Chemical dopamine is the answer again.
*Anyway, if i’m judging right, some of your minds would constantly tell you to skip paragraphs/sentences to skip to the bottom line.*
It’s nothing new. In fact, this constant bugging is due to low amounts of dopamine when you read, compared to watching videos.
Simply in words, your mind has been exposed to alot of dopamine inducing activities, that it cannot stand any activity that does not promote enough secretion. Anyway, tell yourself no when the mind tells you yes.
The happy feel you get when you see 10K likes or your friend commenting “looking good” on your instagram post is due to your dopamine activity.
Likewise, why do you think most video games have “XP points” and “character levels” that increases throughout the game?
The companies clever strategy to introduce points/level based systems, that act like short term pleasures in the game. So, every time you reach a higher level, you get a spurt of dopamine.
So, next time your friend brags about higher XP, simply tell him that his brain activity is wrongly wired.
This answers the first question, in our grandparents case, their brains produces similar and higher dopamine levels while reading a book, playing with their grand children or calmly sitting and enjoying nature and watching stars alone.
Since they are not surrounded by distractions at their time of life, it was really easy to choose the best, without all these high inducing dopamine level objects/activities distracting our mind like nowadays.
“ The struggle rises with technology, that being said, should we blame technology or our own minds?”
What do you think?
Today we have apps like faceapp, facebook, whatsapp, snapchat etc, that is similar to drug use. So, we intensely crave to check these apps to keep that feel good chemical(dopamine) release, no matter what.
Eventually, we will trick our brain into falsely thinking it needs a constant supply of media attention to move through everyday activities such as family gathering, social gathering, college etc.
Anyway, i am not saying technology is bad, but the absence of Knowledge of minds and self, will result in handling technology poorly, eventually leading to destruction of life.
Sadly, we live in a business world. Everything is business now. So in this trade world, the high tech companies invested millions to carefully examine and understand how to make the consumer brain produce maximum dopamine under 1 minute by their products.
Thats right, they hacked our brains.
Likewise, porn sites give you instant pleasure, resulting in lower arousal level in men with high use. In fact, some people chooses porn over sex, due to higher satisfactory levels. Honestly in other words, all of these are addictive digital drugs.
Anyway, let me ask you, in this state of chaos, where these distractions produce more dopamine than chocolate, how can we even think of eating the natural healthy carrot in our other hand. Unfortunately, your brain won’t cooperate under all these distractions.
Lets not give up anyway.
A scientific experiment where a rat has to travel from point A to point B to get food was observed.
Anyway, the crazy part was that path from point A to point B was electrified.
As a result, the poor rat completed the path to get it’s reward infinite times until exhaustion, regardless the electric shock. The scientist stated that the rat paid a heavy price for that reward, influenced by it’s dopamine circuit. This might explain why drug addicts sacrifices their own life and belongings to feel High.
However, in another experiment, the scientist decided to stop the dopamine production in the rat and placed it on point A, while on point B there was alot of cheese. Interestingly, the rat was stationary, that it did not even move a step to get it’s favorite reward. This concludes that we all need dopamine for survival, but under a balanced level.
The solution is to detox from dopamine inducing activities for sometime, so your brain can reset automatically . For instance, imagine you start fasting for 2 days. After two days, when you begin to eat, even your disliked food choice will taste like bliss to you. This is because your brain is reset to producing high dopamine to consume whatever food is available regardless personal choices.
Firstly, we can begin with learning to avoid the instant response to our phone’s/laptop notification buzz. It’s not healthy.
Likewise, if we ignore the desire to eat fatty foods and start eating vegetables, at first the brain will create false scenarios or keep reminding you how a cheeseburger taste like, to make you consume it.
It’s all a mind trick, to avoid falling into this trick, try to think of 3 things that makes you happy in life. It’s proven that by just imagining dopamine producing thoughts/imagination, you get distracted and feel good.
In my experience, i realized that thoughts are the cause of almost all suffering than life itself. So it is how we choose our thoughts that affects our choices. Those rapid choices promotes habits and habits provide your whole life.
For instance, imagine yourself sitting and watching the sunset with your dog. It feels amazing right?
However, i am dead sure that your dog is more happier than you at that moment. Why?
It is because while you trying to solve the past and future events in your head, your dog is only focused and enjoying the present moment (being aware of everything).
The present moment is what exist, great power lies in the now.
Lets go back to the experiment with the chocolate and carrot on both hands, although the brain induces us to eat the chocolate first, if we listen closely there will always be soft voice that tells to do the right act, in this case, eating the healthy carrot, rather than the chocolate.
However, to make that voice stronger we need to believe that not every thought we get is real.
The rational/logical mind will give you 60,000 thoughts a day, it is our decision to give attention to those thoughts.
That space between each thoughts is the doorway to the universe filled with peace, harmony and love.
Simply to say, the observing mind being aware of the analytical and reasoning mind and emotional balance inside you, while observing the outer world, without judging or labeling nothing, is “you”(pure awareness).
That being said, If we begin meditating daily we will soon see through the illusions of the analytical mind while also realizing who we are truly are.
Anyway, we become less judgmental and lead a meaningful life, rather than just living and die.
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” — Jim Carrey
So finally, i can assure you money and fame is also just another dopamine induced desire in our society. It might feel good while having it but it is a short term desire. In case we try to maintain our power and fame forever, we begin to suffer, because life is an ever changing experience and nothing can be made permanent.
Anyway, the way i look at life is “we are all god’s children who forgot how to play”. I mean, we come into this world without nothing and leave this world without nothing. So what we do in-between matters, why not dance, sing and have some wild fun with nature before we say goodbye…..
