More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 3 - October 11, 2020
The control circuit suppresses H&N emotion, allowing us to think in a cold, rational way that’s often required when hard decisions need to be made, such as sacrificing the well-being of one person for the benefit of others.
Salience refers to the degree to which things are important, prominent, or conspicuous.
We inhibit our ability to notice things that are unimportant so we don’t have to waste our attention on them.
Mental time travel is a powerful tool of the dopamine system.
Mental time travel is responsible for every “next step” in our lives.
As we gain experience with the world, we develop better and better models, and this is the basis of wisdom.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. —proverb
It’s dopamine that builds models, and dopamine that breaks them apart.
“Dreams are brief madness and madness a long dream.”
High levels of dopamine suppress H&N functioning, so brilliant people are often poor at human relationships.
They’re overly focused on maximizing future resources at the expense of appreciating the here and now.
The answer is desire dopamine. A short, slick story stands out from the landscape—it is salient.
In addition to tapping into primitive needs, another reason fear works so well is loss aversion, meaning that the pain of loss is stronger than the pleasure of gain.
The H&N system doesn’t care about the future. It doesn’t care about things we might get. It cares about what we have right now. And when those things are threatened, out comes the experience of fear and distress.
Fear, like desire, is primarily a future concept—dopamine’s realm. But the H&N system gives a boost to the pain of loss in the form of amygdala activation, tipping our judgment when we have to make decisions about the best way to manage risk.
Abstract thinking is one of the primary functions of the dopamine system. Abstract thinking allows us to go beyond sensory observation of events to construct a model that explains why the events are occurring.
. . . the beginning is where the end gets born. —Catherynne M. Valente, writer
Binding sets off a cascade of chemical reactions inside the cell that changes the way the cell behaves.
Another advantage is that the 7R allele is associated with something called low reactivity to novel stressors. Change is stressful—both good change and bad change.
“[the] contented do not brave the waves of the stormy Atlantic, but sit helplessly at home.”
Then there is something called hyperthymic temperament, derived from the Greek word thymia, which means state of mind.
Dopamine-producing cells make up 0.0005 percent of the brain. That’s a tiny fraction of the cells we use to navigate our world.
Dopamine is the conductor, not the orchestra.
Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? . . . The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation. —Saint Augustine
Mastery is the point at which dopamine bows to H&N.
Mastery also creates a feeling of what psychologists call an internal locus of control.
In every other situation, though, thinking about other things happened so frequently that the researchers concluded that a wandering mind, what scientists call stimulus-independent thought, was the brain’s default mode.
“a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
