The chemistry of ~~chemistry, pt 1, Pair Bonding

We all know men are visual creatures. Studies show that generally when a man is mentally aroused, he is physically as well. Simple creatures that they are, the gratification need not be sexual. They are often as satisfied with money or sweets. Men see something sexy, & want to be rewarded... even if its not a sexual reward. Its like the desire for sexual gratification spills over into other areas of the brain's reward system.


Our limbic system is hard-wired for this: we have 2 basic desires -- high-fat food & sex/ procreation. These 2 'rewards' stimulate the dopamine response in a way that addictive drugs do as well.


Humans, being pair-bonding animals, not only find sexual relationships rewarding, we also find individual-pair-bonding rewarding. This is an evolutionary boon as it helps us stay together long enough to make a baby. It also helps us fall in love with the child, and want to stay with the child long enough to raise them to maturity. Indeed, having a healthy pair-bond is an almost universal sign of personal happiness.


Pair bonding animals have more D2 (dopamine) receptors, reward (I WANT THAT) sites, and non pair-bonders have more D1 receptors, satiety (I've had enough of that) sites. We all know how intense the feeling of love or infatuation can be, truly like a drug trip, and for some, very addictive.


As these neural pathways evolved at a time when we had so little in the way of stimulation, and now we have so much, its easy to see how easily we become over stimulated by things like video games, gambling, porn, internet, casual sex, drugs/ alcohol, etc. We're programmed to look for the next mood-enhancing moment, and we've become very crafty at finding it. We're hard-wired for lovin'.

Which leads back to men seeing, and wanting.

So we bond mostly because of the reward receptors we have, but also because we touch & orgasm (& breastfeed) which release oxytocin, another very sexy neurotransmitter. It not only makes us feel more trusting & bonded, but also helps reduce other cravings, like sweet cravings. Note tho, that without the "rewarding" dopamine, the oxytocin alone will not create the "in love" feeling. The two, like romantic partners!, must be balanced.


Women are not like men. Women can be mentally aroused and yet not get physically aroused. Their reward circuitry is based on their hormonal cycles, which are much longer than males'. Women tend to anticipate rewards more when their estrogen is at its peak -- pre-ovulation. This is easily attributable to evolution again: a woman should be more reward-driven (I WANT THAT) at the time when she is most likely to get pregnant.

Future posts -- what makes women attractive & the Coolidge Effect

Anvil: dreams are forged in fire

~~Big shots are little shots who keep on shooting.



Hub & I met up with Taki76 & Jenny-Jen the other night. They're pretty cool: they have "respectable people" jobs, they like socializing, watching movies, and in their spare time, they make fun, funky music & videos. Its probably not as common a hobby as, say watching the game, but its their special thing and they get a lot of joy from it. Its a passion.



I have a fondness for people with a passion in life, maybe because I don't. It gives me a thrill to see people get into something just because they love it... not because its their job, or because it will get them more chicks... I like people who like a thing, an activity, just because it makes them happy.



We met up with Taki & Jenny at the Anvil show at the Filmore-TLA. Anvil is the musical love-child of Lips Kudrow & Robb Reiner, two slightly 'over-the-hill' guys who have been rockin' out together since the 70s. I first became aware of them when I saw a documentary this summer. They were portrayed as the real Spinal Tap, the little shots of the 80s metal scene, little shots that kept on shooting.



A funny thing about me is that I'm very goal-oriented, but I'm far more so status driven. I like people who really work at making their dreams come alive, but I'm also terribly irritated by people who can't seem to face reality: you ain't ever gonna be no rock star. Its lame to see a 50ish guy with long hair in leather chaps acting like a badass. Its not cool to just keep pretending one of these days, its gonna happen, we're gonna be BIG.


But it did happen: these guys are big. They just kept shooting their little shots and they managed, after 30odd years of trying, to get the attention of the right person at the right time. Check 'em out -- '09 alone brought them a movie, tour, book and CD release. They had a dream and kept dreaming it, and now they have a dream come true. Lips even said so, he said he didn't take it lightly, to be on stage in Philadelphia. He said he'd been waiting his whole life for that moment and was so grateful to us all, that he'd happily shake every one's hand after the show.


My main passion in life is looking really cute. That's not something I'm likely to garner into any career or even fifteen minutes of fame. It does make me happy to see others succeed tho, and I suppose in a way that's just as important. I was happy to support Mike & Mark in their efforts a decade or so ago. I'm glad to play DJPE's music in the lobby here at work. Still, it would be nice to have something bigger than myself to live for. I'll work on finding my passion this year. Passion will be the target, & I'll keep shooting.

I don't care about Haiti

Call me a jerk, but I don't care about Haiti. I don't even care that you're thinking I'm a jerk because I admitted it. I feel bad that it happened, its shame and all, but I just shrug and f5 my Twitter.

9/11, Katrina, the tsunami... When these types of disasters happen, the number of people dead is just staggering. Its too much for me to ponder: I can feel bad for my friend Rachel who's father died Wednesday, but how can I empathize with 100,000 families? I feel no more grief for 2 people than I do for 2,000 or 2 million.

9/11 was a man-made disater, caused by "evil-doers," but Haiti's earthquake was what we'd call "an act of God," God delivered that evil onto the people of Haiti. Believers then says they will pray for the victims, but God just showed he has no concern for these people, how could the prayers of some strangers in their behalf possibly sway God? and to what end? The deed is done.

I didn't offer to pray for Rachel or her father. I told her I was sorry it happened, and offered to listen. I touched her arm and made eye contact. I try to smile when I see her, and let her lead the conversation where she wants it to go. That's as much as I can do. I can't do that for a Haitian on the other side of the globe. I feel for Rachel because she's here & I can relate to losing a dad, but I have no frame of reference for a disaster.

Some people will pretend a disaster -- man made or act of God -- isn't really an evil. They'll spin it to be 'an opportunity for others to be charitible' or some other platitude. "When God closes a door, he opens a window." Others will crumble, "its just not fair!", and will become angry at God and the hand they've been dealt.

We're nothing but the sum of experiences, both our own & those we witness. We draw conclusions based on the patterns and commonalities between the two, that's how we reason. When a disaster strikes, its like a finger toppling the dominos and one by one, all our patterns & conclusions are shifted: the big picture changes. Sometimes even the most reasonable among us have trouble coping with those changes, but just as often, we feel desensitized.

Rachel keeps saying she feels numb. I can relate.

Wednesday round up

What a fun, funny, emotional day.

We have 6 basic emotions -- joy, fear, anger, suprise, disgust, & sadness. Today I read about 5 more that are somewhat deeper but no less important. These are elevation, interest, gratitude, pride, & confusion.

Of course there are more... like fiero, the pride you feel in accomplishing something just for yourself... which I imagine is what Ray Comfort is feeling these days, having desecrated Darwin's On The Origins for $4.99 a copy...


... or ennui, a form of intellectual boredom I know all too well...

... or schadenfreude!!! I love schadenfreude, tho I don't feel it often. Its the evil glee you get when learning of the misfortune of others. I didn't feel it today, but Pat Robertson did. He got all schadenfreuden while talking about the disaster in Haiti (or Hay-shuh, as he calls it).

BFF Tiff & I had a long chat today about things that have been on our mind this past year, namely the idea of abandonment & betrayal. Betrayal isn't an emotion itself, but can lead to most of the basic: fear, anger, sadness, and far too often disgust with oneself. Helplessness is a natural outcome of being betrayed, and some, like Tiff, will push against that feeling to revenge. Its the classic story: victim becomes victimizer, and we're back to schadenfreude! (I think that's why I like her so much, I admire her agressiveness in life, and feel joy by proxy in her schadenfreude.)

I'm not emotional enough lately.

Lust is easy. Love is hard. Like is the most important. ~~Carl Reiner

Morality by Aphorisms

Dr Shermer posted a blog yesterday on the Ask-First principle, his take on the Golden Rule. He thinks one should go beyond just "do unto others," because sometimes the "others" wouldn't want to be done unto like you would. The Ask-First principle is that you should ask yourself, will the recipient of this action like it as much as I would? Said another way, don't do things to people you wouldn't want them to do to you.

Now while I agree we do have some moral obligations to one another, and of course its in every one's best interest to live utilizing the highest moral principles one has understanding of, lately I'm finding essays like this tiring. I'm tired of moral aphorisms.

I'm tired of thinking about every little thing I do or say... and according to what I've learned from Dr S, I shouldn't have to.

Every action we do either affects someone, or is dealing with how someone has affected us, (and oftentimes both). Our actions are driven by our beliefs, and our beliefs are driven by the patterns we draw --the values we learn-- from our experiences. So if we're driven by the patterns, and we're relatively intelligent, our guts should do the moralizing for us.

All opinion is subjective: there is no objective morality. So to make these rules for morality is nothing but mental exercise, intellectual masturbation. One must work from one's own experience base when making decisions. The patterns, not the aphorisms will always win out.

That being said, we are the animals that have knowledge of good & evil, we experience both. We find ourselves alive, and with the right to do anything no one else can stop us from doing. While we know that our actions have consequences, we are free to do as we chose.

As social animals, we've evolved to instinctively know that we should do good by one another. We generally, unconsciously, don't do what we know to be wrong. If we do something we know is wrong --that will have negative impacts on ourselves or others -- most people feel guilty, like they're accruing a debt to society that sooner or later will be paid back.

As Dr S's blog, Catch 22, the book of Genesis & the law of karma show, the sticky-wicket is knowledge. If we don't know an act is wrong, and we do it, and the consequences of our actions do indeed have a negative effect on ourselves or another, then we learn a new pattern. We learn something about our environment from which we can make predictions that will aid in our (in this case, social) survival, and that's a good thing. That's natural selection in action.

Therefore its crucial to our personal evolution that we sometimes experience evil. I'm done pre-analyzing every thought I want to verbalize. Sometimes the lines you let rip are "wrong" and yet are just what that person needs to hear. One might even say that taking on the challenge of saying the "wrong" thing at the "right" moment is far more noble a deed than taking the moral high-road as it will give the other person reason to stop and think. If the unexamined life is not worth living, being a bitch once in a while might just save some one from intellectual death.

This is what I'm going to call the Suzy Brown principle: sometimes you have to be bad just so you know you're alive.

Patternicity, agenticity, religion & paranoia

Dr Delicious wrote an awesome little thang on patternicity, a concept that is so obvious and yet has changed the way I look at the world. In a nutshell, people tend to find meaningful patterns in the random-ness of life.


If you live in the savanas in the tall grass, its a good thing to be alert when the grass moves. Maybe its the wind, sure, or maybe its a predator. Better to be alert even if there is no threat than to miss the threat and be lunch.


But sometimes people take the pattern-searching too far. This month's Psychology Today suggests...

Dopamine rewards us for noting patterns and finding meaning in sometimes-insignificant events. It's long been known that schizophrenics overproduce dopamine. "The earliest stages of delusion are characterized by an overabundance of meaningful coincidences," explain Paul D. Morrison and R.M. Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London. "Jumping to conclusions" is a common reasoning style among the paranoid, find Daniel Freeman and his colleagues, also at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Shermer has a mate to patternicity he calls agenticity, the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. He goes on to say "Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms." I'd like to add creationism to his mess.

>>>An easy way to think of the pair is conspiracy theories: we see things happening around us, we look for patterns in the events, and then we look for a who or a what behind it.

Maybe its a coping mechanism. When something bad happens, we'd like to think it didn't just happen, that there was some cause, and someone is responsible. That not only makes sense from chaos -- a pattern -- but it also removes the burden of personal accountability, it's their fault!

>>>>>It all comes down to control: are you in charge, or is some external force?

Agenticity is the force behind leaps of faith. Why do people think its a smart move to pay a 'guru playing God' for the opportunity to sweat? What makes a man decide to run his own daughter down in a parking lot because she's become 'too western?' Or when people see the face of God in a restroom, when children think a man in a book has all the answers, or that wealth & status can create a Lucifer incarnate? They have made the choice to no longer be in charge.


When people decide to put their fate, or the fate of their loved ones into the hands of some external force, the external force -- real or imagined -- takes control. The guru's advice is more perfect than the person's, the father thinks more of pleasing his god than caring for his child, & the basic everyday reasoning skill that would tell a peron, "its just a book, its just a pattern, he's just a man" no longer matter.


It's their fault!


And it turns out dopamine is behind it all, just like in schizophrenics. Religious people are nuts.

Dumb is the New Black

I cannot believe how stupid the world is.

I cannot believe the Twitter "NO GOD" storm that errupted yesterday, when Christians, thinking they were spreading a mesage of love, inadvertantly made "NO GOD" a trending topic, and then acted like complete fools , furthering the cause they were attempting to squelch.

I cannot believe that, as Dr Dawkins said during his speech at UVa last Friday, that 40 percent of Americans (and 28 percent of Brits) agree with, according to a Gallup poll, the young-earth creationist view that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Even harder to believe -- when I googled to see if I could confirm that number, a USA Today poll had an even higher percentage of adults believing existance was wished into being in 6 days.

And that's what it all comes down to: belief. Why do we believe what we do? Aren't we free to believe whatever we want, and if so, why is it a problem if people believe in creation myths?

Beliefs drive actions, and actions have consequences. Society drives on the actions of the individuals, and if the actions are based in beliefs that have no grounding in evidence or even reality, where does that leave our entire society?